#if

“Tourney” is a game that barely exists. It’s the shadow of an idea that slipped into the world last week during a free-wheeling conversation about design, agency, failure, and whether games can make meaningful statements about the nature of tragedy. To help the discussion along we invented a few imaginary games that could serve as stable reference points in unfamiliar terrain. One of the things we dreamed up is Tourney, a game about maintaining one’s integrity in the face of inevitable decline.

“Tourney” is a game that barely exists. It’s the shadow of an idea that slipped into the world last week during a free-wheeling conversation about design, agency, failure, and whether games can make meaningful statements about the nature of tragedy. To help the discussion along we invented a few imaginary games that could serve as stable reference points in unfamiliar terrain. One of the things we dreamed up is Tourney, a game about maintaining one’s integrity in the face of inevitable decline.

"People who are interested in interactive fiction but who haven’t played much or any of it ask me for suggestions from time to time — not as often as I’d like, of course, but, luckily, once in a while. I’ve had a page of recommendations up on my site since 2005. The games on that list remain good ones, but I’m now updating those recommendations to take into account games from recent years. I’m posting the new recommendations here. Note that many of the people who ask me about IF are of a literary bent, as am I, and my suggestions reflect that."

"The Frotzophone is an interface for making music with interactive fiction. The topography simulated in the game is used to generate sound, as is the player's path through the game. A Frotzophone "performance" looks just like playing a text adventure; but in addition to playing a game, you're also playing music."

"Words in interactive fiction individually carry more weight than they carry in static prose, if only because of the amount of attention we demand the player give to each one."

"From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989."

"In this tutorial we'll use I7 to write a simple game. By the time we're done, you'll have the beginnings of your very own masterpiece."

"The annual XYZZY awards have been announced, flaunting the gobs of creativity still flowing from the interactive fiction community."

"Zasterisk implements a Rezrov ZIO object, allowing a user to communicate with a Z-Machine via telephony devices."

"Several people have asked me to discuss in depth why I find I7 more powerful than I6 for complex projects."

"There's a solution to every Infocom problem and a way through every Infocom maze."

"Rather than using a small set of terse programming directives as Inform 6 did, Inform 7 uses a subset of English, in an effort to make interactive fiction programming more accessible to writers who lack a computer programming background."

"A clean Java 5 implementation of a Z-code interpreter."

"Made by Videlectrix, Homestar Runner's fictional software design company, Dungeonman 3 sports "state-of-the-art amber monochrome visuals" (circa 1980), real-time simulated medieval English text, a parser that talks back to you, and enough mocked adventur

"ZPlet is an interpreter for programs using the Z-Machine virtual machine invented by Infocom for their interactive fiction."

Insanely cool natural language approach to authoring interactive fiction - "brings together the editing, testing, indexing and publishing of interactive fiction within a simple one-window user interface."

"Membership in the Adventurers' Club is $100."

"The next documentary I am working on is about Text Adventures, or Interactive Fiction. It is called "Get Lamp"."

"For the last eleven years, the readers of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction have held a yearly interactive fiction competition."