To this day I occasionally feel a tinge of regret for never getting past the Vogon ship. Some day I will complete this.
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Although games made with a text parser – you know, where you type commands like TURN ON LIGHT or LOOK IN POCKET or S to travel “south” through described space – are increasingly a lost art
Actually, they’re not at all; the modern interactive fiction community continues to thrive thanks to tools like Twine and Inform 7. This year’s XYZZY Awards are coming up; the long-running SPAG online magazine has just returned from hiatus and a new zine called IFography has appeared; and my blog aggregator makes it clear that there are new discussions, activities, and projects happening among IF fans every day.
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Actually, given that I judge and cover the IF comp most years, make my own little works in Inform and have interviewed just about any notable IF creator you can name, you can assume I do know that. You should look into some of my work! But to your average game fan – and, increasingly, among younger audiences – parser-based IF is seen as a niche if they know it at all.
If you look into the modern community, you might notice that parser-based IF (which was what we were discussing here, not ‘the IF community’) is increasingly conceding space to Twine games (Twine is a hypertext tool, not a parser-based tool) and other more accessible formats, because it’s much easier for newcomers to work with. Therefore suggesting that parser games are no longer as widely-made as they once were is not really an inaccuracy!
We’ll be covering all kinds of works here, but sometimes we need to make concessions to the idea that non-commercial niches seem invisible to your average person and give them an invitation into the topic. After all, it’s one of my specialties and I am always eager to share it with new people. Why don’t you post a link to your blog here so people can check out your stuff?
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I never thought I’d see the word ‘accessible’ used for the H2G2 adventure game. I played it on my friend’s Amiga, I think. It made me want to cry: “Come back, Twin Kingdom Valley! All is forgiven!”
It was a lot funnier than Twin Kingdom Valley, though.
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