"My hope is that Playfic opens up the world of interactive fiction to a much wider audience — young writers, fanfic authors, and culture remixers of all ages." Which is always the audience Inform 7 felt like it was really branching out towards. Sometimes the way to make things accessible is to lower the cost of entry - and in that case, it means a webservice, rather than a downloadable app. Will be interested to see how Playfic develops.

"So is it worth reading dusty IF history? Well, I haven't read it yet. But I can say that the book really represents a tour through the past ten years of the IF community's thinking. Some of the essays are from 2001; some have been revised for this edition; some are brand-new. Many have been published in other forms, so if you've been devouring our blog posts and essays for the past few years, you will see few surprises. But if your awareness of IF dates from the last century -- or if you've been following us only casually -- I think this book has something to offer."

"Curveship is an interactive fiction system that provides a world model (of characters, objects, locations, and things that happen) while also modeling the narrative discourse, so that the narration and description of the simulated world can change. Curveship can tell events out of order, using flashback and other techniques, and can tell the story from the standpoint of particular characters and their perceptions and understandings." This looks both bonkers and brilliant.

"More important: the game, Sand-dancer, is a good game. It is not the sort of example that exists to have one of everything in the manual. It is the sort of game that exists to make IF better. Aaron puts it together on your workbench. You can see the parts going in, and I don't mean rules and action constructs now; I mean character, background, voice, theme, and narrative drive. He explains what he's doing, and what each game element is for. He talks about story structure and shape of interactivity. He discusses what you have to do to get the player involved and what you have to do to put the player in control." This sounds great. Add-to-cart.

"The book assumes no prior knowledge of programming, but also doesn't treat I7 like a regular programming language: loops, for instance, are barely mentioned. In fact, Thinking in Inform 7 might have been a good title." This sounds great.

A short film by Jeremy McIntosh about IF; covers some nice ground, and at ten minutes, is about the right length.

A short story by Jon Ingold. When I first read this, in a Cambridge May Anthology, I thought "this chap must write Interactive Fiction". It turns out he does, and writes very good IF. He's also a maths teacher now, I believe - but he also wrote this several years ago, and it's a lovely little short story about all the things you can only do in writing.

"These are my suggestions for eager first-time IF players, organized by year of release:" A few ones here that are still new to me, and some reminders of thigns I need to get around to.

Andrew Plotkin on some of the design of Inform 7, and rule-based programming as it applies to IF. Long story short: everything is exceptional, and designing systems to support the kind of stories IF authors want to tell is hard.

"The Queen has told you to return with her heart in a box. Snow White has made you promise to make other arrangements. Now that you're alone in the forest, it's hard to know which of the two women to trust. The Queen is certainly a witch — but her stepdaughter may be something even more horrible..." An interesting take on conversational IF, even if some of the most interesting endings - and best writing - his relatively cryptic to access...

"The Bryant Collection is an interactive anthology: a collection of ’story worlds’ by Laura Bryant. They were found at a yard sale in an old strongbox. Five pieces of interactive fiction written by someone who never used a computer. It is interactive fiction, which means that the player types commands in text, and the game responds with text descriptions." This may or may not be true, but the games are very much real.

This looks very, very interesting. Yes, it's IF, but it looks like it's pushing that genre quite far.

"There are no cut scenes, no uninteractive passages, no portions where the characters are essentially "switched off" and indifferent to what the player does. Everything counts. Everything is part of the story." Excellent Emily Short piece on Blue Lacuna

"This year, I have no apologies about any of my top five. Here’s my list of the cream of the crop..." Emily Short on this year's IF competition entrants.

"I thought it was a parking ticket, and was annoyed. But up close, I saw it was just an empty envelope someone put there..." I'll let you click through for the punchline. Delightful, nontheless.

"Finally Taking Over The World is interactive fiction programmed in brainfuck. It is completely written by hand without the use of any compiler or the like." IF written in brainfuck. Blimey.

The 2007 IF competiton games, all ready for download.

Wonderful paper about the creation and development of Crowther's "Adventure", and also the real Colossal Cave in Mammoth, which almost certainly inspired the geography of the game-cave.

Just beautiful. The sonnet and haiku are my favourites so far. (Inform 7 is a natural-language programming language for writing text adventures).

A nice look at some common stumbling blocks in IF