Okay, so I somehow overlooked the fact that The 11th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition started on October 1 of this year, and finished today. But I guess it's my duty to advocate it all the same.

The Interactive Fiction competition is an annual even sponsored by the denizens of rec.arts.int-fiction. It started back in the mid '90s to encourage the writing of short text adventures, and has (for better or worse) sort of become the centerpiece of the text adventure community.

That's right. I said text adventures (though we prefer the term "interactive fiction"). People still play those. In fact, people still write those. In fact, there were 36 entries in the competition this year, and there are still more games released that weren't entered in the competition. I'd go as far as to say that the IF community is one of the most prolific and consistently talented indie-game communities.

And these aren't your father's text games. We've been at this for a good twenty years now, and we've gotten good at it. Thanks to the tools that exist today, even a novice can produce something fairly professional (Which is not to say that you don't need to be a programmer. Some of the less advanced systems will make this claim, but writing a game -- any game -- requires the kind of systematic thinking that not everyone is good at. It has nothing to do with knowing where to put the semicolons, but it has everthing to do with thinking like a programmer). Gone are the days of a two word parser where you have to get the phrasing exactly right (well, most of the time, anyway). Gone (well, most of the time, anyway) are the days of random, plotless dungeon crawls without any sense of character or narrative, and puzzles with no motivation. Authors of these games are half writer, half engineer, and some of them are very good at it.

Also, you can play them on your PDA. Some people like that.

It's no longer strictly true that these games don't have pictures -- many of them don't, but an increasing number of IF games are illustrated, but these images are in addition to the text, like an illustration in a novel -- sometimes even approaching the level of a graphic novel.

But yes, Virginia, people still write text adventures -- even in this day and age where polygon counts and framerates are king. And I actually find it a little strange that people find this hard to understand. Is anyone surprised that people still write books even though the moving picture has been around for over a century?

And we're getting some media attention. No less a publication than The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece on Interactive Fiction.

Why, there are even people who think they can make money on Interactive Fiction (They're wrong, of course, except maybe in the cellphone market. If your further meanderings mention Howard Sherman, I'd suggest you avoid his games: they're crap. And the claims he's made about the sales of his games are almost certainly misleading. If his claims are correct, he's sold 100,000 copies of his games, and at $20 each, that's a better way to get rich than helping Nigerian businessmen smuggle money out of the country).

Anyway, there was, as I mentioned, a competition. Somehow, I failed to notice this year, but a bunch of people didn't, and I think it says more about me being all hung up in my own life than anything else. This year's winner was Vespers by Jason Devlin. Tied for second were Beyond by Roberto Grassi, Paolo Lucchesi and Alessandro Peretti, and A New Day by Alexandre own Muniz. Congrats, guys.

Now, as previously mentioned, I've sold out (if you don't believe me, check those Google ads at the bottom of the page. And if anything sounds remotely interesting to you, please click on it.). So I'd be remiss if I stepped down from my bully pulpit without mentioning that a few years ago, I myself took second place in the IFComp. The page for the game I did it with is here. So if you're looking for a game to vitalize your own interest... Well, actually, mine might not be the best game to start with (It's not really representative of the format, and it's got some bugs that I can't fix, having lost the source code in a crash a few months ago). But it's a game to start with, and I even built a self-installer for it.

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