Introducing Ourselves

General
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On the Adrift forum, we have a little topic stickied at the top of the General Discussion section where people can come along and introduce themselves to the forum. Any chance of something similar here so that everyone can get to know everyone else? (Edited by Rioshin: Post stickied)

Assuming it’s okay…

I’m David Whyld, 30 and a bit years old, way too much free time on my hands and an obsessive drifter (that’s in the sense that I use Adrift, btw :slight_smile: ). I’ve alternatively wanted to be a world famous novelist and just got hold back by the fact that I can’t write a novel worth a damn. Thus I turned my hand to interactive fiction. So, book publishers of the world, it’s your fault I’m here…

Currently working on a huge detective game for the Spring Thing 2007 and I’m in the process of getting my IFComp 2006 finished, excited at the prospect (even if it doesn’t happen) of commercial IF and hoping this forum turns out to be the runaway success it deserves to be.

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How do. Mike Murphy, age 27 and living in London UK.

I played my first text adventure on the BBC Acorn back in the early 90s and have liked them, along with ‘point and click’ adventures since, although not many games I play hold my interest for that long…regardless of how much I like the genre.

A few years ago some members on my forum, which was then primary based on riddles, liked the idea of creating a game based on the background story of my forum. Although we had kicked around the idea of writing our own software for a text adventure, and then with creating our own ‘point and click’ game, they never really got past the early planning stage. Now the interest lies with creating an RPG, perhaps using Ruby on Rails, but I still like the idea of creating a short IF game as originally planned - so I’ll be doing that myself.

The game will be based in a mansion and the player will be required to rescue local children who are being held in a basement by a recluse lion who has now lost control of the mansion to a group of monkeys (um…like I say, it’s kindof relevant to the forum background and so doesn’t sound like it makes any sense :wink:)

Mxx

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Hi, I’m David. I live in Indianapolis, USA. I’m 27, and have a degree in English which I’m sadly not using in any professional capacity.

I started playing adventure games in 1986 on my Tandy 1000EX. I never played much text adventures, mostly graphical adventures like Space Quest and King’s Quest.

I discovered IF around 2003 or so, and liked what I saw. And here I am.

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Two Davids and two Mikes so far… Mike Snyder, 34, from Wichita Kansas (grew up in Oklahoma, but moved back to Wichita in 1995).

My first experience with Interactive Fiction was “The Arconiax Assignment”, around 1987. It was a “scratch-and-sniff” adventure game published by Rainbow Magazine for the TRS80/CoCo. That got me hooked. I had been piddling with BASIC for a year or two (TI-99/4a, Apple II, and by then, the CoCo 2). The first text adventure I ever wrote was called “Antartic Adventure” (yes, Antartic – poor spelling in the title is a good indication of the quality of the rest of that one). I wrote quite a few after that, and submitted them to a subscription software distributor called T&D. For the next three years or so, many of my games (including many that weren’t text adventures) were distributed on these issues of T&D (it worked well for them – which is another reason I think subscription IF might work – but I digress). I have most of my old CoCo adventure games (and the rest) at http://www.cocoquest.com/ but I lack that first one I wrote (it was never published – and for good reason), and the last (a self-published game called “The Entity” that is probably lost forever – a shame, since it might be worth rewriting now).

I’ve written lots of games and done lots of programming since then: BBS and Worldgroup BBS games, browser-based games, DOS and Windows games, interactive fiction. I’m a programmer by profession, though, so after a full day of work it sometimes feels like more work to come home and work on a game.

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Well, I guess it’s time I wrote a short introduction about myself…

Name’s Mikael, age 31. After a few years working, back in school studying software engineering - to finally get the degree for what I’ve been doing for ages.

I started playing IF, or text adventures as they were called back then, in the mid-80’s, and started out writing my own parsers on the trusty C64 (I still like to write parsers on it, in basic, for some weird reason).

A few years ago I stumbled upon the IF community, and ever since I’ve had the itch to create a game… but as I’ve mentioned in other posts, I’m not much of a designer or writer - I’m the workhorse that can get the game programmed.

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Hi, Ken Franklin here!

I am 45, from Surrey, England, UK, Europe, World, and have been part of the ADRIFT community for just on six years.

My first introduction to text adventures came in the early 1980’s with “Philosopher’s Quest” from Acornsoft for the BBC Micro Model B. Like many I drifted away from adventure games for a number of years, though I dabbled a bit with “GTAC: Graphic Text Adventure Creator”
by Andrea Gallo on the Acorn Archimedes/Risc Machine in the nineties.

Since finding interactive fiction, and particularly ADRIFT, I have attempted largely unsuccessfully to actually create something that I could be proud to let others play. I have spent a lot of time as Admin on the ADRIFT Forum, edited the InsideADRIFT newsletter for about 20 issues, created Drift On: the ADRIFT Wiki and have organised many ADRIFT competitions.

