Game culture

he annual Interactive Fiction Competition is an institution that has endured for almost 20 years, with the goal of discovering each year’s best and brightest works in the world of text-based gaming. The genre is surprisingly broad and complex – and this year’s entries show how much text games have to offer modern audiences, even those who don’t ordinarily play computer games.

The age of free and intuitive creation tools, combined with the explosion of mobile platforms, e-reader devices and an audience that’s comfortable reading screens, means a brand-new opportunity for fresh narrative experiences that stand to attract new types of players.

Veteran gamers may remember the text-based adventures of history – titles like Adventureland, Zork and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Arriving in the late 1970s and early 80s, they were taut, forbidding puzzles of logic and language; proceeding the age of graphics on home computers, they made the most of constraints, using brief, carefully chosen prose and a limited list of terse commands to create the experience.

Now that we're all getting comfortable with the notion of reading books on digital displays, it's little surprise that developers are starting to explore the interactive possibilities of electronic novels. In fact, simple interactive fiction has been available on the iPod since the very beginning, with a community of writers using the HTML functionality in the device's Notes application to create "choose your own adventure" stories.

Since then, the actual Choose Your Own Adventure Company, which now owns the rights to the classic interactive children's novels, has ported a couple of old favourites to iPhone. Meanwhile, Edward Packard, the original author and creator of the CYOA series, has a new brand name, U-Ventures and is adapting and updating many of his old titles for iOS platforms.