Who Keeps Text Games Alive: The Institutions Behind the Archive

Infocom became defunct in 1989. The Z-machine it designed in 1979 is still in use, still has published works, and still has a file extension people meet for the first time every year. Something had to keep that going, and the something was not a company.

The archive

The Interactive Fiction Archive describes itself in its games index as holding many thousands of works of interactive fiction, alongside the original source code for many games. It organises them by the machinery they need: Z-code, Glulx and TADS games run in a dedicated interpreter, while HTML, Twine, Ink and Texture games run in a web browser.

An archive is a modest-sounding institution and an extremely load-bearing one. It is what makes a 1980s story file openable now, and it is what makes the source of a Twine game inspectable rather than lost in a build directory.

The foundation

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation describes itself as the body behind that archive and a cluster of related programs. Its published program list names, among others: the IFComp Committee, the Twine Committee, the IF Archive Committee, the IFDB Committee, the IFWiki Committee, the IntFiction Forum Committee, the Accessibility Testing Committee, the Conference Committee and an Education Committee. It also lists research and reports among its activities.

The important structural fact is that tools, catalogue, forum, archive and competition sit under one roof. In most media these would be separate businesses with different incentives. Here they share a mission, which is why a decision about the Twine editor can be made with the archive’s needs in view.

The competition

IFComp describes itself as an annual celebration of new, text-driven digital games and stories from independent creators. On the page seen at the time of writing it reported that the most recent competition had concluded and named its first-place entry.

A recurring competition does two jobs that nothing else reliably does. It creates a regular reason to finish a work rather than abandon it, and it produces a public set of authored works each year that the archive can then hold. Without a yearly cadence, a hobbyist form tends to produce starts rather than endings.

Spring Thing is a second, differently organised fixture. Wikipedia records that it was founded by Adam Cadre, that the competition first ran in 2002 with Cadre hosting in 2002 and 2003, that after a year of inactivity Greg Boettcher hosted it from 2005 until 2013, and that Aaron A. Reed took over in 2014 and rebranded it as a “festival” of interactive fiction in 2015.

That history is unusually well documented for a volunteer institution, and it shows the real risk model: continuity was carried by individual volunteers, one handover at a time.

The tools as institutions

The authoring tools play the same role from the production side. Twine’s documentation frames passages as the foundational unit of the whole medium, with a title, optional tags, and content that mixes prose with code. ink is presented by its makers as markup rather than programming, aimed at writers.

Both are the reason new works keep appearing. A tool that requires a compiler, an interpreter and a build pipeline limits the author pool. A tool that produces a page you can open in a browser does not.

What this means for a reader

The practical consequence is that almost everything worth reading is still reachable. If a work is in the archive and needs an interpreter, that interpreter is a small program you can obtain. If it is browser-based, the archive says so.

The less obvious consequence is that the form’s health is currently measured in institutions rather than revenue. That is a fragile arrangement — it depends on volunteers, donated time and a foundation willing to hold the boring parts — but it has already outlasted every company that tried to sell interactive fiction as a product line.

Sources

• Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation — https://iftechfoundation.org/
• The Interactive Fiction Archive — https://www.ifarchive.org/
• IFComp — https://ifcomp.org/
• Wikipedia, “Spring Thing” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Thing
• Wikipedia, “Infocom” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infocom