I would NEVER. Kittens are too small.
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Youāre right. Keep 'em in a cage for a while to fatten 'em up first.
(cackling optional)
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I was quite the fan of Eragon back in the day (I guess deep inside me I still am? I do still have the books displayed on my shelfā¦) and although I was already familiar with interactive fictions, I remember being a bit excited when discovered that game.
But as far as I can recall it wasnāt really good. 
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No, it definitely felt like someoneās first experiment with Inform. Which, to be fair, it probably was.
But everyone has to start somewhere!
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Sameā¦there may or may not exist a ridiculous amount of doodles in old notebooks of mine attempting to depict Arya. As for the parser, my memories are a little fuzzy but I agree it was a bit rough to play. I recall spending a fair amount of time collecting lichen and powdery mushrooms.
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Hello! My name is Leon. When I was a kid I was a fan of Infocomās games. The first one I ever played was Zork on my friendās C64. Later, when my parents got a computer, I got a couple of Infocom games of my own. In particular I really liked Wishbringer (the first work of IF I successfully completed), Starcross, and Beyond Zork.
I was also a big fan of the Choose Your Own Adventure books (it was the 80ās!). Most of the ones I read I checked out from the library but I bought a few such as Trouble on Planet Earth and War with the Evil Power Master (theyāre probably still somewhere in my parentsā home). I read books from some other series as well like Which Way and Time Machine. I even owned two of the Zork gamebooks by Steve Meretzky.
In the 90ās I discovered the modern interactive fiction scene. My involvement with the community was brief, but I did submit entries to the first and second IFComps. I had some ideas about writing an IF RPG in the vein of Quarterstaff and made attempts in TADS 2 and 3 but not much came of them. I moved on afterwards to other things, including a career in software development. Currently Iām working on software for embedded systems.
I became aware in the 2010ās that choice games had become a big part of interactive fiction, so I downloaded Twine a few years ago and experimented with it, but released nothing publicly. Still, after such a long hiatus I wanted to get some work out there, so Iāve submitted an intent to enter this yearās Spring Thing with a short piece in Twine. After over twenty years, I have a lot of catching up to do, and I hope I can contribute to this community!
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Welcome Leon!
Kissing the Buddhaās Feet has been on my to-play stack for ages. Thanks for the reminder.
I hope you have fun with Spring Thing. Itās a very laid back and welcoming Comp.
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I remember enjoying āThe One That Got Awayā!
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Hi!
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Thanks, Iām looking forward to the competition!
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Thanks, Iām glad you enjoyed it!
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Hello! Itās great to see a familiar name from the old days!
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Hi all
Iām from italy, and I grew up with Mazinga, Goldrake and high doses of C64. And i loved all the Interactive Fictions i could play back then (when they were called Text Adventuresā¦too bad i was too young to really understand the value of those games, i just enjoyed them)
Now that Iām older, iāve started a MS Access Database trying to record and to collect all the Graphic and Text Adventures that i can find (only for PC though)
And while at the very beginning i thought it would be a not so easy project, i now can tell that itās an almost impossible project, but interesting and sometimes rewarding (especially when finding old games using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine)
And thatās all for my presentation
A big thanks to all of you that still bring on these fantastic art of noveling
T.
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Yes! It can be such a great moment when you dig up an old and obscure game from the depths of the internet.
Welcome to the Forum!
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Since Iāve been around for a bit, might as well introduce myself. Hi there. Iāve been playing IF since I was a kid. Was fiddling around on the iPad looking for free games and saw The Dreamhold, which got me into the wider world of interactive fiction. Iāve always liked niche webfiction, and IF definitely qualifies. My interest comes and goes, been getting more into it since last year, when I had a lot of free time and caught myself thinking of various games I could make to fill it. I also like writing and IF seems to be a decent way to share writing with an audience. Crossing my fingers for Spring Thing. Not sure how active Iāll be, I have a tendency to lurk.
I prefer to stay somewhat anonymous online. That said, I made a website a few months ago and from that you can probably guess everything important about me, so check it out if you want my deranged reading list. And feel free to judge me for my media choices or ask me questions like āwhy do you have this on your shills list it sucksā (or send me recommendations, I love recommendations).
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Not a judgment or a recommendation, just an open invitation to discuss Brian Boydās conspiracy theories at any time. They are very fun to read, chew up like bubblegum, and then run with until they pop under duress from one direction or another.
