Interactive fiction news resources
Published by Jeremy Douglass January 16th, 2006 in Uncategorized, IF, Text Art.
For anyone attempting to follow news on interactive fiction, a few general tips:
For general announcements, Brass Lantern posts regular news items and features on adventures games, more than half of which are IF-specific. Xyzzy News is also a traditional (but seldom-updated) news source.
For reviews and interviews, SPAG (Society for Promotion of Adventure Games) publishes an excellent quarterly email list.
For breaking news and events, Grand Text Auto blogs on IF-related topics (among other things) with fair regularity. An exclusively IF-related blog is Renga in Blue, however it almost never updated. And, of course, there is the occasional post here, although we try for the most part to stay out of the news biz.
For usenet newsgroup discussion, the traditional IF group is rec.arts.int-fiction (and the corresponding rec.games.int-fiction).
For online chat, IF enthusiasts eschew IRC in favor of ifMUD, a multi-user dimension which can be entered via either web interface or special client, and whose architecture includes numerous bulletin boards, newsgroups, discussion channels, and archives.
Finally, for news sources, Parsifal is the best directory for up-to-date links on IF.
One of the joys of having such an established media ecology around the topic of IF is that there is little pressure to do quick rebroadcasting of IF news items, as that need is already being met. This makes it much easier for WRT to focus on short features and critical commentary. However there is one class of IF information that I don’t get from an established source - generally links that appear on my Google News filter or occasionally ones culled from RSS feeds. (If you work in a special topic, I’d highly recommend creating a custom filter in Google News and checking it weekly.) Next time, some thoughts on IF related news articles culled over the past few months.
5 Responses to “Interactive fiction news resources”
- 1 Pingback on Jan 18th, 2006 at 9:47 pm
Jeremy, this terrific list seems like another foundational post, along with Christy’s various posts about resources, would you consider formalizing these as part of the permanent “Pages” or “Sticky” of the site?
Thanks Mark - I’ll add a link in Sticky to the sidebar. It might be interesting to see similar lists for chatbots, crossmedia works, etc. - that is, not attempting to be definitive or exhaustive lists of resources, but rather a short list of the most important starting points and media channels to follow in ongoing research.
Good idea. That would free us up from reblogging and develop the pedagogical side of WRT. What was your rule of selection?
I should probably clarify above - the principle is a short list of starting points to staying “plugged in” on a given research topic. What are the most important sources that give the best coverage with the least effort? In my case I’ve found a dozens of interesting outlets, but I can be up on 95% of current goings on by subscribing to SPAG emails, getting the GTxA and Brass Lantern RSS feeds, and periodically drop in to ifMUD and rec.arts.int-fiction to check recent posts, which all told is really only about 5-10 minutes of reading daily.
My guess is that a similar chatbot list would begin with A.L.I.C.E. news posts and the Pandorabots populatity list…?