A software exhibit that allows you to explore Zork and also Zork's source code at the same time.| eblong.com
About Zarfhome| eblong.com
E BLONG| eblong.com
Review: Zork Nemesis| eblong.com
Review: Obsidian| eblong.com
Review: Lighthouse| eblong.com
Reviews of Commercial Games| eblong.com
Please wait while Parchment loads.| eblong.com
This site is my attempt to collect every single version of each Infocom game, both source code and compiled game files. I have labelled each package with release and serial number information where possible. (Infocom serial numbers were a timestamp of the compilation date, which is very useful for reconstructing the development sequence.)| eblong.com
Review: The Dark Eye| eblong.com
Zarf's Redundant Site Map| eblong.com
Another short math/science illustrated essay: The Arches of the Little Prince. Can you build a pole-to-pole arch on a tiny planetoid? Turns out you can.| Zarfhome
Watch This is a short fanfic tag set after, or during-after, the game Oxenfree.| Zarfhome
A short essay on The Twin not-really Paradox, with diagrams. This is an old subject (a century old!) but I've never seen an explanation that illustrated it the way I understand it.| Zarfhome
The books I bought in the first half of 2014, and what I thought of each one. (If you want to see reviews posted as I write them, follow me on Goodreads.)| Zarfhome
Redwreath and Goldstar Have Traveled to Deathsgate (or, the Paarfi-o-matic loosed.) A generated novel for NaNoGenMo 2013.| Zarfhome
An introduction to Seltani, the choice-based hypertext Myst MUD I've been working on.| Zarfhome
The books I bought in the first half of 2013, and what I thought of each one.| Zarfhome
Now it is announced: Bigger Than You Think, a short choice-based text game that I wrote for Yuletide. It was inspired by that gigantic xkcd comic.| Zarfhome
The books I bought in the first half of 2012, and what I thought of each one. By the way, these reviews are now linked from my main book list. Should make 'em easier to find.| Zarfhome
Another Javascript poem, this time a rendering of someone else's work: Eight Haiku -- An Experiment by Richard Alderson. Based on Richard's original poem here. (Thanks to him for giving me permission to post this.) This uses CSS animations, and only works on WebKit (Safari/Chrome) web browsers. (Sorry -- I need to figure out the moz- equivalent for Firefox.)| Zarfhome
Riddle Sutra, a Javascript (and audio) poem that I created for an ELO reading at MIT. The goal (not very seriously) is to procedurally generate every possible riddle. The Boodler package that runs the audio is also available.| Zarfhome
An alpha release of RemGlk, a remote-procedure-call Glk library. This is a component which should make IF bots and web services easier to write.| Zarfhome
In 2001 I posted a teaser page for The Emperor's Star, a three-day, six-player Chrononauts role-playing scenario. Then nothing happened for eleven years. Then Anna Anthropy rightly bugged me about publishing it, and bugged me again until I did something about it. So here it is. All the rules, character information, and the timeline are posted now; also the PDF files I used for the original play session.| Zarfhome
Look at this awesome thing Jason Shiga made.| Zarfhome
This may amuse some folks: A portrait of all the characters in System's Twilight, digitally remastered in vector form! (Here they are in their original 32x32 outfits.)| Zarfhome
IFComp is over, and it turns out I entered this year! Cold Iron placed fifteenth of 38 entries. But there's more to the story than that: I collaborated with three other Boston IF authors to create a secret, cross-game bonus puzzle. Here's an explanation.| Zarfhome
I just threw together a game-design aid to help me with Hadean Lands puzzle layout: PlotEx, a tool for exploring puzzle plot constraints. Might be useful to other folks.| Zarfhome
A dynamic poem: Argot Ogre, OK! (Requires javascript. Content is not all safe for work.) This is a remix of Taroko Gorge, by Nick Montfort, and a stack of poems that remixed that.| Zarfhome
The books I bought in the first half of 2011, and what I thought of each one.| Zarfhome
I've been meaning to post this for a while. Umics: an Emacs replacement that I wrote in Python! Or rather, that I started to write in 2003, futzed around with for a few weeks, and dropped. It's got no editing features at all -- just a framework for buffers, windows, and keyboard commands. But the framework is pretty solid, considering how little work I put in. I'm releasing this under the "show your work" stricture of my web site. I make an effort to release my unsuccessful efforts as well as...| Zarfhome
I've posted The Matter of the Monster, a very small choose-your-own-adventure-style story that I wrote for the Indigo New Language Speed-IF challenge. (The first version I posted was buggy on Firefox, but I think I've fixed that now.) The new language I used -- new to me, that is -- is Undum, a Javascript CYOA toolkit. I had to hack on Undum a little to get the effect I wanted; you can download my toolkit changes here.| Zarfhome
Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home has won the 2010 XYZZY award for Best Writing. Also, Quixe won Best Technological Development. Excellent. On to 2011.| Zarfhome
I've moved my web site to new hosting. If you're reading this entry, you're there. I don't expect any trouble, beyond the usual potential 24-hour delay as the Internet catches up with the change.| Zarfhome
Here's a collection of interviews and articles with and about me. I linked to the older ones when they appeared, and the big batch about Hadean Lands are collected in this blog post. But I want a link farm on my own site, so there it is.| Zarfhome
I've posted Glk spec 0.7.1, along with a slew of Glk libraries and an updated Quixe. You can read an overview of the changes here. (They're not dramatic.)| Zarfhome
