IFComp’s crop of judged-and-ranked entries from 2017 shows the amazing diversity in form, style, and subject matter that text-based games boast today. Regular online competitions and festivals provide a great place to peruse and play new work: The English-language IF world enjoys annual events including Spring Thing and IFComp, the latter a centerpiece of modern IF since 1995-which also makes it the longest-lived continually running game showcase event of its kind in any genre.

Its mainstream commercial viability had guttered by the 1990s, but online hobbyist communities carried on the tradition, releasing both games and game-creation tools.Īfter a quarter century, interactive fiction now comprises a broad and sparkling variety of work, from puzzle-laden text adventures to sprawling and introspective hypertexts. The term originated in the 1980s when parser-driven text adventure games-epitomized in the United States by Zork, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the rest of Infocom’s canon-defined home-computer entertainment. To me, the term interactive fiction includes any video game or digital artwork whose audience interacts with it primarily through text. The history of IF is longer than-but quite enmeshed with-the modern FOSS movement. When a Community Moderator for suggested an article about IFTF, the technologies and services it supports, and how it all intersects with open source, I found it a novel angle to the decades-long story I’ve so often told.

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and improvement of technologies enabling the digital art form we call interactive fiction. Running Kubernetes on your Raspberry Pi.A practical guide to home automation using open source tools.6 open source tools for staying organized.An introduction to programming with Bash.A guide to building a video game with Python.

Text based rpg games pc