I am not very good at solving puzzles. But what drew me into these text adventures was the mimetic quality of the written language--and the ability to have a deep, crucial impact on the direction of the story. The computer gave second person descriptions, and at the prompt...anything could happen. I take that back--the ILLUSION of anything-could-happen was the kicker. I could interact with a landscape, objects around me, and people, and it was satisfying, many times, in those olden games, to simply wander around.
Fast forward 15 years, through college, grad school, an MFA, Clarion, the whole nine yards. In looking around to see who, if anyone, was still interested in Infocom, I was surprised to find a smallish but lively community of people who were still writing interactive fiction. But something strange was going on, in a good way. Far from merely rehashing tired old tropes, an incredible diversity of styles and ideas had welled up, particularly within the last five years. People were writing interactive fiction that had no puzzles at all, or played with the Idea of the Puzzle. People were experimenting with voice, methods of storytelling, multimedia. But what struck the bell most for me was that people were writing "games" that had real emotive content, that tried to make connections with readers/players by creating new types of relationships between author and player.
It was a startling revelation for me; all of the hypertexty po-mo that people talked about in le academe, IF'ers were actually doing, with a minimum level of fuss and a maximum level of vividness and grace.
Anyhow, I hope you enjoy this modest page of mine dedicated to Interactive Fiction. Feel free to download my own debut effort at IF, The Isolato Incident, at your leisure. I'm at work on a new game that will be released in a late spring IF competition.
Once upon a time...Wait, we must stop. Already the story is all wrong. To be honest, we don't want the story to begin, not at all. We like to watch it stay the same. We like to meander to the roof of our cottage, pretending it's a quest. We disdain consumption of food. We like to coif our hair into shape, exactly like each other. We watch our bees, smear their history on our arms and legs. This is our kingdom.
We don't want the story to begin but it begins when there is a scratching outside the door...
Like characters on Seventh Heaven, the game has some mild "issues," but they're not crippling ones. But if you're stuck you can consult the handy-dandy walkthrough.
Reviews were middling to quite positive; you can read most of them on the USENET group rec.games.int-fiction.
2. Download the game files. ALAN games come in two parts.
3. Doubleclick on the interpreter. For Winarun (Windows), it will ask you to supply the gamefile name; type isolato. For ALAN Glk, from the FILE menu, drag down "import game file," and then open the .acd file.
4. That's it, you're ready to go! Consult INFO and HELP within the game itself, especially if you've never played Interactive Fiction before. If you get stuck, the walkthrough (linked above) might be a good thing to try out. Otherwise--or if you want to give me comments about the game--feel free to e-mail me. You can also post questions/comments about IF games on rec.games.int-fiction, and they will usually be responded to by at least some portion of the IF community at large. (By the way, if you ever want discussion about the writing and implementation of interactive fiction, hop on over to rec.arts.int-fiction.)
Here are some resources that I recommend if you're interested in playing or writing interactive fiction, geared mostly towards people new to the medium.
(More content and links coming soon...)