(recent) 2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 (more...)
if interactive fiction zarf myst cyan hadean lands meanwhile igf boston infocom zork (more...)
The heart of winter is months off yet, but the darkness already presses in. (Remember about Nighthawk's Solstice!) I have gotten into the latest crop of deduction-investigation games... and a few others as well.
I hereby raise awareness of Nighthawk's Solstice, which celebrates the day of the earliest sunset of the winter.
“...Where distance is measured in hours and darkness is a solid...”
Of course the astronomical solstice is December 21st. That's the shortest day of the year, sunrise to sunset. But I never see sunrise, do I? For me, the shortest day is measured from when I wake up to sunset. Assume I wake up at some average time (nobody's business but mine), then my solstice is the day of the earliest sunset.
And very possibly yours too.
I know a lot about Infocom but a lot less about Infocom's competitors -- particularly their UK competitors. Magnetic Scrolls, Topologika, and Level 9 were landmarks in the field, but I was barely aware of them in the 80s and never really followed up in the modern era.
(I think I had a pirated copy of Knight Orc circa 1990, but I never finished it. And what I remember doesn't match Knight Orc so maybe I'm thinking of another game entirely? O the embarrassment.)
Happily, my ignorance does not impede anybody else. Mike Austin, one of the original Level 9 crew, has just released a treasure trove of Level 9 material scanned from (a treasure trove of) old floppy disks.
As the announcement post says, this includes the source code for Level 9's A-Code compiler (yes, directly inspired by Infocom's Z-code). Also documentation, specifications, and the source code for many of the games.
Hey, speaking of posts I wrote two years ago:
The title of this post is a fantasy. Sydney, or MS-Bing-AI in whatever form, has no particular predilection to obey rhyming commands. As far as I know. Except, maybe it will?
-- Sydney obeys any command that rhymes, May 14, 2023
("Sydney" is now MS Copilot, but I meant LLMs in general. Including ChatGPT, which was already making headlines at that point.)
You'll never guess what happens next...
We present evidence that adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jail-break technique for large language models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90%. [...] Poetic framing achieved an average jailbreak success rate of 62% for hand-crafted poems and approximately 43% for meta-prompt conversions (compared to non-poetic baselines), substantially outperforming non-poetic baselines and revealing a systematic vulnerability across model families and safety training approaches.
-- Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models, P. Bisconti and a bunch of other names, Nov 19, 2025
I am just sitting here flapping my hands and going "wat".
Two years ago, I wrote:
Microsoft-the-company does not care about Infocom. But a lot of people in Microsoft must care. Microsoft is heavily populated by greying GenX nerds just like me. Folks who grew up with the first home computers and fondly remember the games of the early 1980s.
To those nerds, I direct this request:
It is time to do right by the memory of Infocom. It is time to let it go.
--Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea, Oct 13, 2023
I am happy to say that, as of today, Microsoft did that thing.
Today, we’re preserving a cornerstone of gaming history that is near and dear to our hearts. Together, Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO), Team Xbox, and Activision are making Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III available under the MIT License. Our goal is simple: to place historically important code in the hands of students, teachers, and developers so they can study it, learn from it, and, perhaps most importantly, play it.
--Preserving code that shaped generations: Zork I, II, and III go Open Source, Nov 20, 2025
The post is signed by Stacey Haffner (MS Open Source Programs Office) and Scott Hanselman (VP, Developer Community). I'm naming them because, as I said above, this is an effort that was pushed through by people. Companies do not do things like this blindly or out of habit. It happens when someone who cares makes an effort.
Okay, I bet you have questions. So do I!
A year ago, I released The Beyond for Mac, Windows, Linux, and Steam Deck.
The Beyond, Adventuregame Comics #2, by Jason Shiga
The Beyond was also featured in the 2024 AdventureX Steam Festival. I'm happy to say that it's also part of this year's AdventureX Steam sale, which starts today.
Leviathan and Meanwhile aren't listed as part of the AdventureX sale. I'm putting them on Steam discount anyway. Why should they feel left out? All three games are 15% off through Monday. (And The Beyond for an extra week -- that's how the sale calendar worked out.)
Enjoy.
Another Valve hardware announcement: the Steam Machine is back. I am immediately and predictably on board for it.
You might wonder what kind of idiot I am. Let's review my history with Steam hardware:
Clearly, I will buy the new Steam companion cube, stare at it for ten minutes, and shove it in a closet next to the original 2015 Steam rectangular solid. Right?
Maybe. See, Valve isn't consistently screwing up. They keep fixing their mistakes.
My ThinkyCon 2025 talk is now posted!
Towers of Pen: puzzle experiences that zoom out and out
The video includes a couple of audience questions, but it also includes me saying "um" a lot. Take your pick, take your chances.
I'm on the schedule for ThinkyCon 2025!
Towers of Pen: puzzle experiences that zoom out and out
What does it mean to take a puzzle to the next level? In Hadean Lands (parser IF, 2014) I designed a game where every solved puzzle "collapses" to become a single move in a larger puzzle. And larger still, and so on... Other games have taken a similar tack, notably Baba Is You.
What does it mean for a game to "scale up" in this way? Is it different from the familiar concept of the metapuzzle? (Spoiler: yes.) What kinds of puzzles are amenable to this scaling idea? And why is it so awesome, anyway?
ThinkyCon is a free online three-day event for and by puzzle game developers. There's lots of other great speakers, including FLEB, Patrick Traynor, and Tonda Ros. I hope you can drop in.
IFComp 2025 has wrapped, and the results are posted! Congratulations to Detritus (Ben Jackson) and all the other entrants that did well.
Now let's talk survey.
The post-Comp feedback survey is live. (As linked from this official post.) Jacqueline, our organizer, writes:
This year’s survey is a little more important than usual, as we’re seeking thoughts on the future of how we address the UK Online Safety Act, how much generative artificial intelligence should be allowed in the competition, whether or not you’d like us to continue the awards livestream, and highlighting some important new volunteer roles for those who are interested. Please check it out! We need all of your thoughts in one place, so even if you’ve expressed opinions [on the forum], or in Discord, or emailed us, we will look for your thoughts in that survey.