Subject: Seeking fellow Infocom fans
The place to share these tools and the games made with them was Usenet. rec.arts.int-fiction was the newsgroup for writers and craft talk, while rec.games.int-fiction was the place to discuss releases and get help as a player. It was a transformative time for IF, especially for those who were seeking fellow fans of the Infocom era.
"It was really fun and cool to be part of folks who remembered these games that seemed to us to have this huge cultural impact and then vanished entirely," said Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation co-founder Jason McIntosh. "So for a while, it felt like we were keeping this flame lit. And that felt very important."
"That period was tremendously formative for my own understanding of how to design and talk about games," Short reflected. "There was a terrific sense of creative community and shared inquiry. You might release a game and have it played only by a handful of people, but those people would often give really detailed and thoughtful feedback on everything from the implementation to the literary themes of the work. Sometimes they’d create their own pieces riffing on or responding to the ideas in yours."Jon Ingold—narrative director and co-founder of Inkle Studios, which made 80 Days and Steve Jackson's Sorcery!—also recalled the experience of creating games and iterating ideas in a dialogue. "That ping-ponging between developers in a closed environment means that six games later, you get something really incredible," he said.
He also spoke about the special sense of immediacy in games during that era. "In the '90s, when a game came out, you had to play it because it might do something that would blow your mind," Ingold said. "It might completely pivot your idea of what's possible in a game."
While the collective memory of those Usenet days is mostly fond, the reality was never all sunshine and rainbows. Even while acknowledging the positive aspects of artistic development during that era, Short was clear about the problems. "It wasn’t a flawless environment. Usenet was unmoderated, and there was a certain amount of trolling and harassment there," she wrote. "I did have a few unpleasant experiences with that culture."
McIntosh didn't put so fine a point on it. "We were all assholes. We were just a bunch of young punks, and we would flame each other, and we were mean," he said.
Community via competition in IFComp
The outlook for commercial IF was sinking to a low point during the '90s as "adventure game" started to mean titles like King's Quest and Monkey Island rather than text-only. But people in the IF newsgroups were on the brink of two important events that changed the outlook for the better within their community.
In 1995, the writing IF newsgroup started talking about holding a competition for shorter games. From out of the rambling discussion, Kevin Wilson was the person who picked up the torch. “There had been some conversation on rec.arts.int-fiction about a competition of some sort for a while, but it hadn't really gone much of anywhere," Wilson told me via email. "I was fairly involved in the scene at the time, so I finally just kind of announced one, set some basic rules and a deadline, and off we went.”
The event was dubbed IFComp, and the response far surpassed Wilson's expectations. It became an annual fixture, and multiple people have since helmed the event, including Jason McIntosh. After McIntosh took over IFComp in 2014, he oversaw the event's transition to welcome hypertext entries as part of the IF canon officially. He and the event's recent leadership have emphasized that the competition be a snapshot of IF's current state. "We let the community drive what shape this wants to be," McIntosh explained. "[IFComp] is an annual community expression."
And it continues to play that role, entering its 29th year this summer.
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