February 27, 2004
“Magic Words,” XYZZY
The current lead article on gaming site 1up is about interactive fiction, and it includes an excellent set of interiews with Emily Short, Stephen Granade, Andrew Plotkin, Adam Cadre, and 2003 IF Comp winners Daniel Ravipinto and Star Foster. (Although there are many good bits apart from the interviews, the IF history part of the article, at the beginning, is cribbed from Graham Nelson’s brief history in the Inform Designer’s Manual — as stated in the article — and it’s better to just read Nelson’s history if you’re looking for brief background. The names of both Thomas M. Disch and Robert Pinsky are wrong in the article, too.) The article is by Andrew Vestal and Nich Maragos; 1up is a ZiffDavis joint.
And it’s just in time for the annual XYZZY awards, which will take place on ifMUD this Saturday at 1:30pm Eastern Time. Hope you can make it!
Update: Slashdot Games (and the Uber-Slashdot) picked this up a bit before my post, I just noticed.
Further Update: Slouching Towards Bedlam took top honors today. I was in lost in New York and without a wireless signal (>WAVE iBOOK didn’t work) but fortunately for me, and anyone else who missed the XYZZYs, Stephen Granade has provided a list of winners and transcript of the event. (The links to the transcript are at the bottom.)
Even Further Update: The transcript is available all as one huge file at XYZZY News. Also, the interview with Daniel Ravipinto and Star Foster is great, but be warned that it includes big hunking spoilers for Slouching Towards Bedlam, which is even greater – you should play it first.
February 27th, 2004 at 11:03 am
The lengthy list of Slashdot Games reader comments begin with mostly ranting and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure reminiscing, but eventually gets to a discussion on the use of the term IF and examples of motivation behind “why write IF?”, including posts by several of the writers profiled in the original article.