Text Machines

Raconteur is a framework that makes developing Undum stories less painful.

As of March 2014, the parser is still far behind more mature systems (Inform 7, TADS 3, etc). Unlike those though, Gamefic is a library in a standard programming language (Ruby), not a language of its own, which means you can do anything you can do in ruby (which is anything) in Gamefic. 

There's a sample implementation of Cloak of Darkness here: http://pistacchio.github.io/Dedalus/cloak/cloak.html

The SPAG magazine is back, with issue 61.

If you're looking for info on old text adventure games (rather than more contemporary interactive fiction), this is a site worth checking out.

The games in the 2012 edition of the IF comp are now up and available for downloading or, in mist cases, playing online.

Some are really funny, and most of them are cheesy.

Failbetter Games have a new storygame platform rising from the deep!

In a recent update, the Inklewriter over at http://writer.inklestudios.com just got a little smarter. There is now support for conditions. This is what Jon Ingold wrote about it over at indication.org: As a basic, you add markers to paragraphs of text, and then can test if those markers have been seen / not seen, and turn on and off paragraphs and/or options on the basis of that. You can also do conditional text inline, in an Inform-7-ish kinda way. More powerfully, you can declare variables by setting a marker of "value = 3", and increment/decrement them with simple instructions ("value + 2", "value - 2"). You can test for equality, and the usual orderings (>, <, <=, >=). Conditionals can be strung together using and's and not's. Here's an example of the thing in action: a first chapter of "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual" by Arthur Conan Doyle. http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/musgraveritual

Varytale describes itself as "a publisher and retailer of Interactive books". The books in question are read in a browser, and present choices, mainly at the end of the the segments. It seems they also use a somewhat unusual notion of sections of text that can be "finished". They seem to go for a serious the, and also point out that they are not about gaming but about telling stories. (just to be clear, I am not saying that games cannot be a serious as stories, interactive or otherwise). There's a story by Emily Short, who is one of the more respected authors of interactive stories. The authoring tools at varytale are closed for the moment, although you can request an account by e-mail. From what they say it's an online authoring tool, and it supports stateful stories. There Is also something called story points which control how fast you can read a story, and the option to charge for the stories either up front or to access parts of the story.

The Inklewriter is a really nice tool for editing and playing choice IF in a browser. Currently (may 2012) it only supports stateless choice IF, that is, there are no variables, no random outcomes, no substitutions in the text or anything like that. Still, it is really easy to use and allows you to focus on the writing. And it looks like more advanced features are on their way.

Guncho is a framework for multiplayer interactive fiction, written in Inform7 and published online. As a player you can move between different "realms" and meet other players. The guncho wiki: http://wiki.guncho.com

Replaying and re-reading are two different things. If the interesting thing is not what the author writes but what the reader reads (as Barthes suggested), rereading creates a new reading, because the reader is somebody else (namely: one who has already read the text). Replaying means being able to make other decisions the second time you play a game. This is something that happens in the game, not in your head. The claim that replaying and rereading are different things does not mean you can't do both at the same time. In fact, assuming you go along with the idea of treating a game as a text, it would be impossible to replay something without also rereading it. Unless you argue that a piece of IF is not a text in itself, but a text machine, so that you are in fact not reading the same text, but a different text created by the same text machine at the time of playing. That last bit is a tricky argument, because it's not obviously false, but still misleading. The reason it's misleading is because it's missing the point: while any interactive work can be seen as creating a (perhaps infinite) set of possible interactions, you shouldn't try to understand the work by looking at the interactions, or in IF terms - by reading the transcripts.

Twine is an authoring tool for choice-based interactive fiction. There are visual editors for windows and os x, and a python command line tool. The output is just a web page that works in a standard web browser.