State of text-based games?

I was mentioning text-based games to someone at work. He was familiar with Zork and CYOA books, but he doesn’t really know anything about the current state of text-based games. Is there somewhere a nice roundup of what the whole thing is about, what platforms there are, what the different kinds of interactions are, etc.? I would know where to go if I just wanted to give him an idea of the state of parser-based interactive fiction, but I want to include all the various hyptertext-based systems that have sprung up in the recent past. The best thing I could think of quickly was to point him at the “Creation Tools” set of links on the side of Emily Short’s blog. Any other suggestions?

-Kevin

Quick google gives me:

microheaven.com/ifguide/

howtogeek.com/124460/the-bes … ure-games/

See if those aren’t any good.

The short answer is, no, not that I’m aware of.

There are a whole lot of hypertext and CYOA tools that have recently been and still are being developed; many of these don’t have a lot of games developed on them, and it’s still an open question of which systems will be influential enough to deserve inclusion in a brief summary of interactive fiction.

Unless someone else is just as active in being up-to-date on the world of interactive fiction, Emily Short’s tiny sidebar is the best we’ll get for now.

There’s always http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page

Yeah, this here will get you everything… including systems from 20 years ago, systems that aren’t in development, systems that are really obscure, systems used primarily by a foreign language community, and so forth. No summary of the most popular or useful systems in an easy-to-read format.

I agree with @MTW, the current unfeatured article at the wiki on the front page is a pretty good summary actually, though it sounds like Kevin is looking for something more in-depth.

Ah, I forgot about that. I stand corrected, that is a good summary.

Thanks. These are a bit outdated, although there’s some good stuff here.

-Kevin

Ah, yes. Good call, thanks!

-Kevin

Bainespal from this forum recently wrote a little piece on Yahoo voices, though it doesn’t have Twine:

voices.yahoo.com/top-interactive … tml?cat=47

-Wade

Also, I wrote a glossary of IF terms and game formats for my blog while I was reviewing IFComp games. This may be more in-depth /technical than you’re after, but at least it’s current:

ifcomp2013alawadeclarke.blogspot … ssary.html

Thanks, Wade.