Jon Ingold

Last updated

Jon Ingold
Born1981 (age 42–43)
England
OccupationWriter
NationalityBritish
Notable worksOverboard!, Over the Alps, Heaven's Vault, 80 Days
Website
www.inklestudios.com

Jon Ingold (born 1981) is a British author of interactive fiction and co-founder of inkle, where he co-directed and co-wrote 80 Days , and wrote Heaven's Vault and Overboard!. His interactive fiction has frequently been nominated for XYZZY Awards and has won on multiple occasions, including Best Game, Best Story and Best Setting awards for All Roads in 2001. Ingold's works are notable for their attention to the levels of knowledge that the player and player character have of the in-game situation, with the effect often depending on a player who understands more than the character or vice versa. [1] [2] Ingold has also written a number of plays, short stories and novels.

Contents

Biography

Ingold began writing interactive fiction as a teenager, after searching online for information on Infocom and discovering the Inform programming language. He published his first major work, The Mulldoon Legacy (1999), just before starting a Mathematics degree at the University of Cambridge. It was only a month later that he could view the Usenet newsgroup devoted to interactive fiction; he later recalled, "it's still one of the most startling moments of my life when I loaded up rec.games.int-fiction and there were Mulldoon posts everywhere". [3] Ingold continued to write IF during the university holidays [4] and also reviewed films for a student newspaper. [3] A trip to Venice provided the setting for his All Roads (2001). [3]

After graduating from Cambridge, Ingold worked as a mathematics teacher in London. [4] [5] He later co-founded the company inkle, which has created several award-winning interactive stories, as well as the Inklewriter web tool for interactive fiction [6] [7] and the open-source ink scripting language. [8] Ingold told Gamasutra that he had found potential players of interactive fiction were frustrated by the parser interface, which led him and his colleagues to develop Inklewriter as a non-parser-based alternative. [9]

inkle has produced several games which have won numerous awards, including multiple IGF awards for narrative.

Interactive fiction

The protagonist of Ingold's Fail-Safe (2000) is the only living person on a damaged starship, who makes a distress call and asks for instructions. Commands entered by the player are treated as delivered to him within the story, collapsing the distinction usually made in IF between the parser/narrator and the player character. [10] Out-of-story actions such as saving progress are disabled and little text is displayed to the player apart from the survivor's dialogue, features which Jay Is Games reviewer John Bardinelli praised as contributing to the game's immersiveness. [11]

In All Roads (2001), the narrative viewpoint shifts between a number of characters in Renaissance Italy, as if a separate entity is controlling each of them in turn. The player is challenged not just to solve character-specific puzzles, but to understand the logic behind the changes of character. [12] [13] The game was the first ever to win both the Interactive Fiction Competition (taking first place out of fifty-one entries in 2001) and the XYZZY Award for Best Game. It also received the XYZZY Awards for Best Story and Best Setting. [14] [15] [16] The Electronic Literature Organization anthologised All Roads in the first volume of its Electronic Literature Collection. [13] English professor Alf Seegert has used it as a case study in how interactive fiction can "generate presence", commending Ingold's integration of puzzles into the narrative. [17]

Dead Cities (2007) was Ingold's contribution to the "H. P. Lovecraft Commonplace Book Project", a collection of interactive fiction based on Lovecraft's unpublished notes that was assembled for an exhibition at the Maison d'Ailleurs in Yverdon-les-Bains (Switzerland). It won Best in Show among the three English-language entries. [18] Interactive fiction author Emily Short wrote a favourable review, calling the game "strange and challenging, evocative and opaque like Lovecraft's own stories". [19] However, Eliza Gauger's review for Destructoid criticised the parser as inadequate and the writing and pacing as inferior to those of Ecdysis, another contribution to the Project. [20]

In Make It Good (2009), the player controls a police detective investigating a murder in a house. Reviewers considered that this premise was inspired by Infocom's mysteries such as Deadline (1982), but that Ingold's detective was distinguished by his moral ambiguity and concealment of information from the player. [21] [22] Emily Short commented that the distancing of the player from the protagonist brought out the "alienation and cynicism of genre noir". [22] John Bardinelli called Make It Good "a superb piece of interactive fiction on many levels", praising its active non-player characters and challenging puzzles. [23] Graham Smith felt that it was "probably the best text adventure about being an alcoholic detective" [24] and enjoyed the way the game's complexity make it feel more like a story and less like a puzzle.

