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!
