A selection of interactive fiction

Interactive fiction? It's the artful term for text adventure, a computer program where you are (usually) the protagonist, and (usually) have a goal of some kind that is (hopefully) communicated interestingly and involvingly by the software.

Interactive fiction (IF) can tell some terrific stories. The genres of horror, comedy, science fiction, parody (even MST3000) and drama have been played out.

How to play these games

These games are actually data files which are meant to be interpreted. There are interpreters for a wide variety of computers - just about anything with a CPU in it. One of the best ones is frotz, and it has been ported to the BeOS.

To play these games, you must run frotz from the command line, with the game file you want to play as one of its parameters. For instance: 

$ frotz curses.z5
Here's how to do that.
  1. Open Terminal
    1. Click on the Be menu.
    2. Hold your mouse over "apps".
    3. In the pop-up menu that appears, click on Terminal.
  2. Enter the directory where these games are stored. Do this by typing cd adventures.
  3. Get a list of games by typing ls - an L followed by an S.
  4. Command frotz gamefile.z5 for some suitable game, and you're off.

Which games are included?

Quite a few. Most of them are recognized as quite good. The ones that aren't will be quite obvious from these descriptions.

To read reviews of these games, there is a trusted archive of them right on the net.

If you're fluent in adventure games, try out Curses, So Far, Christminster, Jigsaw, and BSE.

If you'd just like a short story, try Delusions, Sins Against Mimesis, or The Mind Electric. A Change in the Weather is a short story, but pretty tough.

Advent.z5
Adventure aka Colossal Cave, the original 350 points version ported to Inform by Graham Nelson, based on Dave Baggett's TADS reconstruction "Colossal Cave Revisited".
booth.z5, and its sequel, b2demo.z5
Pick up the Phone Booth and Die, a NyQuil nightmare by R. Noyes.
bse.z5
BSE, An Interactive Epidemic by Chris Smith. Winner of the Acorn User 1996 IF Competition.
busted.z5
Busted! A game of high cunning and low humor, by Jon Drukman.
curses.z5
Curses, An Interactive Diversion by Graham Nelson.
Delusns.z5
Delusions, an Interactive Self-Discovery by Christopher E. Forman.
edifice.z5
The Edifice, An Interactive Allegory, By Lucian Smith. Winner of the 1997 IF competition.
freefall.z5
Free Fall, An, uh, Interactive Z-Code Demonstration by Andrew C. Plotkin. It's actually a port of Tetris.
Jigsaw.z8
Jigsaw, An Interactive History by Graham Nelson.
library.z5
All Quiet on the Library Front, An Interactive Vignette by Michael S. Phillips.
lists.z5
Lists and Lists, an Interactive Tutorial by Andrew Plotkin. It's actually a tutorial on Scheme.
mimesis.z5
Sins Against Mimesis: An Interactive Theosophy, by Adam Thornton.
mindelec.z5
The Mind Electric, An Interactive Vision by Jason Dyer.
minster.z5
Christminster, An Interactive Conspiracy by Gareth Rees.
night.z5
Night at the Computer Center, An Interactive Nocturnal Chase, by Bonni Mierzejewska.
sherbet.z5
The Meteor, the Stone and a Long Glass of Sherbet, by Angela M. Horns (aka Graham Nelson). Winner of the 1996 IF competition.
SoFar.z8
So Far, An Interactive Catharsis by Andrew Plotkin.
spirit.z5
SpiritWrak, An Interactive Fantasy Adventure by Daniel S. Yu.
theatre.z5
Theatre, An Interactive Night of Horror; by Brendon Wyber.
weather.z5
A Change in the Weather, An Interactive Short Story by Andrew Plotkin. Winner of the Inform category of the 1995 IF competition.

Want more?

There's the yearly interactive fiction competitions. Held yearly in the newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction, this contest attracts a lot of new talent and experimentation. About half the entries are written in Inform and hence may be played with frotz. Some of the games in this collection came from the top-placing entries in the competition.

You can find them at the interactive fiction archive in the 'games' directory.

Finally, you can purchase the Masterpieces of Infocom collection for about $20 from Activision. This contains all the games ever released by Infocom but for two (for legal reasons). The data files can be copied to the BeOS and played with frotz.