Ingold was the writer for Textfyre's The Shadow in the Cathedral (2009), a steampunk adventure story that was one of the few commercially published interactive fictions of the 2000s. [25] In a column for GameSetWatch , Emily Short described the game's prose as an important element in its worldbuilding. [26]

All Roads

All Roads is a 2001 interactive fiction game by Jon Ingold that placed first at the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition. It also won the XYZZY Awards for Best Game, Best Setting and Best Story and was nominated for Best Individual Puzzle and Best Writing. The game is story-oriented and features few puzzles, though in a sense is one big puzzle, since the player's goal is to decipher the meaning of the game after completing it.

Bibliography

Games
Interactive fiction
Short stories

Jon Ingold has published short fiction in several issues of Interzone magazine: [31]

Technical credits

Related Research Articles

Interactive fiction (IF) is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of Interactive narratives or Interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.

The Interactive Fiction Competition is one of several annual competitions for works of interactive fiction. It has been held since 1995. It is intended for fairly short games, as judges are only allowed to spend two hours playing a game before deciding how many points to award it, but longer games are allowed entry. The competition has been described as the "Super Bowl" of interactive fiction.

Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. Inform can generate programs designed for the Z-code or Glulx virtual machines. Versions 1 through 5 were released between 1993 and 1996. Around 1996, Nelson rewrote Inform from first principles to create version 6. Over the following decade, version 6 became reasonably stable and a popular language for writing interactive fiction. In 2006, Nelson released Inform 7, a completely new language based on principles of natural language and a new set of tools based around a book-publishing metaphor.

Text Adventure Development System (TADS) is a prototype-based domain-specific programming language and set of standard libraries for creating interactive fiction (IF) games.

Graham A. Nelson is a British mathematician, poet, and the creator of the Inform design system for creating interactive fiction (IF) games. He has authored several IF games, including Curses (1993) and Jigsaw (1995).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Plotkin</span> Interactive fiction programmer and writer

Andrew Plotkin, also known as Zarf, is a central figure in the modern interactive fiction (IF) community. Having both written a number of award-winning games and developed a range of new file formats, interpreters, and other utilities for the design, production, and running of IF games, Plotkin is widely recognised for both his creative and his technical contributions to the homebrew IF scene.

The XYZZY Awards are the annual awards given to works of interactive fiction, serving a similar role to the Academy Awards for film. The awards were inaugurated in 1997 by Eileen Mullin, the editor of XYZZYnews. Any game released during the year prior to the award ceremony is eligible for nomination to receive an award. The decision process takes place in two stages: members of the interactive fiction community nominate works within specific categories and sufficiently supported nominations become finalists within those categories. Community members then vote among the finalists, and the game receiving a plurality of votes is given the award in an online ceremony.

<i>Slouching Towards Bedlam</i> 2003 video game

Slouching Towards Bedlam is an interactive fiction game that won the first place in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition. It is a collaboration between American authors Daniel Ravipinto and Star Foster. Slouching Towards Bedlam was finalist for eight 2003 XYZZY Awards, winning four: Best Game, Setting, Story, and Individual NPC. The game takes place in a steampunk Victorian era setting. Its title is inspired by a line from "The Second Coming", a poem by W. B. Yeats.

