having recently played and refunded a terrible “modern” text adventure, I’ve had the urge to revisit my favorite interactive fiction author, Andrew Plotkin aka Zarf. here’s a selection of recommendations from his long list of works:
- if you’re new to playing interactive fiction (essentially the modernized form of the old Infocom text adventures), check out his tutorial game and guide to IF parser commands
- Spider and Web is an old favorite; it uses the nature of the interactive fiction medium to involve the player in a game of deception
- Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home is a good interactive sci-fi short story
- Shade is an exploration into dreamlike writing and horror
- Lists and Lists is a gamified Lisp tutorial — it’s where I learned the language!
The Technical Interview series is my favourite bit of programming fiction ever.