I’m beginning to prep several new courses to teach at Miami in the spring, as I’m also finishing up the dissertation. I recently posted about the Games and Learning course I’ll be piloting next semester, and I’ll also be teaching a section of IMS238 — Narrative In Digital Technology. Historically, the course has been crosslisted with English and Interactive Media Studies, and I’ll obviously be taking a different disciplinary spin on that, while still trying to keep a lot of the same issues at the fore — how do digital, interactive media change how we conceive of story? Are games, in particular, best understood as a narrative medium, a ludic medium, or something else entirely? Plus, how is narrative important in building knowledge, and what sorts of learning implications do narrative digital media have?

So, I’m going to cast the course as a “Narrative in Digital Media” course more than a “Technology,” course, emphasizing narrative across a number of digital, interactive media. One of the major projects I’ll have students do is develop an interactive fiction (IF) game using Inform. I’ve posted about interactive fiction before, so I’ll spare you a lengthy definition right now, other than to say these are essentially the classic genre of “text adventure games” (think Colossal Cave and Infocom’s games) which have, in the past 15 years, spun off into their own, fascinating independent game design community. (If you’re interested in the roots of the genre, please check out Dennis Jerz’s excellent history of Colossal Cave, another shoo-in for an assigned reading in my course this spring).

I’m still working through a readings list, but will definitely feature a “playings list” of good, interesting interactive fiction games. So, it turns out Nick Montfort has impeccable timing and has recently posted an updated list of recommended interactive fiction games for Fall, 2009. If you’re unfamiliar with Montfort, he’s the author of the interesting interactive fiction history Twisty Little Passages, as well as the co-author of the recent Racing The Beam with Ian Bogost, a fantastic analysis of the Atari 2600 through several key games for the platform.

Here’s a snippet from Montfort’s post, describing his thoughts on how he shaped this list of recommendations:

A good introduction to interactive fiction does not have to be easy or simple. A game that you have to restart several times, and that you can only scratch the surface of after a few hours of effort, may show you, by being intricate and compelling, why it’s really worthwhile to try to meet the challenges of IF. It seems most important to me that a piece of IF quickly gives a sense of the powerful, interesting play of simulation and language. Such a game might happen to be hard or easy. On the other hand, some good games rely on a player knowing about IF conventions and even particular earlier games, characters, or puzzles. These often aren’t good places for someone just starting. There are many good commercial games from the 1980s and some from more recent times, but in my main list, I’ve limited myself to games that authors have made available for free download.

I’ve played a number of these, and find the list to be generally a great, varied list of recent games for both novices and experts. But, some were still new to me; for instance, I was unaware that Dan Schmidt — one of the key designers at Harmonix responsible for Guitar Hero and the Rock Band games — had started off writing IF. So, lots here to play with.

But, if you want the bleeding edge of text-based adventuring, the games in contention for the 15th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is also now up and ready to download! I haven’t played any of these, but this is the premier short-form interactive fiction competition, and if recent years are any indication, there will be a few excellent gems in the bunch. Looking forward to giving a few a spin in the coming week or two.

It’s amazing to me that this game genre is still alive and well, over three decades since the first text adventure was written. Here’s to IF’s continued success.