10 Ways to Get Your Writing Out There

Jim  Munroe, a Toronto indie new media author whose work I’ve been following for some time, recently published this useful article on building an audience. Of course he mentions self-published print zines and blogs, but he also mentions another subject I’ve been introducing my students to this term…

6. TEXT ADVENTURE VIDEOGAMES
Anyone out there play Zork
as a kid? Or any text adventure games? Go west, Take sword? They were a
type of videogame that was entirely text, and is also known as
interactive fiction. IF is an amazing thing: a videogame you can make
without programming or graphics skills.

Quick Tips:
-there’s a community of people who write and play these games, and they have a competition each year that often attracts more than 50 new games (one’s happening now! Download and vote!)
-and thanks to this community, there are now tools that make it
possible for non-programmers to write these games, one in particular is
called Inform 7
-the audience for text games is small but intense
-it’s kind of like poetry in that there’s no money in it, and the
audience for it is small, but if you were affected by it in your youth
you keep coming back to it — some people had a slim volume of poetry
and I had The Lurking Horror