The Interactive Fiction Club Group and Podcast

General Events
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Interactive Fiction Club, a group dedicated to the playing, appreciation and discussion of all things Text Adventure and Interactive Fiction. Each month, we select a title to play, rotating between a classic Text Adventure and a more modern Interactive Fiction in hopes of being able to better understand and enjoy the broad spectrum of the medium of text-based games.

The desire to dive deep into the medium started almost two years ago when a dear friend of mine had to stay with my family for an extended period of time. Their experience with games was incredibly limited and casual, but they brought up a desire to try and a text adventure; more specifically the original Zork. I was ecstatic and we streamed out journey as we went through Zork with almost no experience in the game (I will admit I knew about the one puzzle that was very elusive, being the egg puzzle.) He was at the helm entering commands and exploring and I was set to mapping the game. From there on out we were hooked and started whittling away at the entire Infocom library chronologically.

We were at the time doing a podcast where we discussed books set in video game franchises and doing bonus episodes where we talked about the games, but later decided the games needed to have their own place to shine and thus, the Interactive Fiction Club was born.

We typically stream out play sessions online every Saturday night at 9 PM EDT on my personal Twitch page

If anyone is interested in participating in the club, we have a discord dedicated to the group with archived discussions of the previous months and want to stress that it is an absolutely stress-free, no-gatekeeping experience welcoming to everyone of all play styles and skill level. It is far more about supporting folks and encouraging them by sharing perspective and tips in better ways to engage in the software.

If Discord is not your thing, I also engage a lot with Mastodon under the hashtag #ifclub

We ALSO do a podcast with Nick, any other participants who want to discuss the game and myself for each of the months games.

Here are the games we have previously covered

December: Planetfall
January: What Heart Heard of, Ghost Guessed
February: Frederik Pohl’s Gateway
(Took a month off because of life)
April: Counterfeit Monkey

The Current Game: Tass Times in Tonetown

Here are all the links if you are interested in participating in the club

Interactive Fiction Club Discord

Interactive Fiction Club Podcast (It includes an RSS feed for those that do not want to support Spotify, which currently acquired the platform I was using for hosting.)

Mastadon - And feel free to use the IFClub hashtag to make conversation easier to follow

Twitch Streams - every Saturday at 9 PM EDT (typically)

And I also welcome folks to use this space if they so choose to talk about the game if they want to participate!

I really appreciate your time in reading this and you are more than welcome to join in at any time through any means you are comfortable. I love to hear folks perspective and enthusiasm more than anything and that is the major impetus for organizing this group!

To Humor!

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This is my absolute favorite IF game ever! You are in for such a treat with this. I wish someone would neurolyze me so I could play it for the first time again.

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I am SO EXCITED to play through it! My experience with more modern IF is incredibly limited, so I really wanted to use the club as an opportunity to push myself to experience newer stuff which I have absolutely enjoyed thus far!

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tass

In memory of Michael Berlyn, who passed away just last month, I wanted to dedicate this month to one of his games. I wanted to take the time to recognize his work on the lesser known of his titles with a graphical text adventure that embodies the visual and literary aesthetic of its title. For the month of May, the Interactive Fiction club is going to be playing Tass Times in Tonetown, which was published in 1986 by Activision, written and designed by Michael Berlyn and his wife, Muffy McClung Berlyn and programmed by Rebecca Heineman. I hope folks can join in and spread some love to the Berlyn family and bring the tass vibes to the month of May.

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I’m here to share that the Interactive Fiction Club is back in action, playing The Legend Lives! during the month of August. @P-Tux7 has written up a blurb:

The Legend Lives! (1994): The grand finale of the Unnkulia series, one of the first big games to come out of TADS ever since the TADS author’s example games. (And, before you ask, the TADS parser is just as good as the Inform parser even at this early date.) The game takes place in a planet-warping future far after the events of the other Unnkulia games (in the same way that Wishbringer and Return to Zork take place in the modern day,) and requires no prior Unnkulia experience, but it doesn’t take long for the magic of the ancient Unnkulian Empire to rear its ugly head again. In a novel - some would say literary - twist, the game pioneers the use of comedic footnotes - whenever the game text displays a symbol like [X], you can type FOOTNOTE X to get a fourth-wall-breaking footnote about what you just read, which, like the Guide, helps contextualize the game world. The humor is more Space Questy than Douglas Adamsian, but I found the way that future society permeates every area of the game to be a particular highlight.

