FAQ

The ifwiki Interactive Fiction FAQ offers succinct and current information for newcomers to IF and the IF community. It aims to answer those questions that do actually come up frequently, and to direct readers to the most important online resources. While it is meant to be a useful part of ifwiki, this FAQ also should serve well as a stand-alone document that someone might read offline or print out.

What is "interactive fiction"?

The term refers to programs (usually called "games" or, less often, "works") that let you type commands to a character. This character wanders around in a simulated world of some sort, typically one that is described in text. "Text adventure" and "text game" have been used to mean pretty much the same thing. Examples include Adventure, Zork, Deadline, Planetfall, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Hobbit, and Curses.

Some people include gamebooks, hypertext fiction, and graphical adventure games such as Myst when they use the term, but those sorts of works aren't the focus of this FAQ, nor the main concern of the IF community.

The ifwiki offers a formal definition of interactive fiction; there is a longer discussion of the topic in the rec.arts.int-fiction FAQ; and other definitions can be found in various works, such as the book Twisty Little Passages.

What happened to Infocom (Magnetic Scrolls, Level 9, etc.)?

None of the companies that produced IF during the 1980s are still around and producing IF. Infocom was acquired by Activision in 1986, for instance, and is now a (not very active) "label" of that company. Activision abandoned the Infocom trademark around 2002 (though not the copyright to the games); Pete Hottelet of Omni Consumer Products LLC acquired the trademark in 2007.

Interactive fiction from the Infocom era is often hard to find outside of abandonware sites and online auction sites, although some of it has been made available to the public by the company that produced it. Plenty of people are still creating IF, however, and there are hundreds - perhaps thousands - of new games, most of which are free, that have been developed since the "commercial era" of interactive fiction.

How can I download and play IF?

The Interactive Fiction Database is a community-edited IF catalog of thousands of free games, and includes ratings, reviews, and many other features to make finding and playing games easier.

In addition to the game itself (commonly called the 'story file') you usually will need to download an interpreter (just like you need a player for music or video files, most IF games require an interpreter to run). The IFDB can help you download the correct interpreter, or you can choose one yourself; Gargoyle works well on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Other popular interpreters are Zoom for Mac and Linux and Spatterlight for Mac. Some games written in Inform are playable on the web with interpreters such as Parchment and Quixe.

One of the conveniences of Gargoyle and Spatterlight is that they can play IF created in multiple authoring systems. However, to see all the features of some games you may want a system-specific player; QTads is an example of a player created for a specific authoring system, TADs, and many other interpreters are available for specific combinations of systems and platforms.

Most of the games in the IFDB are hosted by the IF Archive, the main repository for free interactive fiction. It includes not only many games, but walkthroughs, interpreters, authoring systems, and more.

Where can I find out what games I might enjoy?

In addition to the IFDB, we recommend:

• Looking back through past XYZZY winners or games that did well in the IF Competition.
• Perusing the IF review sites. Some of the best include SPAG and Brass Lantern.
• Several members of the community have extensive collections of their personal recommendations: Emily Short, Yoon Ha Lee, and Sam Kabo Ashwell, for example.

What can I do when I get stuck?

Some games have in-game hints; try typing 'help', 'hint', 'hints', 'about', or 'think'. For others, hints or a walkthrough (a list of commands that will win the game, sometimes annotated) may be available on the IF Archive or elsewhere on the Web. You can also ask fellow players for a hint on rec.games.int-fiction. Just be sure to include a spoiler warning and spoiler space before you reveal any details of the game, so you don't ruin the game for others by giving away some of its surprises.

How can I post a review of a game I've finished?

If you like, you can simply post a review to one of the community forums (see below), as many people traditionally do with IF Comp games. You can also submit your review to SPAG, put it on the IFDB, or post it on your own site or blog.

What is this "IF Comp"?

The Annual IF Competition is an Internet-wide competition for short games (ones you can complete in less than two hours), started in 1996 and currently run by Stephen Granade. Anyone who is online can vote in the competition. Having played and rated five games is the only qualification necessary for judges. Recent years have seen dozens of entries and hundreds of judges: The 2008 Comp had 35 games voted on by 177 judges.

