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!
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Oh man, Lists and Lists is fun. I was kinda bummed it was over so soon. Perfect for people who enjoy reading SICP or Little Schemer.
I’ll have to try the rest now.
Edit: Most or all of these seem to be written in Inform (specifically Inform 6), a rather curious DSL intended specifically for text adventure games. Here is a fun writeup about misusing its successor language Inform 7 for something it wasn’t really intended for.
The Technical Interview series is my favourite bit of programming fiction ever.
Lists and Lists is the perfect companion for The Little Schemer — that’s how I learned Lisp! have you ever checked out the other books in the series? The Little Typer is a very cozy book that explains a complex computer science topic (dependent types) in depth without being a slog.
text adventure DSLs are fascinating in general — Infocom’s object-oriented Lisp ZIL was the first, and shares some interesting similarities with Inform because both were designed to drive Infocom’s Z-machine, an incredibly specialized virtual machine (with virtual memory, natural language processing, and specialized data structures for large game worlds built in) that let Infocom do impossible stuff on (multiple) 80s home computers. both languages also have massive standard libraries which feature standard game objects and physics rules, along with a bunch of other stuff that comes in handy for text adventures. I’ve always wanted to learn more Inform 7 (which Plotkin had some influence on during the design stage, and which I believe he uses for all his new IF); programming in it feels a lot like a combination between Prolog and the kind of natural language processor you use to play interactive fiction, but it compiles down to and has a high level of compatibility with Inform 6
