The text adventure -- once the purview of geeks and computer scientists seeking to push the edge of mainframe computing technology; now an arena for serious writers and academics looking to explore the intersection between literature and interaction.
Case in point.
Book & Volume is a Z-engine game--implemented using the same technology that Infocom used, back in the day. Too retro for the conventional market, but finding another outlet: it's a highly literary work with serious artistic ambitions, recognized by the Iowa Review of all things--a journal you probably have never heard of, unless you are a short fiction writer, desperately trying to find a venue for your work in a world where markets for short fiction are few. And if, say, you are an obscure SF short story writer with credits in the degraded pulps, and find that Z-machine games are appearing in the effing IOWA REVIEW, you think.... Well, this isn't the world I grew up in.
And you feel, perhaps, a twinge of jealousy, until you play the damn thing, and realize:
Okay. This deserves it.
You can play it on the web here, but can't save your progress there. If you want to do that, you need to download and install a Z-machine interpreter on your computer, then download this game's file and open it with that interpreter.
Awards
2006 Slamdance Guerilla Games Festival Finalist (withdrawn in protest over the exclusion of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from the festival)
Medi@terra festival selection
Published in the Iowa Review Web, July 06. (For those geeks among us--Iowa Review is a serious literary journal, and any mainstream writer would willingly sacrifice his left testicle to have a short story there.)
I think his name's spelled
I think his name's spelled MonTfort.
(edit) Is there a way to delete old comments like this once they've been addressed?
Ed.: Yes :).