We’ll be discussing it as we play on the club’s Discord server!

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If anyone is hesitant about playing TLL, it is halfway through the month and I’ve already completed the game.

Here is a spoilered list of all 9 ways that Tabitha and I found to softlock the game. This list is also credit to @David_Welbourn 's notes about the game in order to determine which items are strictly necessary or not in certain locations. I would personally rate 1, 5, 8, and 9 as Tough, 2, 3 and 4 as Nasty, and 6 and 7 as Cruel.

1. You have left the Barfee research lab without transmogrifying the two items you need (prune seeds and liquid nitrogen,) and without pressing the button on the matter mover so you can use your autodialer to warp back to it. However, you can skip the second step if you got the two correct items the first time around.
2. If you use the bike in the Terminal Velocity bar to warp to the future, and you don’t have the hammer and liquid nitrogen needed to obtain the HandyPad from the locked chest before you warp back to the present, you won’t get a second chance, as the bike’s owner will padlock it.
3. If you transmogrify an essential item before you have used it for its necessary purpose, your game is forfeit. A list of items that are essential and can be transmogrified before being used includes the bedzyl, your thesis disk, the revolt-a-kola, the hammer, the synthegg, the real egg, the fried synthegg, the fried real egg, the eggplant seeds, the frying pan, your Terminal Velocity elite passcard, the HandyPad, the ary ung, the jade figurine, the Wundur Gro, the thermos of Growth Formula, the akmid, the string, the firecracker, Squirt, the metal coat hanger, the olive drab uniform, the detachable keyboard, and the mirror. I’m not sure if transmogrifying your autodialer forfeits your game, but to continue playing without it would be an arduous task indeed.
4. Similar to the above, if you convert any essential item besides the fried real egg and the jade figurine (which you are supposed to) using the Matter-to-Digital Converter and place it in the Unnkulian Unventure III game world on your thesis disk before you have exhausted its use, your game is forfeit, because then you won’t be able to use it in the real world.
5. Get Squirt to emit sparks and light the firecracker by yelling while it holds the firecracker, in any place except by the fuse in the Akmi HQ ducts, which will exhaust the firecracker before you are supposed to use it to light the fuse. This action gives you an uncharacteristically-friendly marker of failure by deducting a point from your score.
6. If you enter the escape pod to go to Irata before you have the required items (the bedzyl, the fried synthegg, and the ary ung) to finish that part of the game and reach the matter mover to get back to the rest of the game, you’re stuck on Irata.
7. If you QUIT from the Unnkulian Unventure III game-within-a-game after having already used the real fried egg and/or the jade figurine within the game, you’ll enter back into the game and it will restart, but without the necessary two items that you need to complete it. I’m not sure if they are intended to not respawn, but it will ruin your game either way.
8. Eat the fried synth egg or fried real egg yourself, or feed them to the dog on Foon. They are required to be fed to people other than you and the dog, not to mention that you don’t have a hunger or thirst timer anyways, with the only necessary item to consume being the revolt-a-kola.
9. Drink the revolt-a-kola and let its temporary effect wear off before you’ve used your temporarily-heightened reflexes for the necessary purpose of catching the bedzyl.

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Goodness, I’d quite forgotten about those notes.Those notes are so, uh, rustic compared to my current standards. I’m glad you were able to get any use from them.

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October’s game has finally started - ⁠The Bat by Chandler Groover. This is a great time to play one of the most acclaimed parser games of last month’s IFComp by the author of Eat Me , Toby’s Nose , and Midnight Swordfight if you haven’t yet. This game is projected by the author to take 2 hours to play through, meaning that it’s a great way to get back into the club even if you don’t have much free time.

You can discuss your experience with us on the Discord server.

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I son’t have permission to edit the main post, so I will just post it here.

For the past 3 games (Tass Times in Tonetown, The Legend Lives, The Bat) we aren’t doing any streams or podcasts anymore. All we do is talk on Discord about our experience with the game and ask for hints. I think it works much better this way as you can work through the game at your own pace, like a normal book club. This also means that you can feel free to have emotional reactions and goof-ups while playing the games without worrying about the forum or public seeing them.

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This is lovely. I’ve been searching for new podcasts!