End-of-year present: StonerView in your web browser. In Safari, at least -- it doesn't seem to work in Chrome, and I haven't set up the CSS properly to work in Firefox. Sorry! But you can install it as a web app on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. Probably on Android devices, too, although I haven't tested them.| Zarfhome
Today was the last day of my job as an industry software engineer. Tomorrow is the first day of my job as an interactive fiction designer. But the first few days will be planned relaxation, because it's holiday time.| Zarfhome
A frequent criticism of Inform 7 is that the manual needs an index. Sean Barrett put together an unofficial one several years ago, but it got out of date. I have now updated and extended it for the current I7 release. Check out Inform 7: An Unofficial Documentation Index.| Zarfhome
The shirt-selling page wasn't solely a money-grubbing experiment. I've started designing shirts to wear myself. (How many years have I spent wearing other people's art?) It's a project, so it gets its own page. Not all of the designs are for sale -- I'm still using a free Cafepress account, so I can only offer a few options. But I've added the Shade artwork.| Zarfhome
Late, because I was getting ready for Readercon: books I bought in the first half of 2010, and what I thought of each one.| Zarfhome
Back from Readercon, where I gave a short introduction to IF for writers. Jason Scott also showed his Get Lamp documentary (the convention cut, 60 minutes), and folks from the book-fandom world seemed willing to be interested in IF as a topic. At least for two hours on a Saturday evening.| Zarfhome
Meet the 1.0 release of Quixe, a pure-Javascript interpreter for the Glulx IF virtual machine. You can use this to put Glulx games (the larger games generated by Inform 7) on a web page. Try out Adventure on a web page.| Zarfhome
This weekend I took part in an online chat about rule-based programming. Our original intent was to design a complete (albeit tiny) programming language. We didn't succeed at that, but we did have a useful discussion of the programming ideas I've been idly kicking around for the past several years. Now they've been kicked farther. Thanks to William Byrd for suggesting this, and to him, Cassie Orr, and Doug Orleans for participating.| Zarfhome
Zarf's List of Interactive Games on the Web. Remember that? I found a cached copy, so now it's back on my web site where it belongs. A couple of the links even still work!| Zarfhome
A quick experiment in presenting IF: Transmatte. This is not a way to play IF, but rather a way to excerpt an IF scene on a web page, in order to discuss it. You create a handful of transcripts which demonstrate your point; the transmatte.py script munges them together into a dynamic web page. Go look at the examples, it's easier than explaining how it works.| Zarfhome
This is a frightening burst of web-site activity, isn't it? I just re-played Myst 5 -- my second time through. But this time I wrote a review. Finally.| Zarfhome
I am thrilled to announce that my game Spider And Web has been translated into Russian by Vsevolod Zoubarev. He volunteered to do this over a year ago, and he has been working tirelessly, almost entirely on his own -- he asked me just a couple of questions over the entire development cycle. I am extremely grateful to Vsevolod for his interest and perseverance. You can download the game file (and accompanying introductory files, also in Russian). Vsevolod has entered his translation in the KRI...| Zarfhome
Here's a weekend hack I whipped up for the Boston IF meetup: Mutagen, a simple Javascript library for generating pseudorandom strings of text. Push the button! Keep pushing it. Source code is linked from the explanation page. Feel free to use it or port it or whatever. It's more of an example than a usable tool, but it might solve somebody's problem somewhere.| Zarfhome
Look what I posted fifteen years ago today!System's Twilight was released on October 8, 1994. But I waited a day before posting to Usenet, because I wanted to make sure it had propagated to all the Info-Mac FTP mirrors.| Zarfhome
I haven't done a review post in a while. I've been playing the games, but they haven't been turning into reviews. I've been doing other stuff, mostly. But specially for you -- Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper. Some recent games have been turning into bits of commentary, which I'm ashamed to even call "mini-reviews". But you can see them on my Quick Take Reviews page, and also in this Gameshelf blog post I just made.| Zarfhome
Backdated entry here, sorry. I put this up in time for Worldcon, but forgot to add it to the "what's new" list. Now you know: the books I bought in the first half of 2009, and what I thought of each one.| Zarfhome
Have a look at Rule-Based Programming in Interactive Fiction. This is a slide presentation I gave at Penguicon 7, on May 3, 2009. I describe the programming model which Inform 7 is based on, and then go on to a more general rule model which I am still trying to figure out. (See also my earlier notes on rule-based programming.)| Zarfhome
A few weeks late: books I bought in the second half of 2008. And what I thought of each one. I extended the existing "2008" page, so if the early entries look familiar, skip down to Axis in late June for new ones.| Zarfhome
Here's some more nostalgia: the write-up of Inhumane that appeared in The Book of Adventure Games II in 1985. My first review! Entirely fair, considering that it was reviewing a game I wrote in BASIC as an Infocom parody. I was 15 when I saw it, and it was about the best thing ever. Thank you, Kim R. Schuette, wherever you are.| Zarfhome
2009 is the fifteenth anniversary year of System's Twilight, my old Mac puzzle extravaganza. In celebration, I'm releasing the audio files. (CC license.) All the little zip, zwoop, sproing noises that I made for the original game. Download as MP3, AIFF, or iPhone ringtones.| Zarfhome
Review: RealMyst| eblong.com
Reviews of Commercial Games| eblong.com
Review: Riven| eblong.com
Interactive fiction was the first great computer-game craze. Through| eblong.com