Upcoming BBC Radio 4 programme about interactive fiction

This hour-long programme is coming up on Saturday 27th February at 8pm GMT. It should be listenable to online afterwards. BBC TV programmes can only be viewed online in the UK, but radio programmes are unrestricted.

Quoting from the blurb:

For more details see here. Which should also have a link to the online iPlayer version of the programme after it airs.

Neat! Thanks!

Whew, they don’t geoblock their archives. I hate having to falsify my geo.

-Wade

That blurb makes me wary. They seem to heavily conflate IF with CYOA with gamebooks, in a time when, unlike today, they were more clearly distinct from one another.

Still, any media coverage on IF, in whatever shape, is always a great thing, so…

COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS
You have 69,105 blessings.

Amusing to know that IF is now a ‘cult literary form’ :stuck_out_tongue:

Thank you for the heads up! Made myself a note to watch when it goes up online.

At last, I can add ‘cultist’ to my business card!

Bumping this thread because the programme was broadcast tonight and can be listened to online - follow the link in the original post. It should be playable worldwide.

As I was listening to it I had some concerns part way through that it was going to skip text adventures, in particular the significant 1980s Infocom era. But it spent a lot of time on those, and Douglas Adams, as well as earlier 1970s text adventures, and more recent IF experimentation and developments, including Twine. Emily Short contributed to this part of the programme, though I felt it could have been developed more fully than the time allowed.

And I really liked the programme’s discussion of pre 1970 interactive fiction experiments. So much so that I just bought me a copy (inexpensive, phew!) of the 1969 political IF book “State of Emergency: A Programmed Entertainment”. Never heard of it before!

The interactive game version of this programme is out now, but I saved it for posterity. So you can still play and listen.

Hey that’s pretty great. I liked the Oulilo pea story.