Small world

[dougo]

lambda_ultimate linked to an article about interactive fiction programming languages (Inform and TADS), written by someone at a company called Interactive Factory, in Boston. So I went to their site, and a few clicks later ended up on the Our Team page, where I found a picture of cnoocy. Small world!

Looks like they don't actually do interactive fiction there, by the way. But their mission statement sounds straight out of Bureaucracy.

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Huh, even smaller world. I've been to ifMUD a couple times, but never really saw anything to make me want to stick around. Maybe I should try it again sometime. Not that I've tried any IF in a long time either, since Myst 3, probably (if that even counts).

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Well, it wasn't really conversation I was looking for anyway. It just didn't seem as technologically advanced as, say, MOO, at the time, and for some reason I was expecting more.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I always thought of muds as multi-player interactive fiction—I even ran a short-lived mailing list by that name—so I thought the IF people would have tried to bring their expertise to mud technology. But I think IF has been moving away from simulation into pure storytelling, which is much harder to adapt to a multi-player setting. (E.g., what happens when someone does "sleep"?)

[jfpbookworm.livejournal.com]

Really small world. I found your post through a bloglines search for ifmud, and it turns out I've already seen you via comments on in_parentheses's livejournal.

As for trying IF, the results of the latest Interactive Fiction Competition (http://ifcomp.org/) are in. You might want to check out some of the winners.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's definitely on my list of things to do when I have more time than I do now.