How can I write my own game?

Although some people try to develop IF from scratch in general-purpose languages, winners of the IF Comp and developers of successful longer games have shown that it can be a good idea to use one of the highly capable and free interactive fiction development systems. Inform, TADS, and Hugo are the most powerful and cross-platform of the options, but there are others. You can seek help from fellow developers in the IF community as you work, and avail yourself of some of the extensive documentation, tutorial material, and sample code that is online.

Which development system is best?

No one knows for sure, but a safe way for you to decide for yourself is to review all of them at Roger Firth's Cloak of Darkness page. You should also consider the development communities for different systems, what sample code and tutorial and reference information is available for each, the whole range of these systems' capabilities (including multimedia capaibilities, if these are important to you), and whether interpreters are available on the platforms you care about.

Why not create my own IF development system?

While almost all IF authors use some existing system such as Inform, TADS, or Hugo, there are many other less used authoring systems, in addition to information and advice on how to create new ones. The usual advice against creating a new system is that most new systems don't add to the existing menu of choices, but just duplicate, sometimes poorly, features already found in other authoring systems.

If you're developing a new system, it will help to be very familiar with how all of these existing systems work, and what choices developers before you, such as Graham Nelson (creator of Inform) and Mike Roberts (creator of TADS), have made, so you can imitate their systems' better features and avoid imitating anything you think is a mistake.

Another important consideration is what computer platforms your games will target and who their audience will be. With the dominance of Inform and TADS, many IF players will be less likely to play games written in other, less-popular languages. At the same time, players completely new to IF may have different conceptions of what they consider 'good' IF. Before you begin you should have a firm understanding of the goals of your project and its intended outcome -- a decent IF system requires more work than you might think!

How do I get people to test my game?

The site if.game-testing.org provides a convenient means to find testers, includes valuable information on the testing process, and allows you to sign up to test other author's games as well. You also can ask for testers on one of the community sites (see below). Often you'll have an easier time finding testers if you test a few games yourself.

How do I get people to play my game?

Releasing it in the IF Comp can be a very effective way, if it fits the bill by being a two-hour game that is not based on previous copyrighted work. There are other IF competitions at other points in the year which are less popular but still provide good ways to release a game. If you don't release your game as part of a competition, you should announce your game on the IF community sites (see below).

You may also want to publicize your game outside the IF community, if there are other groups who might be interested in it. For example, the Electronic Literature Organization, if your work is written for a literary audience, or TIGSource, if your IF might appeal to the general indie games community. Outside the IF community there are increasingly more competition venues and forums for games such as IF, and the ELO and TIGSource are good places to start looking.

Where can I talk with other people who are into IF?

The IF community started in the early 1990s on two Usenet newsgroups: "raif", for authoring, programming, craft, and theory (raif on Google Groups, and see the raif FAQ and past raif topics), and "rgif", devoted to playing games (rgif on Google Groups). The term r*if refers to both raif and rgif.

For real-time interaction, IFers founded the ifmud in 1997 and it's still actively used today. There is an annual awards ceremony on ifMUD for the XYZZY Awards, the Oscars of interactive fiction (see the transcript from the 2009 XYZZY Awards here).

IFers created Intfiction.org in 2007, another web-based forum whose community overlaps with raif, and in 2008 Planet IF, a blog aggregator that follows many IF-related blogs and RSS feeds.

2009 saw the formation of the first IF meetup group, the People's Republic of Interactive Fiction, and since then more groups have formed in Seattle, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay area. The PR-IF hosted the first 'IF summit' at the games expo PAX EAST in 2010.

How can I keep up with IF news and events?

Besides following Planet IF and community forums, Brass Lantern, IF URLs, and the current events page on ifwiki are sources of news, and there is increasingly more IF discussion outside the community proper on social sites such as Twitter.

Welcome to the IF community!

Major Resources

• IFDB, a catalog of games, with capsule reviews and powerful search features.
• The IF Archive, the main repository for games, interpreters, and development systems.
• SPAG (Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games), an email newsletter also available on the Web.
• Brass Lantern, "the adventure game website," with information for beginners, and numerous reviews, articles, and other resources.
• Planet IF, a collection of IF blogs.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.