I remember devouring your blog back when I was first stumbling into interactive fiction and roaming through archives like Emily and Sam’s sites!
I’m glad that it was fun while it lasted for you- and wish you well on whatever adventures the future brings your way.
Thanks, that’s very kind of you to say! At the very least, I plan to keep the blog up indefinitely, even if I’m no longer updating it.
I don’t write interactive fiction, I write text adventures.
Why do I do it? Because I enjoy it. Simple as that. And I hope that I can bring a little joy into someone’s life, even if it’s only for an hour or two.
Because when I was a kid in the early 80s, few things gave me as much joy as discovering “xyzzy”.
I feel similarly – not to imply that those who write primarily for literary or personal reasons are any less worthy. My literary tastes just tend toward the less personal, and my IF tastes lean the same way.
I’m not sure I can answer the general question in the abstract. But I kinda backed my way into making the game I’m currently working on an IF game. Basically I came up with the idea and then worked backwards from there: how do I turn the idea (or rather a couple of related ideas) into a) a design I could actually successfully build, and b) a game that anyone would (hopefully) be willing to play.
Having a bunch of characters and a lot of semi-dynamic dialog is something that very rapidly becomes intractably asset-heavy for almost any other kind of game.
being a teen during the 80s, I can only fully concur and agree with Phil and Garry; but the issue wasn’t kids, but teens. and their frustrations with the sexuality…
Thanks to the Divine, during the 80s the 'Net was unavailable to teens, even in the USA, else the concept of “revenge porn” surfaced 30 years earlier… but teens often lack in constructive assessment of their creativity, and in many cases led to the circulation of roughly-implemented, even seriously bugged, text adventures (Zarf being, as usual, the notable exception 
)
… and is in the respective timeframes that perhaps lie the cause why The Quill is fondly remembered and AGT often reviled; the former was out in the pre-'Net days, and the latter in the early (and very wild…) 'Net days.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I’ve only done it once so far, so I can hardly say just yet if it’s a habit I’ll continue, but I will say that I’m enthusiastic about exploring the forms it can take. There are very few video games that can not be described as interactive fiction, after all: visual novels, JRPGs, even action platformers generally have a story to tell, and one you yourself affect with your playing. The exceptions are truly abstract games like Tetris— and maybe some deeply non-interactive games that could have been novels instead.
Either way, I love telling stories and anything that keeps my readers engaged during the story is a big help!
As a stepping stone.
Even famous authors ponder why they write at all. I’m not one of them, so I don’t have to puzzle that question very much.
For me, it’s because I have something to say, and not much time to say it. What are the economics of telling a story, when you have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay?
Suppose that all the time you have free to create is half-a-dozen hours a week? Can you make a Video Game that way? Or a movie? Most people would say not.
You could start a YouTube channel. Or an Instagram site. Or a Substack blog. Or a Bandcamp account. They sound like the right kind of thing. Except you quickly find out that if you want anyone to notice, you are going to have to live and breathe that platform choice.
So if you are at the limit, you work incrementally, and you work in text.
That’s not necessarily a disadvantage when you have well established Web standards and powerful languages like Python.
If you choose this path, please make sure you publish your software with a copyleft licence. So even if your artistic work falls flat, at least other authors under the same constraints may benefit from your innovations.
Well said. Being retired, I have a lot more time in theory. However, I still get pulled between different activities and obligations.
Copyleft is the way to go. I need to figure out the best implementation to cover my meager works.
Thanks
That’s nice to hear! I have stories in my head that are just waiting to come out. When I write, the stories come out of my head, and into the world for others: to consume, to examine, to experience. That’s why I write.
Speaking of video games and interactive fiction, I have heard that most of Emily Short’s games always end tragically. The second place finish ending of Bee and the ending of Mega Man X, despite both plots having little in common, have you wonder- what are both characters fighting for? Or rather, reflectively, to be more precise.
Sorry, my bad.
I’m pretty sure that’s false! I think a lot have at least mildly upbeat endings.
Yeah, this is me. I first tried as an 11 year-old in the late '80s who liked the IF I’d run into and had always loved to tell my friends improvised CYOAs. My school gave me a British computer magazine with a program I could type that would in theory allow me to go on to make a text adventure. I failed; I’ve never been a programmer, and can’t remember now what language or even what computer that was on.
I consoled myself with D&D for the next couple of decades, plus some book-length non-interactive writing projects. Then I heard that a couple of my college friends had started a company whose main selling proposition was a coding language that was accessible to non-programmer authors. It took me a year or two to get around to trying “Choice of the Dragon”…at which point I immediately devoured the three other games they’d published to date and started writing my own. It was even more satisfying than I’d thought it would be.
I write interactive fiction because it lets me explore multiple ways of seeing a story, or a character, or a world. It’s so much fun to work through the consequences of approaching a particular conflict with violence (discriminate or otherwise), persuasion, bribery, mockery, avoidance… to see how your characters respond differently when you attack them, forgive them, or fail them. You can write a big, rich world that unfolds itself in wildly varying ways to different readers.
Which makes me part of the growing problem of gigantism in Choicescript games. I’ve also always wanted to write an epic fantasy series, and am (maybe ill-advisedly) doing my best to scratch both itches at once. As @mathbrush observed in his IFDB review, Robert Jordan is (like George Martin) a visible influence on my work, and I expect to match Wheel of Time’s word count by the time I’m done (I’m nearly a quarter of the way there). Hopefully the reading experience will be a lot tighter, though, given that most folks will see less than a million of those words on any given readthrough of the whole series…a version of WoT where you can either hit Ebou Dar or Cairhien on your way to the last battle, and don’t have to do both, but know the other one is there if you want it on the reread.
It’s interesting to look back at my answer now! Back then, I was steeling myself for my first round of testing. I think it went badly. I did a poor job explaining what the game was, which led to mismatched expectations. I didn’t know, back then, how well things would turn out. I felt quite discouraged, honestly.
But as I said last year, I always need to be writing something, and the game criticism that I was working on didn’t scratch every itch. I was finding an audience there, and really happy with the work, but I wanted, for lack of a better phrase, the freedom to make stuff up. Having written quite a bit of fiction and poetry, I felt like Inform 7 was a chance to do something completely new. And it was! I couldn’t have told the story of Repeat the Ending in any other medium. I really believe that.
I’m committed to writing one more parser game after the current work in progress. Who knows, after that? In the meantime, it’s very rewarding both mentally and emotionally. I’ll keep at it until that isn’t true anymore (if ever).
Wait a minute! How can a chronologically earlier post be a reply to a later post?? (See VictorGijsbers’ post above)
Hrmm… Joey?
I think that was later edited in (you can click the pencil icon to see edits to a post).
Okay, look, it’s not always my doing…! 
Sometimes it’s @SomeOne2. Actually, it’s usually him. I typically use time travel to slow time for myself; it’s very rare that I change the past, lol.
Alright, sure, ya got me. Now… POOOOF!
Why do I write interactive fiction? For the unlimited access to crack cocaine.
-Wade
