It was born into the family Computer Game, but it has since grown up and increasingly hangs out with the Literature crowd (though it still regularly writes home)--which is to say that in much latter-day interactive fiction, particularly things produced since 1996, storytelling has been increasingly emphasized and puzzles deemphasized. Not that puzzles are gone, but more and more authors are trying to integrate puzzles into a coherent and compelling plot, rather than (as was often the case in earlier years) letting the story serve as an ostensible premise but populating the thing with puzzles that had nothing to do with the plot. And some interactive fiction (IF for short) goes whole hog and abolishes puzzles altogether.

Why try to tell a story through this medium? Because making the player/reader drive the course of the story allows for some interesting effects; a skillful author can get the player/reader to identify with the protagonist in ways that simply aren't possible in static fiction (because the player/reader has a sense of complicity, to use a favorite word, in the plot that the static fiction reader lacks). Plus there are all sorts of neat things that can be done with narrative when you have a computer on your side.

So what I have written? Er--nothing yet. Presently, I'm a player, reviewer, and appreciator of good IF--and, as you see, a promoter as well.

Reviewer? Well, I've written a number of reviews over the years. Infocom was one of the earliest IF companies, and while it's long since defunct, the IF it produced is well worth remembering--and so I've written some reviews.

But I've also written quite a few reviews of IF written in the recent years' renaissance. See what you think.

One of the best things about the new golden age of IF is that virtually everything produced is free, and available for download at the IF archive. Emily Short, Suzanne Britton, and Nick Montfort all have suggestions about where in the IF archive to find the IF worth trying, and Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive has a more comprehensive look with lots of capsule reviews (some of which I wrote).

Most of the reviews here originally appeared at SPAG, a quarterly webzine capably edited by Paul O'Brian, who has a page of his own. Paul wrote LASH and Wearing the Claw, and has written lots of other things as well.

One of the IF community's most important events is the annual competition, which is run by the indefatigable Stephen Granade. Stephen also maintains Brass Lantern, a general repository of links, information, and thoughtful essays by Stephen. Stephen also wrote Arrival, Losing Your Grip and Common Ground, among other things.

Another important yearly event is the XYZZY awards, which are organized by the maintainers of XYZZYnews, another zine. This is a comprehensive rundown of the history of the XYZZY awards.

Some more important folks:
Andrew Plotkin, author of So Far, Spider and Web, Shade, Change in the Weather, Hunter, in Darkness, Space Under the Window and others.
Emily Short, author of Galatea, Metamorphoses, Best of Three and others.
Adam Cadre, author of Varicella, Photopia, Lock and Key, Shrapnel, 9:05, and others.
Suzanne Britton, author of Worlds Apart.

A few more links:

The canonical Infocom bugs list is an amazingly thorough list of many of the major bugs in Infocom games.
Inform, TADS and Hugo are three of the most important and widely used languages for creating IF.
PARSIFAL is a compendium of links to important folks in the IF community.
IfFinder is another.
Reviews from Trotting Krips has a whole bunch of reviews with a rather, uh, different tone from the reviews found here. But don't get me wrong--they're good reviews, consistently entertaining.
The IF Theory Project, a potential book with essays about various aspects of IF design, for which I've submitted two articles.

Questions? Drop me a line.