Interactive Fiction

Interactive Fiction

You extend your grimy hand and touch the dusty folder very, very carefully. Nothing appears to be happening but from between the aged pages the long lost game file emits a squirmy, impatient kind of sound that tickles your ears. You pull your hand back and lean away from the desk in awe. A fat ugly fingerprint is now visible on the filthy folder and you feel strangely uplifted by the sight. Under the desk, at your feet, the 486DX slowly grinds away its ancient memory modules.

You can get out of this scary place to the north and a broken staircase leads up and into dusky sunlight. The clock keeps moving counter-clockwise on top of the pile of eighties paraphernalia, ticking softly.

Interpreters, game creation and game downloads.

Interpreters.

You will need an interpreter installed to be able to play any Interactive Fiction game.
There are of course more interpreters out there than what I’ve made available here but this is what I use. There are many sites out there that can give real information and plenty of downloads. I will not even try to fake it.
Interpreters I recommend:
Windows Frotz TTS 2002 (Text To Speech version)
Windows Frotz 2002

Game creation files and how to use them.

The inform Designers Manual. Read this and you are well on your way!
The files you will need to compile your own games using Inform 6. (Zip archive.)

My games

A few favorites of mine:


Anchorhead by Michael Gentry.

The Awakening.

The Zuni Doll. Great little horror game.


Across the stars.

8 Replies to “Interactive Fiction”

  1. Eek. this nested comment thing is bothering me. How am I supposed to know what’s what. Arg. Good thing I’m an admin. Anyways. I started up Release four. And I realized I forgot to add the verb “poke”. Because that was all I wanted to do to LD when she stood there on the riverbank. Poke her and see what happens. Fun fun. Ok, I also have to update this page. The release is #4, the notes are #3, wonder what else is off kilter here.

  2. Oh I do that all the time. Maybe I shouldn’t have it do nested comments. 🙂 Hey, that is strange, but it wouldn’t be the first time my computer didn’t like a website I’m on. I’m going to give it another try right shortly but thought I’d reply to this first in case everything goes Helen Keller on me. . And I think I will take you up on the release updating. Chances are I’ll never get around to get it done otherwise. It would be greatly appreciated. Expect an email at some point before the weekend And I just realized I’m worrying for nothing. The file is obviously on the server here; doh. But either way; I’ll check everything and the release notes first though.

  4. A couple of things.

    First, if you want, you could send me the updated release and I can take care of uploading it to the archive and updating ifwiki/ifdb. I’d be happy to help.

    Second, while I know the transcripts are accessed by people on screen readers and braillenotes, I may have the original transcript around and could just send you a TXT file. We played your game for three sessions, and it’s a really big HTML page as a result. Let me see if I can find the original and then I could even strip out the word “Floyd” which proceeds every line printed by the bot whose running the game for us in a group environment.

    Send me the updated file at my gmail account: jacqueline.a.lott

    I’ll just hit reply on your note and send the transcript. I probably won’t be able to dig it up until Sunday, though.

  5. Ouch. When I hit that page my Firefox, and chrome too goes unresponsive. I don’t know what’s going on with that. Perhaps something with screenreader access. I don’t know. That’s a disappointment damnit.

  6. Oh thank you so much. CSBB is one of the things I’m so happy I started, and finished. I probably did not update it on the archive. I’ve lost track of the IF for some time to be honest. It goes up and down. Inspiration hits and then it hits me with something else that I just have to do. haha. I should look into it though. That is the beauty of IF; it’s timeless. It doesn’t go old, ever. Never needs fixes and updates to keep being great games. It’s so nice to hear from players and I should keep it available and stuff. This inspires me but I have no idea when I’ll have the time. Sometimes something Lornedei did pops up in my head and Deini barks at me to get my shit together. Seriously. Those two were my obsession for two years and they still are in a way always in the back of my mind. I will look into this. Working on making a music video today though. Oh, where does the time go?

  8. Hi, Jenny.

    I’ve been quite remiss in not telling you that ClubFloyd, a weekly group that gets together to play interactive fiction together, played CSBB game last summer. The transcript didn’t get posted right away and I just lost track. But I wanted you to know because I can honestly say that Crystal and Stone, Beetle and Bone will forever be one of my favorite IF games, and made for some of my favorite sessions ever of ClubFloyd.

    You’ve updated your site since we played, and done a new release of CSBB. I can’t wait to dig in to your site and see what else is here. Sometimes we play betas of stuff, so if you’d like us to check out Gideon, let me know.

    And, of course, it’d be great if you joined us on the ifMUD. Email me for details if you’d like to hang out and talk IF.

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