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Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Using Playfic to write interactive fiction

During my university years, I played MUD's with a number of friends. As we sat in the vax lab at Uni the adventures were rich and satisfying. I was surprised to find out that these interactive text environments are still being used, not for games, but for interactive fiction.

Playfic is a platform using Inform for writing and playing interactive fiction. The program that is created is used to tell a story within an interactive world. The reader can move through the text by giving simple instructions which allow the reader to respond to the text. There shouldn't be any ambiguity in the text, so writers need to be clear on their intentions.


Readers can experience the text adventures or write one of their own. The code for this interface looks straight forward and it would be fun to teach a unit on interactive fiction as part of an English/IT. You could also use Playfic as a story starter tool, getting students to document their adventure and turn it into their own story.

As you can see the Source Code is really easy to understand.


Interactive fiction (aka "text adventures") is a genre of game that uses no graphics or sound, but instead, uses text to tell a story in an interactive world.

This reading environment is the next step in the old "Choose your own adventure" or the new "you choose books" where you have power over the direction that the story takes.

Further Reading:

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