This is a free hosting service for Interactive Fiction games. You can upload games and share them with others by giving out a link to play online.
Games must be either parser system story files or HTML files. Currently supported file formats:
* HTML (including Twine and Texture)
* Z-Machine (Inform, Dialog, ZIL)
* Glulx (Inform)
.* gam, .t3 (TADS)
* HEX (Hugo)
* Å-Machine (Dialog)
* Ink JSON files
Game uploads can be public or private. Public uploads can be found in the gallery on the front page. Private uploads aren’t listed anywhere and can only be accessed through the direct link.
–https://borogove.io/
Tag: interactive fiction
Disco Elysium
“This is why I love Disco Elysium. Why I think it is one of the most shit-stained, beautiful, and hopeful games I have ever played. Throughout its entire length it never fails to give testimony to the pain and splendor of Revachol and of life. I have thought about it every day for the last year and a half because it was the game that helped me learn what to do with my own bullets.
Tell stories and never stop, even when it hurts. Reach into the holes and pull out lead. Plant seeds in the wounds, and then watch them bloom.”
-Renata Price, “A Year Later, I Still Can’t Stop Thinking About Disco Elysium.” Kotaku.com. August 30, 2021..
The article above has spoilers. The main thing you need to know is that it is highly recommended. To confirm, I checked in with Steam’s reviews. This is the top recommended review on Steam over the last 30 days by someone with over 80 hours in game:
“Masterpiece.
Best RPG I have played in the past years. It is a very strong title. Like Heavy Rain, Dishonored, SOMA, Dragon Age: Origins, Walking Dead, Last of Us, Witcher.
It is like an interactive book. With decisions. With consequences. With unique skills. Memorable characters. Story that is more deep than you can imagine even in the middle of the playthrough.
It is a comedy. It is a drama. It is a world with grey colors in everything: characters, choices, outcomes.
At one moment you will be laughing at great jokes, idiotic situations, main character, somebody else. At the next moment you will be depressed because of some outcomes.
Beware that gameplay mostly consists of reading and choosing the options, so if you are not into this, you may not like it.
Disco Elysium deserves even more than it’s regular price.
This is truly a gem in modern gaming market. Such a pity it happens so rarely.”
–WilliamRockwell on Steam
Bookmarketing so I can pick this up in a few years when it is on sale for $10, which is how I buy video games that are not on Linux.
Interactive Fiction: ink & inklewriter, et al.
“* inklewriter is an easy-to-use online tool to write basic interactive stories.
* ink by comparison is a more powerful narrative scripting language that is primarily designed for professional game development, though it can also be used to write and share choice-based interactive fiction. It is also surprisingly easy to learn, though for ease of use it’s hard to beat inklewriter!
–https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/
h/t to Interconnected and the post “Filtered for some text-based virtual realities.” I could have easily made posts for
- Cait Kirby’s playable page using Twine and Sugarcube and the tutorial on both
- The House of Cenci, “a free-roaming text adventure with live performance on Zoom across four weeks.”
- The Impossible Bottle, the joint winner of the 2020 Interactive Fiction Competition
- Tully Hanson’s Writing and telescopictext.org that was used to produce it
The whole post is gold for anyone interested in what’s going on and the tools in current use with the interactive fiction community. My knowledge of the tools stopped at Inform 7.
Twine
“Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.”
–https://twinery.org/
Interactive Fiction & Text-Based Games
Interactive fiction is text-driven games and stories most commonly associated with the dawn of the computing age and games like Zork. Depending on one’s definition, you might be able to stretch the category to include games like Nethack.
Today, it is a thriving sub-culture with new works being created by independent creators. The Interactive Fiction Database is a good way to find great games or genres. The Interactive Fiction Competition a good place to look for new works. For a gentle introduction, try one of the many guides available.
Play Now
The game 9:05, playable via the link, is a commonly referenced entry point to interactive fiction and is also used by English as a Second Language teachers to teach basic English vocabulary.
If you’d like to go old-school, some have been made playable in a web-browser. Want to play Zork without installing any software? Now you can.
Or, if you want to get a feel for these types of games but still want some graphics, try Nethack, a dungeon exploration game with permadeath which has recently been updated. Easy to learn to play, but very difficult to master. “Internet user needs food badly!” Best played cold, but it is also interesting to play if you read the spoilers.
cafebedouin.org 