Electronic Literature Organization

In this brief work of interactive fiction, Plotkin (a.k.a. zarf) causes the ordinary actions of looking for a glass of water and searching for plane tickets to turn terrifying, transforming an ordinary setting. Shade is a very unusual entry in the classic “one room game in your apartment” category.

“The Dazzle as Question,” first published in frAme, traces the conflict between the left and right brain inclinations of an erstwhile “old school” artist as experienced via an encounter with the digital realm. The Dazzle is a lyrical one; its marks and varied rhythmic emphases are indicative of the questions and confusion underlying the relationship between old and new identities and images. Claire Allan Dinsmore is a writer, artist, and the editor and designer of Cauldron & Net: a journal of the arts & new media. She has an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Parsons School of Design/The New School for Social Research. Dinsmore has exhibited worldwide and been published as an artist, critic, essayist, and poet. See this work’s Directory entry for links to more works by this author.

Patchwork Girl is one of the most widely-discussed and inventive works of hypertext in Storyspace. It is a feminist retelling of the Frankenstein story that asks “What if Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein were true? What if Mary Shelley herself made the monster - not the fictional Dr. Frankenstein?” Robert Coover has referred to Patchwork Girl “perhaps the true paradigmatic work of the era.” See the Directory entry for more information about this piece.

Short’s all-text simulation lets the interactor converse with a statue that has come to life. Depending on how the conversation affects the mood of Pygmalion’s creation, and where the conversation goes, different secrets will be unfolded and different (sometimes incompatible) backstories will be revealed. Galatea won the 2000 IF Art Show and set the standard for compelling characters in interactive fiction. See the Directory entry for more information about this piece.

This all-text game improved upon Adventure by better understanding commands, more richly simulating its world, and adding a character, the theif, who appeared throughout to challenge and motivate the player. Zork was originally written for fun by researchers, who developed this interactive fiction collaboratively on a computer at MIT and made the program available for online play. The game was later adapted into successful commercial software, as the Infocom trilogy Zork I-III for home comptuers. Ethan Dicks has made the “original” MIT version of the game available for modern platforms.