I’m home sick with a bad cold this weekend, so I’ve been spending the better part of my day relaxing at my desk and playing a few selected games from the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. Though I have played IF games before, this actually happens to be my first time ever voting in this comp, so I’m not always sure what I should be expecting in a good entry. I’m hoping I’ll still be able to judge the games somewhat reasonably, nevertheless.

See, the thing is, while I started playing computer games reasonably early for someone my age, I wasn’t really around for Infocom and other commercial text adventures. Hell, I wasn’t really around for the early Sierra games that still used text parsers, either. I fell into the genre rather late, once the “verb coin” interfaces from Full Throttle and Curse of Monkey Island became the defacto standard. As such, the text parser interface in adventure games has been something I’ve never had any particular nostalgia for, resulting in me dismissing it as obsolete and unnecessarily difficult to learn. [1]

Of course, what happened in the meantime was this: a community of amateurs sprung up, created IF engines that improved heavily on the annoying guess-the-verb problems of their commercial predecessors, and simultaneously produced games aspiring to a much higher narrative quality than said predecessors. They started doing the whole “interactive stories, not just games” thing long before I’d ever thought that such a thing could ever exist. In fact, it was when I first started playing IF that I came up with the idea of doing the same in my own work.

At first, the text parser was something I slogged through in order to get to “the good stuff”, that is to say, the writing. [2] These days, I’m surprised to find the parser growing on me. A funny artifact of my extensive experience in graphic adventures is me typing commands like “use key on door” into IF games, only to have them tell me to do something more specific, such as “unlock door” or “scratch door with key”. Most IF enthusiasts find the latter far more intuitive and interesting, allowing for far more creativity in puzzles and possible actions to explore, and I’m starting to see their point. I’m hesitant to refer to this as “better”, though, because I’m still a huge fan of minimalistic user interfaces. It certainly is refreshingly different, though.

Granted, it’s not like the IFComp entries don’t suffer from guess-the-verb problems from time to time, but when they do, they’re highly criticised by players. It may be that I just haven’t seen a large-enough subset of IF enthusiasts to judge, but I’m seeing a lack of the same nostalgia-fueled apologist views I often read at Adventure Gamers, where certain people routinely regard implementation flaws as an essential part of the genre. Either way, I’m absolutely thrilled to see such attention to quality and usability from the IFComp judges. It almost makes me want to write an IFComp entry myself, just to see how I measure up. Maybe next year, if I can think of something decent.