Interactive fiction and me, and IFComp 2022 launches

I’ve played and enjoyed traditional parser text adventure games since my first go in December 1980. My dad had borrowed an Apple II over Christmas, and one of the very first things I tried on it was Colossal Cave Adventure. Complete and utter instantaneous love. Oh and for computers too! I was only 8 then, but it’s not surprising I went on to study a computer science degree a decade later.

Growing up in Britain in the 1980s there was a vibrant home based computer coding scene, as youngsters tried to write games to emulate those they could buy, typically on cassette. Not just video games, but many text adventure games were coded. I never released anything commercially then, but was designing games from just a couple of years after that first Apple II try, coding in BASIC. In fact the book I had out on loan most often from Hawick public library was a book about programming text adventure games on the TRS-80 computer.

At university my love affair with text adventures continued. I played and coded in a multiplayer text based LPMUD game. And this was just the time that Graham Nelson was engineering Inform, allowing people to write their own Infocom style text adventures. His game Curses was a joy then. This era also saw the start of the IFComp, the annual competition for text adventure games, or as they were often called then interactive fiction. And this has continued ever since. Interactive fiction has since evolved to include different styles of game, including web based and choice. But remains a joy. I have also enjoyed writing and releasing my own games in Inform 7, as much as my health allows.

Anyway the original main point of this post was to say that the games for this year’s IFComp are out and available to play. Judges need only play and rate a minimum of 5 games for your votes to count. And judging runs through until mid November. 71 interactive fiction games I think this year, a mix of traditional parser text adventure games and web/choice ones. I playtested some of this year’s entries, which I enjoyed immensely. Looking forward to trying some of the others!

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