The Interactive Fiction Pages

If you've just wandered in from the music side of MusicWords, there's a good chance you've never heard of Interactive Fiction (IF). If, on the other hand, you're active in the online IF community, you don't need me to tell you what's what. You're more likely to be wondering whether there's any information here that you can use.

Let me answer the latter question with an unqualified, "Maybe."

For starters, I've gotten some nice compliments on The Inform 7 Handbook, a book-length manual that provides a solid introduction to the popular Inform 7 programming language. It's available here as a free download.

Several of my own games are also available here as free downloads. For now, you'll also need to equip yourself with an interpreter program, which will require that you jet off to another site. (I hope eventually to have browser-based game play on MusicWords.) Instructions on where to find an interpreter and how to set it up are also on the games page.

For those who are curious: Plenty of information on IF is available on the Internet. Just Google "interactive fiction" and you'll be off and running. You'll find some slick software tools, weighty discussions of theory, and hundreds of free games, some of them very good and others ... lacking certain refinements, shall we say. You'll also run into a few pages full of old, dead links, and a few pages with information that's years out of date. And while much of the available online information is both well-presented and readable -- IF aficionados tend to be a literate bunch -- from time to time you'll run into a discernible "in-group" mentality. I sometimes get the impression that people in the online IF community are writing mainly for one another rather than for the benefit of the general public.

The mission of the MusicWords IF pages -- one mission, anyhow -- is to provide a map that will help you navigate safely through this particular maze of twisty little passages. (You knew that metaphor was coming, didn't you?)

In addition, I'll post news, information, and download links on my own interactive fiction projects, and possibly an essay or two. Oh, wait, there's one now, a rant about game design called "Fair Play".

If you know little or nothing about IF, and would like to get started, the Getting Started page is for you. This page also provides a few clues for those who are confused about the fact that the most popular development system for IF (that being Inform) is not listed in the IF archive index or in the games index of Baf's Guide.