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Hi, I’m Gayla. I’m twice as old as most of the other folks involved with IF, so in a metaphoric sense you can think of me as a little old lady with an umbrella and a very large handbag. I live in Las Vegas and spend my days working at a fairly boring job in the accounting department of a small company.

I played Zork back in the 80’s and loved it. So did my children. Then I forgot all about text games until my son Erik came home from college for a visit and installed Winfrotz and Curses on my computer. He said, “Play this, Mom. You’ll like it!” He was right. And then he recommended “So Far,” “Metamorphoses,” and “Savoir Faire.”

After that he said, “Why don’t you try writing one of these games?”

“Sounds like fun,” I said. “How do I do that?” So he gave me the URL of the TADS site. A year and a half later I finished writing “Finding Martin,” and then I asked him, “Now how do I get people to play it?” Erik told me about the IF newsgroups, and I found out about all the things I did wrong with “Finding Martin.”

I’m in the planning stages for a second project, but I haven’t started coding yet. I have too many ideas, and none of them are meshing together cohesively yet. I’m not sure if I’ll ever get anything started with a second project. But I had so much fun writing the first game that I don’t want to give up trying to put something together.

–Gayla

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I think it’s amusing that you live in the exciting world of Las Vegas - casinos! casinos! casinos! - and yet your job sounds every bit as unexciting as mine (from here in unexciting little England). :confused:

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I am David Fisher, from Sydney, Australia …

I had a brief encounter with IF as a teenager (The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy - the infamous Babel fish was OK, but I got stuck on the Heart of Gold), but not much other than that.

Last February I discovered the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup, and was fascinated … I spent a while doing “catch up” work and researching the group archives, which ended up in ifwiki.org/index.php/Past_raif_topics (maybe a strange way to do things, but that’s just me !)

I tend to be very ambitious in creating games, so I haven’t officially released anything yet (other than an Inform 7 extension) … I have two main things in progress, one of which will appear in a few more months and the other in another year or so (probably :smiley: ).

Currently running CreatureComp, a mini-comp for creature-oriented people.

Oh, and I’m a computer programmer too.

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I’m Richard Otter from the UK (or England if you prefer).

My interest in IF dates back to the adventure games of the 80s. I must have played all the old ZX Spectrum classics such as “Sherlock”, “Hobbit”, “Lords of Time”, “Snowball” and “Subsunk”. I even had a go at writing my own stuff in those days using the dear old Quill by Gilsoft.

A couple of years ago I stumbled onto Adrift and so started my life in the modern world of IF. As I’m no programmer I have stayed with Adrift and have a few games of varying quality under my belt.

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I’m Victor Gijsbers from the Netherlands, 24 years old and working on a PhD in philosophy.

My first experience with interactive fiction must have been when I was, oh, 8 or 9 or so, with a Dutch game called “Korenvliet”. Although I did play some adventure games with parsers (the early King’s Quests, Space Quests and so on), it was only a few years ago that I discovered modern IF. My love, I have to admit, is also restricted to recent, not too puzzly IF: I never finished an Infocom game, and in fact find them nearly unplayable - the experience of “getting stuck” is exactly 0% enjoyable for me, and most often a reason to quit the game and never start it up again.

A related interest of mine is recent, independent roleplaying games, about which I write far too long posts on my blog.

To date I authored one IF game, The Baron.

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I’m Kent, and I’m 17 from California, USA.

I’m very new to the IF community. I first ran into IF back in Summer 2005, but didn’t actually seriously consider the gaming form until August 2006 when I ran into a beauty called Inform 7. Curious about it’s natural language processor, I downloaded the tool. I didn’t really know what to do, so I started familiarizing myself with Interactive Fiction. Before long, my slight interest became a somewhat obsession. But I became rather busy and couldn’t actually get into the genre until last month, when I finished my transition to fandom of IF. I finished writing my first game, A Dream Too Real, a few days ago. I did upload it to the net and shared it with a few friends, but it was more of the first-time-using-a-system game that some authors use to better understand the language. Now I’ve started my second game, one of a more ambitious scale, one that I hope to be able to use as my debut game to the public. I came across this site through SPAG e-zine, and registered up and came here.

I use Inform 7 and am currently working on the tentatively named IF game, Spacecraft Project.

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Hi! I’m Alex W, 21 years old. I live in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

The first interactive fiction game i ever played was Dunnet which comes with emacs. Dunnet introduced me to the whole genre, and after googling around I found out about the IF community and started playing more games. Vespers was the next game I played and really enjoyed.

I’ve written one text-adventure for my gf to play using inform 6, and now i’m learning inform 7 to make a much more expansive game for all to play :slight_smile:

Not sure what else to say, but feel free to ask!

