From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and interactive fiction

Playing in the ifMUD

Around the same time that IFComp was getting off the ground in the mid-'90s, Liza Daly started looking for more ways to connect with her fellow IF fans. She saw the potential benefit of having real-time conversations in addition to the asynchronous dialogues of the Usenet forums. So she turned to a multi-user dungeon, or MUD. These early online experiences were part interactive fiction, part chat room, and part adventure or role-playing game. MUDs were familiar to many of the IF fans of the era, and Daly decided to make one for the scene.

"Because a MUD is sort of an embodied place, it was an opportunity for people who liked writing text adventures to create a text adventure-like shared space that folks could occupy," she told me.

And occupy they did. After Daly created the ifMUD space, it didn't take long for the idea to take off as a popular counterpart to the newsgroups. And while there was plenty of experimentation within the MUD as a piece of communal interactive fiction, Daly's goal of offering real-time connection did come to fruition. "I'm not sure the scene would have been quite as strong if there wasn't some place for folks to make those personal relationships and bring them into the real world," she said.

Over time, IF's online conversations shifted to other platforms, and while ifMUD is technically still around, its heydey has passed. But its role during the late '90s and early 2000s is undeniable. "For a solid 10 years, it was the place that the IF community came together," Daly said.

Both IFComp and ifMUD were the result of a community member seeing an opportunity to strengthen the bonds among this seemingly rag-tag bunch of IF fans. And to both efforts, the rag-tag bunch said, "Yes, please!"

A seismic shift in tech: Ink, Twine, and Inform 7

The interactive fiction story, perhaps fittingly, began to branch in new directions during the late 2000s and early 2010s. After so many years with Inform and TADS as the de facto platforms for creating and reading parser games, the scene started experimenting with new tools and new approaches to storytelling. Chris Klimas launched Twine in 2009. The same year, Dan Fabulich and Adam Strong-Morse founded Choice of Games, which still publishes text-only stories with the ChoiceScript language. Hot on their heels in 2011, Joe Humphries and Jon Ingold teamed up to launch Inkle Studios.

These people had shared experiences writing and playing parser works in the '90s, but many of their efforts in the aughts reflected a shift across the gaming world to treat interactive fiction as more than the process of solving puzzles in a virtual space. This in turn demanded new tools.

"The more games I wrote, the more I realized that I was interested in characters and dialogue primarily, but doing that within the parser-based setup was a huge amount of work for not much reward," explained Ingold.

He and Humphries wanted to make a text game with mainstream appeal. They developed a choice-driven IF tool called Ink that fit their creative and technical aims precisely, making it easy to weave together different blocks of text for a highly variable game experience. Ink powers not just Inkle's own game releases, like the recent A Highland Song, but also many notable indie projects such as Bury Me My Love, Sable, Goodbye Volcano High, and Neocab.

Klimas had a similar experience. As he was brainstorming new ideas for his own IF works, he found "that the kind of experiences I wanted to make didn't, at least in my mind, lend themselves well to the parser format." He explored some early-'90s experiments in hypertext fiction and found himself drawn to the idea of having a dynamic, modifiable website for a text game. So he set out to create a tool explicitly for writers who wanted to create interactive stories with that approach.

His first effort, a command line tool for an existing hypertext platform called TiddlyWiki, fell flat with most of the IF world. But Klimas stuck with the project, feeling certain that there were people who could benefit from the approach. "I wanted to feel like I was not quite so alone in my creative concerns, to be honest," he said.

Once he revamped the initial concept and released it as Twine, the community Klimas had sought found him. The system stood out both for its visual scripting approach that requires no prior programming knowledge, and for publishing projects as webpages that could be easily shared and played. Indie game developers, and notably queer creators, were drawn to the tool as a way to create a personal story without the usual technology and complexity barriers associated with a video game. My sources talked about this time as the Twine "explosion," and that isn't hyberbole—at the time of this writing, indie game marketplace itch.io has more than 6,600 games with the Twine tag.