Andrew Plotkin’s Interactive Fiction

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!