The new wave of IF is centered in the Usenet newsgroups rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction, and that's about where I come into the picture. I was an avid Infocom gamer in my teens, and discovered the IF renaissance during grad school ('round about 1994.) Since that time, I've created four games, written dozens of reviews, and taken on the mantle of editorship at an IF-centered webzine. It's become one of my hobbies and one of my passions, and I'm proud to call myself a member of the Internet IF community. On this page, you can find information about my games, archives of all my reviews, and lots of interesting links. If you're a newcomer to IF and want to know more than the cursory outline I've given above, try Stephen Granade's Brass Lantern site for lots and lots of general info and links, and Emily Short's Recommended Playing List for a rundown of games generally considered to be good.

Oh, and why ">VERBOSE"? Well, the ">" is the standard IF prompt. As for "VERBOSE", it not only describes my writing style (as you've no doubt noticed by now), it's the first command I type in any piece of IF.

My latest IF work is a series of games that pay tribute to the Marvel superheroes I've loved all my life. The first, an 8th place finisher in the 2001 IF Competition, is called Earth And Sky, and the second one, which actually won the 2002 Comp, is helpfully dubbed Another Earth, Another Sky. The final episode is Luminous Horizon, which won the 2004 comp, but which I haven't gotten around to creating a page for yet. Sorry!

In March of 2000 I released a game called LASH. It's a major work of interactive fiction, and it was almost two years in the making. I encourage you to download it (or play it on this site, if you've got a Java-enabled browser) and tell me what you think!

The first game I ever wrote was a short fantasy game entitled Wearing the Claw. It concerns a young protagonist's quest to defeat a slowly advancing curse, and it won 8th place in the 1996 Interactive Fiction Competition.

SPAG stands for the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games, but it's not really a society as much as it is a webzine. The zine was named and founded by Kevin Wilson, and I edited it for six years (1999-2005). The current editor is the esteemed Jimmy Maher. Each issue features loads of reviews of interactive fiction, as well as news, interviews, and lots more.

The SPAG website also features archives of all SPAG reviews (with links to the games they discuss), every back issue of SPAG, and the SPAG FAQ. It's enough to keep any interactive fiction aficionado in bliss for days.

• 2004 Competition Game Reviews
• 2003 Competition Game Reviews
• 2002 Competition Game Reviews
• 2001 Competition Game Reviews
• 2000 Competition Game Reviews
• 1999 Competition Game Reviews
• 1998 Competition Game Reviews
• 1997 Competition Game Reviews
• 1996 Competition Game Reviews

"His reviews are often better than the games they're about." -- Stephen Granade

One salient feature of the new wave in IF is the annual Interactive Fiction Competition, now in its eighth year. Competition games are usually short works, which gives authors the ability to stretch and experiment with the form. The competition has seen an incredibly wide variety of works as a result.

One thing I did for nine years is try to provide substantive feedback for competition authors in the form of reviews. Below is a list of the games I've reviewed -- click on the game's title to read the review. Note that although for voting purposes competition games are rated on an integer scale of 1 to 10, I've taken the ratings out to one decimal place for a little finer calibration.

I've linked the game title in each review header to the appropriate directory at the IF-Archive. If you're unfamiliar with IF file formats, you might take a look at Stephen Griffiths' FAQ on the subject. Also, if you're having trouble downloading these files with a web browser, remember to right-click on the file name to download it in binary format -- browsers don't typically recognize IF file types.

Finally, just for fun I've compiled a couple of plaintext listings of the competition games ordered according to the scores I gave them. One listing separates the games by year, while the other lumps them all together.

The only competition games missing from these listings should be:

• The 1995 competition games, about which I didn't write reviews.
• My own games Wearing the Claw, Earth And Sky, Another Earth, Another Sky, and Luminous Horizon, about which I can't be objective.
• The excellent games Mother Loose and All Roads, for which I was a beta-tester.
• The 1996 game Promoted!, which required the OS/2 operating system to run.
• The 2000 games Infil-Traitor and Happy Ever After, which had known bugs that required recompilation before the games were viable.
• The 2001 game Begegnung Am Fluss, which was in German.
• Games written by newsgroup trolls (defined by me as people who have made multiple, unprovoked, personal attacks on newsgroup regulars), which I don't have the ability or inclination to review fairly.
• Games from 2005 or later -- after my son was born I lost the time that used to go into these reviews.

In the spring of 1993, I was in the midst of a Master's Degree program in English Literature at CU-Boulder, taking a class in Literary Theory. At the same time, I had just rediscovered IF via the Lost Treasures of Infocom packages. For my final project in that class, I wrote a paper called Interactive Fiction and Reader-Response Criticism . That paper was missing for quite some time, since it was written on a legacy word processor and I had lost the file anyway. However, I found the hard copy in my recent move and, eager to test out the OCR capabilities of my just-purchased scanner, scanned it in, cleaned it up, and presented it here in text form. Naturally, it's not the paper I would write today, having done much more thinking and acquired much more knowledge about IF since the time I wrote it. However, it still might be interesting to some people out there.

I also wrote an essay for the long-anticipated IF Theory book called Landscape And Character In IF

I wrote an extensive review for the first book-length academic examination of interactive fiction, Nick Montfort's excellent Twisty Little Passages.

I wrote a few IF Haikus that started a fun thread on the newsgroup.

I've been interviewed a few times in various places:

• InsideADRIFT, a fanzine for users of the ADRIFT IF development system.
• Terra D'IF , an Italian IF zine.
• Duncan Stevens interviewed me in SPAG #31. It's rather odd to be interviewed in one's own zine, but SPAG has a tradition of interviewing the top three finishers in the IF comp, and I won that year. However, when I won the next time, SPAG interviewed finishers 2-4.

I'm quite fond of Mark Musante's IF-Review, which is currently the only site that pays for IF reviews. I've reviewed the following games for Mark:

• City Of Secrets
• Dungeon, the original MIT mainframe version of Zork.
• Future Boy!
• Lock & Key
• Once And Future

I wrote an advance review for The Act Of Misdirection, a comp-sized game by Callico Harrison released in early 2004.

I've been asked to serve as a judge for a variety of mini-comps:

• PrologueComp [Reviews]
• SmoochieComp [Reviews]
• WackyComp [Reviews]

I've beta-tested some large games, and for a couple of them, I wrote the author a long letter afterwards talking about my reactions. These letters were more or less informal reviews, but I didn't release them as reviews at the time, since there's something less than kosher about a betatester reviewing a game. Now, with the permission of the authors, I'm reprinting those letters here. Please note that they can be rather spoilery.

• Dangerous Curves by Irene Callaci -- 28 April 2000
• Worlds Apart by Suzanne Britton -- 19 May 1999

I've also done some reviews of graphic adventure games, though I never manage to play them until several years after they've been released, which is why I call them "Really Late Reviews." They were originally hosted on Stephen Granade's site when it was a part of About.com.

• Really Late Review #1: The Space Bar
• Really Late Review #2: Riven
• Really Late Review #3: Redjack: Revenge of the Bretheren