Readings in narrative game history

Friday, August 26, 2011

Comments: 1   (latest 19 hours later)

Tagged: blogs, cyoa, eliza, oregon trail, wumpus, paean to wanderings, adventure, edward packard, sam kabo ashwell, steve jackson, jimmy maher, adventureland, digital antiquarian


If you follow Planet IF, you're already all over these links. But if not, you gotta start following two blog-post series that have been rendering early IF and choice-game history into a fine itchy mist of detail and insight.


On the CYOA side, Sam Ashwell has been analyzing various corners of the genre in terms of structure -- with lots of chewy graphs and statistics.

And on the game history side, Jimmy Maher has been playing through every game that can be plausibly be called an IF ancestor. He's trying to find the versions closest to the original source, and he chocks each game up on a solid base of history and context.

...You know what, I don't need to paste any more links here. It's not about this page, it's about Jimmy's. Go look at the DA post list and start scrolling back.

Both series are ongoing, so stick them in your feed reader or your instant paper or your stone burner or whatever technology fries your eyes.



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