intfiction.org

I'm Richard Otter from the UK (or England if you prefer).

My interest in IF dates back to the adventure games of the 80s. I must have played all the old ZX Spectrum classics such as "Sherlock", "Hobbit", "Lords of Time", "Snowball" and "Subsunk". I even had a go at writing my own stuff in those days using the dear old Quill by Gilsoft.

A couple of years ago I stumbled onto Adrift and so started my life in the modern world of IF. As I'm no programmer I have stayed with Adrift and have a few games of varying quality under my belt.

I'm Victor Gijsbers from the Netherlands, 24 years old and working on a PhD in philosophy.

My first experience with interactive fiction must have been when I was, oh, 8 or 9 or so, with a Dutch game called "Korenvliet". Although I did play some adventure games with parsers (the early King's Quests, Space Quests and so on), it was only a few years ago that I discovered modern IF. My love, I have to admit, is also restricted to recent, not too puzzly IF: I never finished an Infocom game, and in fact find them nearly unplayable - the experience of "getting stuck" is exactly 0% enjoyable for me, and most often a reason to quit the game and never start it up again.

A related interest of mine is recent, independent roleplaying games, about which I write far too long posts on my blog.

To date I authored one IF game, The Baron.

I'm Kent, and I'm 17 from California, USA.

I'm very new to the IF community. I first ran into IF back in Summer 2005, but didn't actually seriously consider the gaming form until August 2006 when I ran into a beauty called Inform 7. Curious about it's natural language processor, I downloaded the tool. I didn't really know what to do, so I started familiarizing myself with Interactive Fiction. Before long, my slight interest became a somewhat obsession. But I became rather busy and couldn't actually get into the genre until last month, when I finished my transition to fandom of IF. I finished writing my first game, A Dream Too Real, a few days ago. I did upload it to the net and shared it with a few friends, but it was more of the first-time-using-a-system game that some authors use to better understand the language. Now I've started my second game, one of a more ambitious scale, one that I hope to be able to use as my debut game to the public. I came across this site through SPAG e-zine, and registered up and came here.

I use Inform 7 and am currently working on the tentatively named IF game, Spacecraft Project.

Hi! I'm Alex W, 21 years old. I live in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

The first interactive fiction game i ever played was Dunnet which comes with emacs. Dunnet introduced me to the whole genre, and after googling around I found out about the IF community and started playing more games. Vespers was the next game I played and really enjoyed.

I've written one text-adventure for my gf to play using inform 6, and now i'm learning inform 7 to make a much more expansive game for all to play

Not sure what else to say, but feel free to ask!

In general, I tend to dislike thread necromancy. However, since this one is only a month inactive and has an appropriate topic, in this case I'll throw my hat in. I'm Chris Knight.

And let's just get this out of the way right now. No, not the guy who played Peter on the Brady Bunch (he goes by "Christopher"). But you're the first person who ever noticed that it's the same name. :)

Anyway.

I played interactive fiction when it was just called a "computer game" or "text adventure". I had Zork on my trusty TRS-80 Model III, which got me hooked. Some other early titles I played included a game called Bedlam in which you had to escape from a sanitarium, and Quest for Fire (you can probably guess the plot of that one). There was also some sort of Dungeons & Dragons game I recall -- more of an RPG really -- that was written (I think) in BASIC. I don't remember much about it at all, other than the two-handed sword was called a THS, and there was a dragon that kept killing me.

I played a lot of the Infocom titles, and wish that I would have saved the original packaging that I used to have with all of them. I was an avid reader as a young-un, so I stuck with text adventures even as computers became more graphics-oriented (though I am also a fan of the early Sierra games).

I discovered the underground modern-day IF community via usenet about 10 years ago, and briefly re-entered the scene as a player. I, at that time, had delusions of authorship... but eventually got bogged down with Real Life (tm) and never got around to it.

Somewhere in a game, I am going to put a Round Tuitt.

Anyway again.

I hate to call something a New Year's Resolution, so let's just not call it that. One of my goals for this year is to do more writing -- I did some in college, even got a paycheck as a freelancer for a while, but never did much else with it into grad school and beyond.

Now, with a family and a real job, I suppose I'm looking back and not wanting to let the many hours I spent hunched over a keyboard go. So as an extension of my goal to do more writing, I returned to the idea of writing text adventure games.

My day job is a network administrator; I know enough about programming to be dangerous (I sometimes call myself a "street coder", since I haven't had a lot of formal schooling)... so something like TADS or Inform is right up my alley.

If anyone is still reading this blathering, I will mercifully sum up. I am intending to learn TADS and start writing some text adventures (it's still hard for me to call it "interactive fiction"). I've been doing some reading and writing in the r*i-f newsgroups, and I've got a blog dedicated to my learning that the desperate amongst you can find here: http://mirrorshades.at.preempted.net/wordpress/

Thanks for listening. Please don't tell me if you haven't been.

Hope to see you all around.

Good to see you on the forum, Chris.

