November 18, 2003

The IF Comp is Over — Long Live IF!

by Nick Montfort · , 5:58 pm

The results are in from the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition! The collaborative work Slouching Towards Bedlam by Star Foster and Daniel Ravipinto took top honors. In second place was Michael Coyne’s Risorgimento Represso, then Quintin Stone’s Scavenger, then Daniel Freas’s The Erudition Chamber, and then Aaron A. Reed ‘s Gourmet. And many of the 25 other entries are worth playing. For those who didn’t get to play during the Comp, you can still download all the games in one file.

What is there to do after finishing the comp games and reading the slew of thoughtful reviews, for instance, the ones by Dan Shiovitz, or those by many others that have posted on rec.games.int-fiction? Well, you might want to try matching these 30 drawings each to one of the IF Comp entries (this topical art is by XYZZY award winner J. Robinson Wheeler).

Or you could always read Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. It has just been published — I haven’t gotten a copy myself yet, but I got a note from MIT Press about it today.

4 Responses to “The IF Comp is Over — Long Live IF!”


  1. andrew Says:

    Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. It has just been published

    Let me be the first on grandtextauto to congratulate you! It looks like quite an achievement, and quite a contribution to the field. I’m ordering my copy tonight, very much looking forward to reading it. I’m curious, how long has this production taken you? When did you start?

  2. nick Says:

    Thanks, Andrew. I proposed the book to MIT Press in 2000, and I had some of it drafted at that point. My work on the book wrapped up a while ago – it was MIT Press that has been working on it over the past few months – but I suppose it took about three years from start to finish. I’ll be very glad to see it!

  3. Jill Says:

    Congratulations, Nick!

    :)

  4. Better Than Edlin Says:
    Grand Text Auto
    Very cool. I just discovered a blog called “Grand Text Auto” that is about, at least in part, Interactive Fiction (IF). I intend to make this part of my regular reading regimen. I found them because I decided to ask…

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