“If you like Interactive Fiction at all, I would like to draw your attention to Ad Verbum, a marvellous game written in 2000 by Nick Montfort. When I first downloaded this, I really didn’t expect it to be any fun at all — I prefer IF that is more a story than a game, and I generally detest puzzle-heavy games because they tend to get me stuck early. As Graham Nelson puts it, an adventure game is a narrative at war with a crossword puzzle; in this game, the narrative doesn’t really put up much of a fight at all. And I love it! Because the puzzles in Ad Verbum are really good puzzles.” Arnt Richard Johnson
With Stuart Moulthrop, Montfort will be presenting “Face It, Tiger, You Just Hit the Jackpot: Reading and Playing Cadre’s Varicella.” at Digital Arts and Culture. The paper, among other things, challenges Nelson’s formulation of IF, and suggests that theorists and artists move beyond the old categories and recognize works of IF as accomplishments in their own right.
Completely unrelated query. The quote I took from Johnson’s website included a passage that reads “any fun at all &emdash; I prefer”. I changed the “&emdash;” to “–“, which was surely the author’s intention. But I feel somehow that I may have violated the Blogger’s Code by changing a quotation. Oh, well. Nick’s site seems to be down for the moment… here’s the ELO 2002 gallery page for Ad Verbum.