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That sounds like an excuse to ramble about Pale Fire and Iāll take any excuse to ramble about Pale Fire I can get, so sure thing. I hope you werenāt expecting actual conspiracy theories, these are moreā¦ epileptic trees fantheories. Like āAsh from the Pokemon anime was in a coma all alongā but the literary equivalent.
This turned out much longer than I expected, so I'll hide it under the cut.
Pale Fire is one of my favorite novels because of how bizarre it is and how many even more bizarre academic articles have been written about it. Itās nuts. It might also be an early precursor to interactive fiction if you squint. (Actually, while I was looking stuff up for this post I discovered many articles have been written about Pale Fire as an early example of hypertext, because as I get to later, academics have milked Pale Fire to death and every single aspect of it is probably captured in an essay somewhere.)
So, the concept of the novel is this famous poet John Shade dies, and his āfriendā and fellow university professor Charles Kinbote takes it upon himself to generously publish the manuscript of the last poem Shade wrote before his death, his 999-line autobiographical magnum opus. The in-universe Pale Fire is Kinboteās critical edition of Shadeās poem, complete with Kinboteās commentary. Except his commentary is long. Pages upon pages of footnotes, with footnotes linking to other footnotes linking to other footnotes, and as you read you start realizing that not all the footnotes may be relevant to the poem, and not all the footnotes may be true, and Kinbote may have quite a fewā¦ issues, to put it lightly. Itās basically a more realistic version of House of Leaves (Iām also not a fan of House of Leaves, thought it was boring, but Pale Fire does the footnote labyrinth gimmick much better in my opinion). Itās about death, art, becoming obsessed with art, and socially malajusted people who are forced to turn to fantasy having nothing else to turn toāor maybe Iām projecting because itās so metafictional that it could be about any number of things. You can read the novel in any order, like starting with the poem and reading all the footnotes after, or following footnotes from one to another in a chain as they come up, or reading one part of the poem and then reading the footnotes for that part and then reading the next part, and so on. And depending on how you read it you could end up with any number of interpretations about what actually happens in the story and what itās about. Basically if youāve ever looked into those videogames that get popular on Youtube for having ādeep loreā thatās obscure, obtuse, and just begs for a two-hour video essay a Youtuber can milk for millions of views, this is the literary equivalent of that.
And academics have milked it for all itās worth. One of the reasons I like Pale Fire so much is because the academic discourse around it is insane. Iām not in English academia and the most I do is browsing articles on JSTOR when bored, but the Pale Fire JSTOR articles are something to behold. There was a huge debate over who the actual narrator of Pale Fire is: people who think Shade is a fictional character invented by Kinbote are called āKinboteansā and people who think Kinbote is a fictional character invented by Shade are called āShadeansā. Iām not making this up. Thereās also a hidden dude named V. Botkin, who is mentioned about two or three times in the entire book but might be Kinboteās actual identity and the guy who created both Shade and Kinbote.
Brian Boyd, a literary scholar whose career is based in Nabokov studies (Vladimir Nabokovās the author, in case youāre reading this and didnāt see my reading list), wrote a really long book analyzing Pale Fire and the various theories about the characters, called Nabokovās Pale Fire - The Magic of Artistic Discovery. (You can find it on JSTOR, though youāll need some kind of access to read it.) Itās not as dull as it sounds! Boyd started off as a Shadean, but in this book he explains that he no longer believes this theory and has instead developed his own unique theory: that after his death, Shadeās ghost (along with the ghost of his daughter Hazel) subliminally inspires Kinbote from the afterlife, compelling him to create Pale Fire the book as a continuation of Shadeās masterpiece from beyond the grave. Additionally, though itās never hinted at in the book itself, Nabokov has suggested that Kinbote kills himself after he finishes writing the critical commentary. Boyd tied that into his theory as well by suggesting that Kinboteās ghost can reunite with John and Hazel Shade within death, as a kind of happy ending that doesnāt exist in the book itself. I think this theory is bunk, by the way, but itās deranged in an interesting way. The book has spawned so many articles like this, where because the story itself is so open-ended you can spend ages debating the specifics and coming up with hyper-specific fan theories.