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In general, I tend to dislike thread necromancy. However, since this one is only a month inactive and has an appropriate topic, in this case I’ll throw my hat in. I’m Chris Knight.

And let’s just get this out of the way right now. No, not the guy who played Peter on the Brady Bunch (he goes by “Christopher”). But you’re the first person who ever noticed that it’s the same name. :slight_smile:

Anyway.

I played interactive fiction when it was just called a “computer game” or “text adventure”. I had Zork on my trusty TRS-80 Model III, which got me hooked. Some other early titles I played included a game called Bedlam in which you had to escape from a sanitarium, and Quest for Fire (you can probably guess the plot of that one). There was also some sort of Dungeons & Dragons game I recall – more of an RPG really – that was written (I think) in BASIC. I don’t remember much about it at all, other than the two-handed sword was called a THS, and there was a dragon that kept killing me.

I played a lot of the Infocom titles, and wish that I would have saved the original packaging that I used to have with all of them. I was an avid reader as a young-un, so I stuck with text adventures even as computers became more graphics-oriented (though I am also a fan of the early Sierra games).

I discovered the underground modern-day IF community via usenet about 10 years ago, and briefly re-entered the scene as a player. I, at that time, had delusions of authorship… but eventually got bogged down with Real Life ™ and never got around to it.

Somewhere in a game, I am going to put a Round Tuitt.

Anyway again.

I hate to call something a New Year’s Resolution, so let’s just not call it that. One of my goals for this year is to do more writing – I did some in college, even got a paycheck as a freelancer for a while, but never did much else with it into grad school and beyond.

Now, with a family and a real job, I suppose I’m looking back and not wanting to let the many hours I spent hunched over a keyboard go. So as an extension of my goal to do more writing, I returned to the idea of writing text adventure games.

My day job is a network administrator; I know enough about programming to be dangerous (I sometimes call myself a “street coder”, since I haven’t had a lot of formal schooling)… so something like TADS or Inform is right up my alley.

If anyone is still reading this blathering, I will mercifully sum up. I am intending to learn TADS and start writing some text adventures (it’s still hard for me to call it “interactive fiction”). I’ve been doing some reading and writing in the r*i-f newsgroups, and I’ve got a blog dedicated to my learning that the desperate amongst you can find here: mirrorshades.at.preempted.net/wordpress/

Thanks for listening. Please don’t tell me if you haven’t been.

Hope to see you all around.

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Good to see you on the forum, Chris.

Never got around to posting in this thread either; so as for myself, I’ve been playing text games such as muds since college. Long ago, in lieu of doing our grammar school work, we would play the text games available on the school computer (Zork and The Hobbit) and write games in BASIC. But I didn’t know about IF until about a year ago; I don’t remember the exact circumstances but you know how late night googling can turn things up.

I’m a carpenter by trade so I think playing and attempting to write IF feeds some other part of my brain that isn’t satisfied by working with my hands.

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Ah, you must be the same George who read my blog. :slight_smile:

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Speaking of your blog, Chris, where is it? I was looking forward to a nice r*if digest when you mentioned it, but the link seems to be broken.

Hello, everyone. My name is Skye Nathaniel Schiefer; I am 24 years old and have spent most of my life in New Jersey (USA), though not by my choosing. I have a well-credentialed BA in Philosophy (of Religion, as opposed to of Logic), and a very impressive, grossly unfocused resume that could only serve to open unappealing doors. It’s been about two years since I graduated, and I’ve probably spent a little more of that time out of work than in it, stretching that post-collegiate “I-got-a-philosophy-degree” limbo state as long as possible among brief fits and starts of employment, in spite of the pressures applied by my creditors. Read between the lines, people: I LIVE AT HOME WITH MY MOMMY AND DADDY.

My interests, aspirations, and unfinished projects include a long essay interpreting Jason Molina’s music as a kind of philosophy of the blues, a screenplay and storyboard for an original film, a book outlining my scientific interpretation of the universe as a series of self-abstractions in which human society and technology represents the latest redefinition of the natural, a neverending stream of frustration with the oligarchical financial foundations of American democracy and the weakness of the United Nations as an international governmental body in a young global age, the occassional intricate, narrative mix cd, a couple of original videogame designs, and generally being an awesome and brilliant fellow.

My background regarding interactive media lies mostly in the realm of videogames such as (to name a few favorites and important influences) Ico, Earthbound, Silent Hill, Silent Hill 2, Super Metroid, Half-Life 2, Uplink, and Metal Gear Solid 3. I’ve spent the past few years analyzing such works among a forum-based community that does not shy from theoretical debate, and I take interactive media in general seriously a priori as an emerging set of formats whose fundamental designer/player joint authorship presents a new direction for artistic expression that is of ever greater central importance and contemporary relevance. As implied by this feeling, I basically consider interactive fiction to be the future of literature. I told you I was an awesome guy!