The Dreamhold is an interactive fiction game by Andrew Plotkin, released in 2004. Its primary purpose is to be a tutorial to interactive fiction; because of that, the "core" of the game is relatively easy to finish.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emily Short</span> Interactive fiction writer

Emily Short is an interactive fiction (IF) writer. From 2020 to 2023, she was creative director of Failbetter Games, the studio behind Fallen London and its spinoffs.

The Space Under the Window is a 1997 interactive fiction game by Andrew Plotkin. The game is part of a collaborative art piece, also entitled "The Space Under the Window", by Kristin Looney – each piece had to have this title, but was otherwise unconstrained.

Hunter, in Darkness is a 1999 interactive fiction game by Andrew Plotkin, written in Inform. It won the "Best Individual Puzzle" and "Best Setting" categories in the 1999 XYZZY Awards, and came in eighth overall in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition.

<i>Anchorhead</i> 1998 video game

Anchorhead is a Lovecraftian horror interactive fiction game, originally written and published by Michael S. Gentry in 1998. The game is heavily inspired by the works and writing style of H.P. Lovecraft, particularly the Cthulhu mythos.

Vespers is an interactive fiction game written in 2005 by Jason Devlin that placed first at the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition. It also won the XYZZY Awards for Best Game, Best NPCs, Best Setting, and Best Writing.

<i>Jigsaw</i> (video game) 1995 interactive fiction computer game

Jigsaw is an interactive fiction (IF) game, written by Graham Nelson in 1995.

Earth and Sky is an interactive fiction trilogy written and produced by American author Paul O'Brian about the adventures of a brother and sister who gain superpowers while searching for their lost parents. Games in the series have won awards in the annual Interactive Fiction Competition and received an XYZZY Award.

<i>Aisle</i> (video game) 1999 video game

Aisle is a 1999 interactive fiction video game whose major innovation is to allow only a single move and offer from it over a hundred possible outcomes. It is notable for introducing and popularizing the one move genre.

<i>80 Days</i> (2014 video game) 2014 video game

80 Days is an interactive fiction game developed and published by Inkle. for iOS on July 31, 2014, and Android on December 15, 2014. It was released for Microsoft Windows and OS X on September 29, 2015. It employs branching narrative storytelling, allowing the player to make choices that impact the plot.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inkle (company)</span> English video game company

Inkle is a video game development company based in Cambridge, United Kingdom that specialises in interactive narrative, i.e. text-focused computer video games. They have created games such as 80 Days and Sorcery!, a recreation of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! gamebook series.

Howling Dogs is a Twine game and piece of interactive fiction created by Porpentine in 2012. The game is text-based and includes occasional abstract pixel art. In 2017, the game was included in the Whitney Biennial.