Never got around to posting in this thread either; so as for myself, I've been playing text games such as muds since college. Long ago, in lieu of doing our grammar school work, we would play the text games available on the school computer (Zork and The Hobbit) and write games in BASIC. But I didn't know about IF until about a year ago; I don't remember the exact circumstances but you know how late night googling can turn things up.

I'm a carpenter by trade so I think playing and attempting to write IF feeds some other part of my brain that isn't satisfied by working with my hands.

Ah, you must be the same George who read my blog. :)

Speaking of your blog, Chris, where is it? I was looking forward to a nice r*if digest when you mentioned it, but the link seems to be broken.

Hello, everyone. My name is Skye Nathaniel Schiefer; I am 24 years old and have spent most of my life in New Jersey (USA), though not by my choosing. I have a well-credentialed BA in Philosophy (of Religion, as opposed to of Logic), and a very impressive, grossly unfocused resume that could only serve to open unappealing doors. It's been about two years since I graduated, and I've probably spent a little more of that time out of work than in it, stretching that post-collegiate "I-got-a-philosophy-degree" limbo state as long as possible among brief fits and starts of employment, in spite of the pressures applied by my creditors. Read between the lines, people: I LIVE AT HOME WITH MY MOMMY AND DADDY.

My interests, aspirations, and unfinished projects include a long essay interpreting Jason Molina's music as a kind of philosophy of the blues, a screenplay and storyboard for an original film, a book outlining my scientific interpretation of the universe as a series of self-abstractions in which human society and technology represents the latest redefinition of the natural, a neverending stream of frustration with the oligarchical financial foundations of American democracy and the weakness of the United Nations as an international governmental body in a young global age, the occassional intricate, narrative mix cd, a couple of original videogame designs, and generally being an awesome and brilliant fellow.

My background regarding interactive media lies mostly in the realm of videogames such as (to name a few favorites and important influences) Ico, Earthbound, Silent Hill, Silent Hill 2, Super Metroid, Half-Life 2, Uplink, and Metal Gear Solid 3. I've spent the past few years analyzing such works among a forum-based community that does not shy from theoretical debate, and I take interactive media in general seriously a priori as an emerging set of formats whose fundamental designer/player joint authorship presents a new direction for artistic expression that is of ever greater central importance and contemporary relevance. As implied by this feeling, I basically consider interactive fiction to be the future of literature. I told you I was an awesome guy!

Although I am certain I was exposed to the text adventures of the '80s, I honestly remember the likes of TutorDOS more clearly than any games of that time. I was more involved with my Texas Instruments and Commodore 64 than the young personal computers available then. However, when graphic adventures became common, I played Sierra and LucasArts titles prolifically even during the golden years of the SNES. I never became involved in the modern IF community, whether or not I was aware of its existence or size. Then, last year, a member of the videogame forum I mentioned posted something of an announcement about Inform7. We all became very excited, and several members of the community authored their own titles to test the language for themselves (for example). Since then, I have habitually loaded up the I7 homepage just to browse through it for the umpteenth time and dwell upon the implications of a natural language development system's existence.

About a month ago, something grabbed hold of me and I wildly explored every nook of the modern IF community, browsing, researching, and learning everything I could about the medium. I made an extensive, carefully selected and organized compilation cd including everything from a z-code implementation of Eliza from 1966 to the four Spring Thing 2007 entrants, as well as a library of mini-competitions and projects, documentation such as historical and theoretical papers, abuses and oddities, and installation files for interpreters. I also wrote a .txt file introducing the compilation and providing a basic overview and instructions. Really, the whole thing got started because I wanted to introduce my friend to IF, and somewhere along the line I became obsessive and took the project as far as possible. Unfortunately, it's not something I can offer to distribute in any way since it includes z-code versions of all the Infocom titles, which Activision has not yet abandoned. Anyway, after I got done with this, I just sort of kept going, continuing to read about IF far more than actually reading IF, mostly because I am so impressed by the depth and sophistication of the IF community and want to soak it all in.

So I have a huge amount of IF lined up to read. Once I have -- once I've seen how experienced authors have tackled certain prickly design problems, and once I've been generally inspired and blown away by everything and seen what I'm up against -- I have no doubt that I'll eventually write my own piece with I7. After all, I found all of this because of my lasting excitement for I7, so becoming an Inform author myself will be a wonderful bit of full circle closure as well as the start of a whole new adventure. In the meantime, I hope to talk about theory and design a great deal with you fine folks. I'm looking forward to it!

Hello, my name is Chephren Mansley, and I'm from the uk. I'm a 21 year old student, and I've been interested in IF since about 2000. My interest in the IF scene has drifted in and out, but always seems to return, I've started a few games over the years, and never really got anywhere, still, I'm optimistic at some time I will suceed in creating something. I joined these boards, because I felt a sudden desire to discuss IF, or at least to distract myself in a whole new way.

Hello,

I'm a long time lurker of the IF community and have recently decided to actually take part, particularly now when 2 new robust authoring systems are evolving out of beta. I've also signed into www.ifwiki.org and hope to help fill in empty pages as penance for my long term silence.

I really like the idea of a moderated set of forums beyond the looseness of the rec.arts groups. Just needs more traffic here.