A Writer's Guide to Interactive Fiction

(or, why am I still interested in a videogame fad from when I was ten years old?)

This is a talk I gave at Readercon 21, July 2010. I wanted to describe IF for writers (and readers) of traditional fiction.

This is nearly the talk I gave, anyway. These are the notes I wrote up beforehand. On the one hand, this makes them much more coherent and less "um"-ish. On the other hand, of course, notes never quite survive contact with reality. The introductory bit about IF in popular culture? I didn't have to explain that -- because Charlie Stross practically did it for me, in his guest-of-honor interview two hours previously. He was talking about his novel Halting State, which is written in second-person, "the narrative voice of computer games". Thank you, Mr. Stross, for anonymously introducing me. :)

---

Interactive fiction -- text adventures -- was the most advanced computer game technology of the early PC era. These games were the best-selling and most highly-rated games of the early 80s. Then they were overtaken and crushed by games with graphics, and that was the last anyone heard of them.

Most people.

Only that's wrong, in a couple of ways. IF has lingered in popular culture. If I mention "...a twisty little maze of passages", you know they're "all alike". (I know they're all different, but that's the other side of the chasm.) The call-and-response form of IF -- "TAKE LAMP", "I don't know how to take the lamp" -- has been a familiar gag for thirty years now.

And somewhere, in the basement of the computer game world, a few people are still writing text adventures. A few people... a few games... Actually, lots of games. Over a hundred last year, with rapidly-advancing development tools. This is a more active fandom than you might think.

So why am I interested? Books are more popular than IF; even short stories pay better than IF. What can I do with text adventures that I can't do with traditional fiction?

Inform great tool for your transmedia tool belt.