References

  1. ↑ Montfort, Nick (2003). Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. p. 220. ISBN   0-262-13436-5. Ingold's main contribution so far has been in his greater sensitivity to the levels of the interactor's and player character's awareness ...
  2. ↑ Ricard, Mark (2 January 2013). "SPAG Specifics: Creating, inverting and making good the detective genre". SPAG. 61. Retrieved 4 July 2013. The most significant distinctive of Make It Good is how it plays with what the player knows compared to the player character, who initially knows far more than the player. ... Ingold himself used this in his earlier games Fail-Safe and Insight.
  3. 1 2 3 "Jon Ingold, author of "All Roads"". SPAG. 27. 4 January 2002. Retrieved 24 June 2013.
  4. 1 2 Grassi, Roberto (June 2004). "Interview with Jon Ingold". Terra d'IF. 3. Archived from the original on 24 January 2007. Retrieved 24 June 2013.
  5. ↑ "Jon Ingold and Mike Sousa, authors of "Till Death Makes a Monk-fish Out of Me!"". SPAG. 31. 3 January 2003. Retrieved 24 June 2013.
  6. ↑ "About us". inkle. Archived from the original on 26 June 2013. Retrieved 24 June 2013.
  7. ↑ Alexander, Leigh (14 March 2013). "Roundtable: The Interactive Fiction Renaissance". Gamasutra . Retrieved 24 June 2013. Reprinted from Game Developer
  8. ↑ "The scripting language that drives 80 Days is now open-source". 11 March 2016.
  9. ↑ Alexander, Leigh (2 July 2013). "New, free tools allow any novice to make an accessible text adventure". Gamasutra . Retrieved 5 July 2013.
  10. ↑ Reed, Aaron (2011). Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7. Boston, MA: Course Technology, CENGAGE Learning. p. 264. ISBN   978-1-4354-5506-1.
  11. ↑ Bardinelli, John (28 May 2009). "Fail-Safe". Jay Is Games . Retrieved 24 June 2013.
  12. ↑ Montfort, Nick (2003). Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. p. 220. ISBN   0-262-13436-5.
  13. 1 2 "All Roads". Electronic Literature Collection. 1. College Park, MD: Electronic Literature Organization. October 2006. ISSN   1932-2011 . Retrieved 24 June 2013.
  14. ↑ Dickens, Evan (23 September 2002). "IF Week Part 3: The Top Five IF Games". Adventure Gamers . p. 2. Retrieved 4 July 2013.
  15. ↑ "7th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition: The Results". Interactive Fiction Competition . Retrieved 4 July 2013.
  16. ↑ "XYZZY Awards: Winning Games of 2001". XYZZYnews. Archived from the original on 9 June 2002. Retrieved 4 July 2013.
  17. ↑ Seegert, Alf (1 May 2009). "'Doing there' vs. 'being there': performing presence in interactive fiction". Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds. 1 (1): 23–37. doi:10.1386/jgvw.1.1.23_1.
  18. ↑ Nepstad, Peter (3 December 2007). "The H.P. Lovecraft Commonplace Book Project". SPAG. 50. Retrieved 4 July 2013.
  19. ↑ Short, Emily (15 August 2007). "IF Games from The Commonplace Book Project". Jay Is Games . Retrieved 4 July 2013.
  20. ↑ Gauger, Eliza (8 September 2007). "Interactive Friction: Lovecraftian abortions resurrected as text-adventure games". Destructoid . Retrieved 4 July 2013.
  21. ↑ Ricard, Mark (2 January 2013). "SPAG Specifics: Creating, inverting and making good the detective genre". SPAG. 61. Retrieved 4 July 2013.
  22. 1 2 Short, Emily (26 April 2009). "Make It Good: Darkest Noir". Play This Thing . Archived from the original on 10 February 2013. Retrieved 4 July 2013.
  23. ↑ Bardinelli, John (16 September 2009). "Make It Good". Jay Is Games . Retrieved 4 July 2013.
  24. ↑ Smith, Graham (29 April 2014). "Book 'Em: Make It Good Is IF About An Alcoholic Detective". Rock Paper Shotgun . Retrieved 5 May 2014.
  25. ↑ Short, Emily (16 November 2009). "The Shadow in the Cathedral: Gears within gears". Play This Thing . Archived from the original on 10 February 2013. Retrieved 5 July 2013.
  26. ↑ Short, Emily (4 December 2009). "Gaslight and Cog". GameSetWatch . Retrieved 5 July 2013.
  27. ↑ IGF nominations for 2023 https://igf.com/article/visai-games-venba-leads-finalists-2024-igf-awards
  28. ↑ Homepage for 2022 Writer's Guild Awards https://writersguild.org.uk/29th-writers-guild-awards-winners/
  29. ↑ IGF nominations for 2021 https://igf.com/article/unpacking-and-inscryption-lead-igf-2022-nominations
  30. ↑ Homepage for 2020 Writer's Guild Awards https://writersguild.org.uk/writers-guild-award-winners-2020/
  31. ↑ Bibliography of Interzone magazine
  32. ↑ Homepage for ink http://www.inklestudios.com/ink
  33. ↑ Homepage for Adventure Book, from archive.org archives https://web.archive.org/web/20071120072512/http://www.ingold.fsnet.co.uk/adbook.htm
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