Opinion 12
Night in the Woods Is Not About Teens or the 90s
Night in the Woods is not about teenagers or the 90′s. One of the developers behind the project, Scott Benson, tweeted out today “people are gonna be sad when they discover it’s neither furry nor saved by the bell.” The first is, of course, a reference to the subculture fandom of anthropomorphic animals and the […]
Interactive Cinema: Her Story
This guest post was written by Bruno Dias. If you want to hear more from him, check him out on Twitter or his website. Her Story (Sam Barlow) is a difficult thing to classify, because it’s premised on a clever hop across medium boundaries. We’re used to talking about interactive fiction as a near-synonym of interactive […]
Editorial: Adam Orth’s New Genre FPX Sounds Like Graphical IF
In a recent interview with gamesindustry.biz, Adam Orth detailed the new game his studio Three One Zero was working on and how it was the advent of a new “genre.” As entailed in the quote to the right, the new genre is called the FPX — the First Person Experience. What is sounds like is […]
The Scope of IF: What Game Deserves the Name?
This guest post is brought by Hap Aziz. You can find more from him on his website. a tale of two formats Perhaps there’s some significance that as we approach the 40th year since Will Crowther first developed the text version of his Colossal Cave Adventure, the game community finds itself engaged in a serious […]
Mobile: Necklace of Skulls
You are Evening Star, a hero in the making, about to find out what happened to your lost twin brother Morning Star. This is the setting of the mobile game Necklace of Skulls, set in a colorful, well developed world populated by myth and legend. Through your journey you encounter a variety of characters; from […]
IF Isn’t Dead: The Vibrant World of Interactive Fiction
Last week the IF Comp announced its participants in the annual competition. The IF Comp has been running for twenty years, and is a long standing fixture in the interactive fiction community. This year has a wide variety of participants and entries, which I’ve listed on another part of this site, and if you’re at […]
An Open Love Letter to Kentucky Route Zero
We have a ritual. The kind of ritual that thrives in a group of four. When a new episode of Kentucky Route Zero is released, we get together and eat dinner. We pull out the projector, relax on the couch and begin to play. I don’t know if there’s something unique about Kentucky Route Zero that […]
Teaching Experimental Interactive Fiction
This post is brought to you by Chris Martens, who you can find on Twitter. Like most interactive fiction enthusiasts, working on IF isn’t my day job, though perhaps I come closer than most. I’m a grad student at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) who’s managed to incorporate a sneaky amount of game design theory into […]
War, Pestilence, Famine, Death, and Twine
There’s something unusual about the announcement of this year’s XYZZY Awards finalists. For the first time since since Inform 7 was released in 2006, most of the XYZZY Awards finalists were not created with it. In fact, this is the first time in the entire seventeen-year history of the XYZZY Awards that the plurality of […]
A Year Ago Today, LucasArts Closed Its Doors
There exists a faint whiff of legacy around LucasArts. A year ago today, Disney closed the iconic studio, six months after they purchased it. With this closing they ended two anticipated Star Wars games, but something more came to a close. In recent memory, LucasArts was best known for handling the Star Wars franchise, pumping […]