General software dev looking around. Been writing code since the 1990s. I have a deep history in open-source interactive fiction, but that doesn't mean I'm looking for game jobs; it means I've worked on compilers for custom scripting languages, interpreters for same, virtual machines, porting all of the above between C/C++/Python and Web platforms. Linux, Apache, JS/Typescript/Node, ObjC, C#, a bit of Rust just to see. Interesting in building tools that people will use.
Thanks for the nitter.net pointer -- I wasn't aware of that. That will be helpful.
I know (in principle) how to use curl to send an authenticated API request via HTTP. That's authenticated; you have to log in. I already have a twitter client for that use case.
There's also unauthenticated API access (read-only public tweets only, as you'd expect). (I assume this is what nitter.net is doing.) Less tracking, but you still have to request an API key, so it is under Twitter's control and they could in theory cut it off. It's still not supporting the basic web principle of "you can GET the flippin' data".
Anyhow, I'm glad this is getting some public attention. I'm a little surprised that I was the first one to make a fuss about it.
Infocom used "interactive fiction" as the marketing tag for their games. You can easily see this on their box covers. I believe they started using the label with the "grey box" packages in 1984.
I don't know how much competing IF companies, like Level 9, tried to use the term. Infocom may have treated it as a trademark; I haven't checked.
Post-golden-age, hobbyists were congregating on the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup starting in 1992 or 1993. The newsgroup wasn't actually started by Infocom fans -- it was more serious literary-hypertext people who tried to co-opt the term! But that didn't stick, and it was all parser/text games and Z-code software by 1994. So "IF" was solidly held by that community through the 2000s, when IFComp and the IF Archive started to clue in to Twine and the larger space of text-based games.
As for the words "interactive fiction" -- of course their literal meaning is wildly off from how the genre is understood. Genre labels are always silly when read literally. (Contemplate "science fiction" and "fantasy", which do not mean "stories about scientists" and "made-up stories".)
(I have a soft spot for the term "adventure game", which -- for a few years -- literally meant "a game like Adventure, aka Colossal Cave." But it's changed since then, and I mean since 1982.)
I'll accumulate a bunch of replies here, if that's okay...
First, I apologize for having a web page that implies that I haven't done any IF since 2017. Cragne Manor actually came out in late 2018, and I added it to my IF page, but I forgot to update the "last updated" date. (Fixed now.)
I'm still messing around with IF ideas. I'm working on a prototype for a non-parser-based IF system. It's a work in progress and I don't have anything to show off yet; we'll see how far it gets over the summer.
I suspect that dozens, nay, scores of people are trying to make IF work on Alexa. It's not an area that I'm working on myself, but I know some of the folks at Earplay (mentioned above). My understanding is that getting Alexa to respond to commands is pretty easy; the hard part is designing a game that plays well in narrated form.
Yes, I can sometimes be spotted wandering around the Somerville/Cambridge area. We have a monthly IF meetup at MIT: http://pr-if.org/ Anyone is welcome to drop in.
And also! If I may spend a moment promoting a current project... we are organizing an IF conference called NarraScope this summer. It will be held at MIT, June 14-16.
I wanna expand on this, in relation to Hadean Lands.
I wrote HL in Inform 7. Could I have written the game in a more traditional IF language, such as Inform 6? (I6 is C-like.) Answer: yes, but it would have been a bunch more work and a lot more frustrating and painful.
The English-ish syntax of I7 takes some getting used to. Yes, you have to free yourself of any attachment to brevity. I7 code is verbose. The hidden benefit is that it's very easy to skim through and re-read. All code is write-once-read-many-times, right? You may be comfortable with "gruecount++", but "increase the grue counter of the location by one" is just as intelligible (and more so for people who didn't grow up on C).
The real strength, for me at least, is I7's rule dispatch model. Big swatches of HL's code look like this (yes, an exact quote):
Ritual-processing rule for rit-speaking anaphylaxis-word when at RSChymicStart and the bound of rstate is the retort and the reservoir comprises grey-acid-subst and the retort contains exactly perfect-diamond: [...]
I've got hundreds of these little code snippets, and I trust the compiler to stitch them together into a working state machine. If this were I6, I'd have to write giant functions and collect these snippets together -- in the right order, etc. If this were an OO language, I'd go crazy deciding what object each snippet is a method of. I7 just takes the above and runs. (Okay, I have to worry about the rule ordering a little, but I7 mostly gets it right.)
(You can see that I've forced some brevity in, by careful definition of the words "at" and "comprises" and "contains exactly". I like hyphenated-symbols too. Those are personal style choices.)
- The Scheme engine that this implements is really small -- about 10k of heap. (This is a Z-code game, and the Z-machine is a 16-bit architecture.) And the garbage collection sucks. So you can't do much with this beyond toy problems.
- You could port it to the Glulx VM (32-bit architecture) without too much trouble, and then you'd have a couple of gigabytes. Feel free. :)
- As an IF author, I never intend players to guess a verb. But I do expect players to be familiar with the common IF verbs -- the stuff on the PDF sheet, basically. This was more true in 1996, when the IF community was tiny and all read the same Usenet group. I wrote this thing for enthusiasts.
- Today, I'd put more emphasis in the help docs on the difference between the two input modes (">" and ">>"). And I'd check if the player typed a line starting with ">" -- display an appropriate explanation of why that's wrong.
- But I'm not going to update this thing, because yes, 1996 was a long time ago.
- The era of the text adventure is dead the way the era of home-brewed beer is dead. Nobody makes it and nobody drinks it, except the people who still do.
- Is it silly to write a text adventure in 2014? I put one up for sale a couple of months ago (hadeanlands.com) and it's doing pretty well. Yes, for actual money. No, it's not a gigantic indie success, but the niche still exists and there are still fans. So that's my past twenty years of work justified.
Hey. This is me. I hope I was not that much of a dick, but at that point I wasn't interested in making money off old IF. I don't remember the specific incident, though.
(I'm still not very interested in making money off old IF, although I've tried a bit of that. The Hadean Lands plan is to charge money for a new game which has never been released before.)
Other notes: we also have a Boston IF meetup group (http://pr-if.org/).
The term "interactive fiction" dates from the early 80s, actually. Infocom used it in their ads with the general theme of "We're more serious and important than mere videogames." The term has been tussled back and forth over the years; these days it's more of an umbrella term than a niche.
Portfolio: https://zarfhome.com/portfolio/
Github: https://github.com/erkyrath
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-plotkin-775881355/
Email: zjob at eblong.com
General software dev looking around. Been writing code since the 1990s. I have a deep history in open-source interactive fiction, but that doesn't mean I'm looking for game jobs; it means I've worked on compilers for custom scripting languages, interpreters for same, virtual machines, porting all of the above between C/C++/Python and Web platforms. Linux, Apache, JS/Typescript/Node, ObjC, C#, a bit of Rust just to see. Interesting in building tools that people will use.