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?
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.
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.
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: