Interactive Fiction

Interactive fiction may be better known to you as "text adventures." Regardless, I've written a number of these games. All of them are written using a program called TADS; you'll need to get a TADS interpreter to play the games.

Losing Your Grip

A big game featuring smoking, surrealism, and one of the most beloved NPCs in interactive fiction history: the head buried in mud. The game is long, and is one of my more serious works. It has its very own page.

Arrival
or, Attack of the B-Movie Clichés

Two aliens, one child, and lots of silly drawings. Placed fourth in the 4th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. It is short, and not meant to be taken seriously. Unless you're the foil-beanie-and-crop-circles type, in which case you should play this game in order to be ready when the invasion does occur. Has its own page as well.

Common Ground

One night in a three-story house. Shorter than Arrival, yet more serious than Losing Your Grip. Like my other major works, it warrants a separate page.

Pong

A while back, Adam Cadre asked a number of us to write interactive fiction versions of old arcade games. I wrote Pong, a strange little version of the classic arcade game.

I actually wrote two games for Adam's arcade pack. This second one is known variously as "The untitled game" or "MC."

Constraints

In early 2001, Emily Short held a mini-contest in which you had to write a game which could be solved using a supplied walkthrough. The catch? The walkthrough was sent via telegram, so it had no punctuation or line breaks, and many of the words could be verb or noun. The resulting game is a little off for having been forced to fit the walkthrough, but I'm oddly fond of it nonetheless.

Apparently, so was Emily: Constraints won the "Games" division of the competition. I even got a telegram congratulating me.

In my spare time I also maintain Brass Lantern, a web page devoted to adventure games of all kinds.

Once you're done with them, feel free to take a look at my non-interactive writings.