intfiction.org

http://escapepod.org/2012/04/05/ep339-run-bakri-says/

I thought this short story was an interesting take on the save-and-restore narrative.

Yeah I heard that story on Escape Pod!

It would make an interesting game, especially if you didn't tell the player what was happening. The key would be having the protagonist 'remember' what had happened in previous games. This would be a great 'freak-out' moment when the player realised the lead character knew they were a character in a game, and aware of the game-save system!

I suppose you'd have to run some trick with the save-point or 'restart' game commands so the game actually kept running but looked like it had been restarted.

You could also have the game read data from a text file.

Inform 7 can do this - See "22.10. Files" in the WI part of Inform's Documentation. There are several sections and examples listing the benefits of this and describing how to implement such things.

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- Ste/SteW aka Steve

Your friendly neighborhood IF enthusiast

This has already been done in IF:

http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=82mn545s8bt3csa4

Edit:
The implementation is faked though, but the "wtf?!" effect is there.

Endless, Nameless and Möbius also fit the bill, to an extent.

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Grotesque: an interactive fiction library manager for Linux
PyIFBabel: a Treaty of Babel library for Python

As a story, it reminds me a bit of Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Lathe of Heaven."

Some very obvious nods to Run, Lola, Run. I found the general idea and progression interesting, but the execution fairly lackluster.

Skin Horse (a web comic, Shaenon Garrity, SFW despite the title) is in the middle of a storyline with this theme.

(It also throws in some offhand Spider and Web references, which I am unduly gleeful about.)

Also the whole thing is basically a love-letter to Jason Shiga.

I think I forgot about that one.