Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

2007 ended with a flurry of activity, with the French IF-Comp launching and two new games. (The Text the Halls contest also hasn’t closed yet.)

2007 was quite a year for theory: we saw two new IF dissertations and new blogs. While I don’t see any more dissertations coming down the pipeline, I’m hoping more pieces like Dennis Jerz’s brilliant article on Adventure surface in journals.

For the coming year, Textfyre should be coming out with their first game. While there is understandable trepidation at commercial interests, I find the possibility of there once again being professional IF writers too thrilling to ignore.

It’s much harder to predict freeware releases, but based on commentary in various Internet forums I predict this year we’ll see more new authors brought in the fold by Inform 7.

Also, the trend of more non-English IF will undoubtedly continue. I’m hopeful translations will also start to appear for the best works.

Out of sheer wishful thinking I will also predict a major tutorial for TADS 3 will come out, giving it a major boost. I also predict (once again based on nothing at all but hope) that a major multimedia Hugo game like Future Boy! will come out and hit outlets like Adventure Gamers.

I’m hoping more “mainstream” outlets like Play This Thing!, TIGSource and JayIsGames continue to support IF (although it seems from the JayIsGames awards list this year they didn’t have much exposure outside of the Lovecraft Project and IF Comp).

Personal goals:

• Finish this thing. Nudges from the peanut gallery may help.
• I will resume posts on Nick’s thesis, and I have general theory posts of my own to make (“Hotel Dusk: player as conscience” and “Mutual exclusivity in puzzles” are in my draft queue).
• At some point this year I may run a 4th Interactive Fiction Excerpt Hunt.
• I should brush off my old paper for that Theory Book; my paper is now likely hopelessly outdated and it lacked a proper conclusion anyway.

Let me slip in something extra and say I have something new coming out on the 10th of January.