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Margins of IF - Page 2

© Mark Silcox

IF ON PAPER

An Oxymoron? Mais non! Consider, for example, those old 'Choose Your Own Adventure' and 'Fighting Fantasy' -style books from the period just antecedent to the PC revolution. Such works are still produced, and as I've learned thanks to correspondence with Gamebooks fan Demian Katz, they still have a very keen following. I've added his wonderfully encyclopedic Gamebooks site to my list of links.

Then there's those wonderful, wonderful parlor games from the How to Host A Murder series, which involve getting a bunch of your friends together, dressing them up as characters from an Agatha Christie style murder mystery, and having them act out the parts of the suspects until everyone gets to guess at the murderer. Happy is the man (or woman) who can scare up half a dozen pals with enough playfulness in their souls to pull off this kind of feat - my wife and I once pulled together a bunch of prima facie uptight philosophy graduate students to give one of these games a try, and after some initial skepticism (and sobriety) had worn off we had what must have been one of our best parties ever. Carried out properly this sort of collaborative, non-hierarchical storytelling is one of the greatest pleasures that life has to offer. Once again, though, participants do have to be fairly carefully vetted if the whole thing has any chance of succeeding. The games/books also need to be pretty well-written, which (sadly) is also something of a rarity.

NETWORK IF

OK, I admit it - the only reason I've added this category is because of the soon-to-be-released commercial adventure game Majestic, which is causing quite a stir in the IF community. Unlike previous online games such as Everquest and Asheron's Call, which are almost entirely graphics-based, tell no stories, and ape all the tired conventions of on-paper roleplaying games, the mostly text-based Majestic looks like it just might revolutionize the genre. Players are communicated with not only via the internet but also by means of fax machine, e-mail and - get this - telephone! I don't usually like to plug for commercial games on this site (unless they're Written by Me, of course!...ahem...) but this one really does look to be just too cool to ignore; also, they do offer the first "episode" free to us tourists of the cyberworld. I'll keep you updated on this new genre if it turns out to be anything more than a flash in the pan.

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