The Rosebush

The Rosebush, launched in 2023, is a free online magazine dedicated to publishing longer form articles about interactive fiction. It aims to be a platform for in-depth analyses, theory articles, discussions of craft, interviews, historical pieces, and so on. The intended audience consists of both players and authors of IF.

Victor Gijsbers proposed the idea for the magazine on November 18, 2022 at the Interactive Fiction Community Forum, where other forum members expressed interest in contributing to the project[1]. At the time of the magazine's preliminary launch on May 17, 2023, the team of editors included Aster Fialla, Benjamin Slade, Daniel Stelzer, Drew Cook, Josh Grams, Kiana Lee, Lisa Fox, Mike Preston, Mike Russo, Victor Gijsbers, and Zee[2].

Josh Grams explained how the title of the magazine came about: "This was Victor’s joking off-the-cuff 'we could name it something that has nothing to do with anything.' We didn’t want to suggest that it should favor parser or choice, or sound too highbrow academic and unapproachable, etc. and we weren’t coming up with anything that we loved and were just bikeshedding for too long and everybody was like, 'you know, The Rosebush actually isn’t a terrible name.'"[3]

Links

• Website
• Announcement on intfiction forum
• Tumblr
• Mastodon