Hereās one of my favorites, comparing Pale Fire to (of all things) the original Super Mario Bros, complete with stilted explanations of videogame terms like āLetās Playā, āglitchā, and āwarpā meant for tech-unsavvy English professors. I like this one because if youāve actually read the novel, everything he says comes across as a desperate reach much like Kinboteās commentary itself, and also itās funny. Excerpts:
- āIf Kinboteās project is, as I have argued, akin to that of a programmer patching buggy code, then [Brian Boyd] is a playtester, seeking out the bugs that remain, the errors that cannot be patched over.ā
- āMany critics have documented, sometimes exhaustively, their actual process of gonig through the bookāa form of captured experience referred to in videogame criticism as a āLetās Playā (or LP).ā
And hereās another one of my favorites, where someone goes through the book and uses a smorgasbord of chess references, literary references, and numerology to argue that the ācrown jewelsā of the kingdom Zembla, which reoccurs in Kinboteās ramblings, are secretly hidden within the book and can be found as a little crown icon Nabokov drew on the title page of an early printerās proof. This is the same logic that people use to argue the Great Pyramids were built by aliens. Iām not sure if this guy is right or not, but the sheer effort he goes to just to find the answer is hilarious.
- 'The possibility that a chess-like game is being set up in the Index recalls the author Franklin Laneās middle name, which appears in the Index . . . āKnight.ā Nabokov often describes the chess knight in metaphoric terms, describing in Pale Fire āthe fanning out of additional squares which a chess knight (that skip-space piece), standing on a marginal file, āfeelsā in phantom extensions beyond the board.ā If we combine the two double-italicized clues that allow us to skip between the Commentary and the Index, that is, the terms āLettersā and ā810,ā we get the composite notion of ā810 Letters.ā If we then take the trouble to count 810 alphabetical letters beyond the ā810ā in the Franklin Lane entry, we start with the āLā in āLassā and arrive at the āwā in the word āworthyā in the Odevalla entry: āworthy Zule (āchessrookā) Bretwit, granduncle of Oswin Bretwit (q.v., q.v., as the crows say).ā ā
Anyway, yeah. I wrote a lot more than I intended to, hopefully someone finds it interesting.
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LOL this is my new fave way to describe them. At a certain point in my life I was one of the English academics wringing out analysis and authorial intent debates from every line of Nabokov, and I kind of wish I could reenter that world for just one second, to sneak in some 
zest . Gotta spice up the journals, you know? I focused more on translation and affect theory in regard to language, but my takes never got quite on the Pale Fire level. Donāt ask about my Red Yarn Corkboard Thoughts on Vasiliy Ivanovich in āCloud, Castle, Lakeā
100% agree on the Pale Fire academia discourse being a force of nature, and that Ferguson article you linked has me cackling three lines in. Thereās something about Nabokov academia thatās just so fun to dive into. Pale Fire especially, there are just enough details with few enough pins in them that you can really go wild with it.
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Hi! I go by Juuves on here, though you might also know me as Joocee, Joocy, Jooce from some other sites. Jess is my real name, though any of the listed are fine. Iām a fairly new arrival to the world of interactive fiction. I had my first introduction to IF with games like The Porthecrawl Witness (Book One), by S. M. Ricken, during a recent period in my life where I had way too much free time on my hands and unrestricted access to the Internet (I regret the way too much time and Internet part). My jam nowās mostly settings-focused choice-based games ā I suck at parsers too much to enjoy them and excessively romantic ones, on the other end of the spectrum, tend to turn me off just as well. I love all forms of art, even though Iām not so good at the arts, and I love interactive fiction for how artistic it can get. One days (soon or in the distant, far-off future) Iāll make the IF Iāve always wanted to make, but for now Iāll content myself with reading and lurking and learning. One major reason for this is my habit to procrastinate; the other is that I can write, but I canāt write stories for some reason. But itās okay! Iām here and Iāll continue to learn, continue to improve. Someday weāll get it.
Right, a warning; I have a habit of lurking and appearing and disappearing at the oddest of times, over irregular intervals of days, months, years (though it has never reached up to the years point as of right now). Well, I feed my enthusiasm when I can. Besides the arts I also have a love and curiosity of other cultures and languages. Some of my favorite words: hope and future and verisimilitude.
Well, thatās all for now. Check out my IFDB page if you want (name: Joocee | TUID: u8u4siz34jxgw3x4); I have a list titled Civitas on there, where I curate games with a strong sense of place, namely in the city sense (I also love cities! Hit me up if you ever want to talk about them!) ā updated semi-frequently. Currently in the process of replaying some old games and penning reviews for them ā I want more people to be exposed to them. Hopefully I can get that one done sooner or later.
Thank you so much for reading!
Cheers,
Jess.
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