Although I am certain I was exposed to the text adventures of the '80s, I honestly remember the likes of TutorDOS more clearly than any games of that time. I was more involved with my Texas Instruments and Commodore 64 than the young personal computers available then. However, when graphic adventures became common, I played Sierra and LucasArts titles prolifically even during the golden years of the SNES. I never became involved in the modern IF community, whether or not I was aware of its existence or size. Then, last year, a member of the videogame forum I mentioned posted something of an announcement about Inform7. We all became very excited, and several members of the community authored their own titles to test the language for themselves (for example). Since then, I have habitually loaded up the I7 homepage just to browse through it for the umpteenth time and dwell upon the implications of a natural language development system’s existence.

About a month ago, something grabbed hold of me and I wildly explored every nook of the modern IF community, browsing, researching, and learning everything I could about the medium. I made an extensive, carefully selected and organized compilation cd including everything from a z-code implementation of Eliza from 1966 to the four Spring Thing 2007 entrants, as well as a library of mini-competitions and projects, documentation such as historical and theoretical papers, abuses and oddities, and installation files for interpreters. I also wrote a .txt file introducing the compilation and providing a basic overview and instructions. Really, the whole thing got started because I wanted to introduce my friend to IF, and somewhere along the line I became obsessive and took the project as far as possible. Unfortunately, it’s not something I can offer to distribute in any way since it includes z-code versions of all the Infocom titles, which Activision has not yet abandoned. Anyway, after I got done with this, I just sort of kept going, continuing to read about IF far more than actually reading IF, mostly because I am so impressed by the depth and sophistication of the IF community and want to soak it all in.

So I have a huge amount of IF lined up to read. Once I have – once I’ve seen how experienced authors have tackled certain prickly design problems, and once I’ve been generally inspired and blown away by everything and seen what I’m up against – I have no doubt that I’ll eventually write my own piece with I7. After all, I found all of this because of my lasting excitement for I7, so becoming an Inform author myself will be a wonderful bit of full circle closure as well as the start of a whole new adventure. In the meantime, I hope to talk about theory and design a great deal with you fine folks. I’m looking forward to it!

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Hello, my name is Chephren Mansley, and I’m from the uk. I’m a 21 year old student, and I’ve been interested in IF since about 2000. My interest in the IF scene has drifted in and out, but always seems to return, I’ve started a few games over the years, and never really got anywhere, still, I’m optimistic at some time I will suceed in creating something. I joined these boards, because I felt a sudden desire to discuss IF, or at least to distract myself in a whole new way.

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Hello,

I’m a long time lurker of the IF community and have recently decided to actually take part, particularly now when 2 new robust authoring systems are evolving out of beta. I’ve also signed into www.ifwiki.org and hope to help fill in empty pages as penance for my long term silence. :slight_smile:

I really like the idea of a moderated set of forums beyond the looseness of the rec.arts groups. Just needs more traffic here. :wink:

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Hello,

My name is Ben, 24, I’m from Slovenia. I’m a student of electrical engineering (about to graduate) with too much time on my hands, and Interactive Fiction has been one of my main hobbies for quite a few years. I also love music (playing and listening to), hiking, and Steel Panthers: World at War. 8)

My very first taste of IF was a hilarious Legend’s masterpiece called “Eric The Unready”. I still think this is one of the best (and funniest) games ever made, and I can’t possibly recommend it enough. :laughing: I played some other Legend games as well (especially both “Gateways” and the “Spellcasting” series - which I still believe Harry Potter is based upon 8O), and some modern titles (though I’m afraid I have lots of catching-up to do in this area).

Since I also love to write, it wasn’t long before I started to fiddle around with Inform 6, trying to create a game of my own. So my first “exercise” in designing IF was a recreation of a certain act from “The Dig”, a graphical game by Lucas Arts, and to my surprise it actually came out quite well.

However, I realize that I will never be able to write a truly solid game; it’s the language that’s causing the problem. :cry: Though I have the general grasp of English, which is good enough for everyday chat on forums and such, it’s not nearly enough for what is required from an IF author. I’ll never be able to express myself quite as well in English as I can in my own language, Slovene.

So at the moment I seem to be on a special quest: I’m desperately trying to wake up (or create from nothing, for that matter) our own, Slovene IF community. In my country, the IF medium seems to be completely overlooked, which is just sad. :frowning: So last October I even made a translation of Inform 6 libraries to Slovene (if anyone’s interested, they’re located here: http://sloif.freehost386.com), and now I’m trying to recruit some other enthusiasts like me to actually write some Slovenian games. So far, I haven’t had much luck, but I’m not willing to give up just yet. :wink:

Anyway, so far I really like these forums and I think I’ll spend quite some time here in the future. Cheers!

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