In accordance with hosting regulations and general courtesy, please be warned that this page (and some of the games on it) use language and imagery (in the sense of evocation, not in the sense of actual graphics) not appropriate for all ages, sensitivities, and religious beliefs. Most of it is, in my opinion, rather tame, but others may differ.

Take IF, for example. Interactive fiction has a tiny audience. The number of people who follow IF is somewhere in the same range as the number of people who read "Daria" fanfic or collect WWI helmets. We're talking about maybe a couple hundred people on the outside. You would not expect writing an IF program to make a huge difference in one's life. But you would be wrong.
—Adam Cadre

New! Thanks to the Parchment web-based interpreter, you can now play the games without downloading anything, if your web browser is sufficiently javascript-capable.

What is interactive fiction?

I've written several games, most of them silly, and most of them for the irregular speedIF events. All of my games are written in Inform, so you'll need a Z-code interpreter to play them.

• 1997
  • The Bank of Zork (source, play online!)
    This was my first released work, and was really written as a joke for a mathematical modeling class I was taking at the time. Nonetheless, it has some interesting library hacks, probably outdated by upgrades in the library, allowing for numbered individuals and hermaphrodites. Exactly how old it is should be clear from the email address given in the game, which hasn't been active since before I went to college.
• 1999
  • Zokoban (play online!)
    Not much to be said for this one, but that it was an exercise in writing a Z-machine abuse, and there was an obvious abuse to be written here. There's nothing great about this one except the idea -- and the idea worked far better in Quim K. Holland's A Tight Spot.
• 2001
  • Getting to Know the General (play online!) from SpeedIF O
    My first work in Inform for many years, this one surprisingly didn't suck as hard as it might have. There are embarassing blunders (try jumping while in the suitcase), most of which are well within the acceptable suckitude of SpeedIF entries. Notably, this game ended up with a bizarre element which was not dictated by the constraints: three elements of the game were lifted from three separate Graham Greene works, one of them incorrectly (the brand name of the unusually large suitcase in Travels With My Aunt was "Revelation", not "Remington").
  • Pick Up the IF-Archive and Pi (play online!) from SpeedIF Pi-Theta-Aleph-Parallax
    This one may require a slight bit of historical explanation: around the time of this SpeedIF, there was a great deal of anxiety in the IF community over the merger of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and the Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung. This particular merger worried the rest of the world not a bit, but was alarming to the IF community largely because the GMD ftp site graciously donated space and bandwidth for the IF-Archive, the main repository of interactive fiction and IF tools on the internet. So, this one's a petty little revenge fantasy, on behalf of the IF community.
  • Apocolyptica [sic] (play online!) from SpeedIF y=1/x
    There's not much to be said about this one. I enjoyed writing it and think it's pretty good, other than my demonstrated inability to spell "Apocalypse".
• 2002
  • Tightest (play online!) from SpeedIF EXTREME
    I've got nothing to say but this: Shakespeare, Nethack, and the U.S. Men's Hockey Team really don't mix.
  • Descent of Man (play online!) from SpeedIF Orange
    My first, but not even close to my last, game set in Hell. I apologize to the Pythagoreans for misrepresenting their beliefs.
  • Taipan! (source .zip, play online!))
    This is a port of Art Canfil's Apple ][ classic Taipan! to the Z-Machine. It's not original, alas, but it was an excellent chance to test drive Kevin Bracey's extraordinary Inform floating-point library.
  • The Road to Destruction (featuring Bob Hope) (play online!) from SpeedIF 10^-9
    Both the premise for and title of this SpeedIF event came from my (perhaps unfortunate) brainstorm to use a Nanofictionary deck to create SpeedIF parameters. As a historical note, this is the first nontrivial work I tested out my 'mislead' inform patch (coming soon) on, and as such, destruct.z1 is the first work in twenty years, as far as I know, compiled in the version 1 Z-Machine format, to be released to the general public. If you don't know (and actually do care) about what these version numbers signify, check out the short history of the Z-Machine.
• 2003
  • Upwards and Onwards (play online!) from SpeedIF 19
    It's another religious farce! I fear I become typecast. Also, it really needed a better title.
  • What Dreams May Come (play online!) from SpeedIF Jacket 2
    I was really busy this weekend, and the parameters soaked in my brain for a while before I came out and wrote it. Also, I'd been kind of suffering from mood swings, so this one ended up a lot darker (or at least less humorous) than my SpeedIFs usually are. Bonus points, however, for finding references to T.S. Eliot and Nine Inch Nails.
  • Sell-Out (play online!) from SpeedIF 20
    This one was actually written in realtime, for once. It features at least one device I've used before -- the "message stolen from nethack" -- and also has the single worst room description I've ever written in it.
  • Schrödinger's Door (play online!) from SpeedIF Let's Make a Nightmare
    This is the effort of which I'm the least proud. I had a lot of interesting ideas, but time ran low, and the result ended up being just plain lame.
• 2004
  • Twilight of the Dogs (play online!) from SpeedIF that Dare Not Speak Its Number
    For whatever reason, I made this one huge. It's full of rooms in which nothing at all happens but which create an almost-consistent geography. This makes it large, by SpeedIF standards. In addition, it's rated PG-13 for violent imagery and implied sexual activity.
  • Fade to Black (play online!) from SpeedIF Century
    Writing descriptions all in haiku was a fun challenge. I particularly liked having an opportunity to paraphrase a Right Said Fred song in haiku. It's a 90s flashback, Japanese-poetry style! Besides that, an awful lot of the jokes are topical -- if not to the XYZZY awards, at least to current events. I'm being optimistic here. I'm presuming future generations will not remember Justin Timberlake well enough to comprehend the sort of irritation he provokes. Then again, future generations probably won't play my SpeedIF either, so it all works out fine.
• 2005
  • The Something Adventures of Somebody (play online!) from SpeedIF Jacket 3
    I'm presenting a quasiprofessional front as of now, so if you want the actual title of this game, you've got to download it (or look at the aforementioned Wiki link). It's a large, sparse game. I had the title long before I had anything else, and if you want an explanation of the title, well, you'll have to ask. There are a lot of nifty bits which you're unlikely to see on an average playthrough, though (props if you found the monkey wrench without TXD).
• 2006
  • Little Green Robbing Hood (play online!) from SpeedIF Gruff
    Silly, undirected, and with at least one in-joke nobody who's going to play this game will get (and about 3 which everybody who plays this game will get). Not my most inspired work, but not completely pointless either. This is the first -- and at present only -- post-Infocom Z2 game ever. How's that for obscurity?
  • Somebody's Second Adventure: The Job (Z5 file, source, play online!) from SpeedIF Neologism
    It's my first Inform 7 game. That explains why it's kind of buggy. It's also a sequel to the Game Which May Not Be Named, so it doesn't get named either. I include the source code mostly as an example of what happens if you let someone comfortable with Inform 6 loose on I7.
• 2007
  • The Twelve Heads of St. John the Baptist (source, play online!) from SpeedIF Introcomp
    My seocnd, and somewhat more polished, Inform 7 game. The central conceit I lifted, to some extent, from Umberto Eco's Baudolino, but of course I am not nearly as skilled a wordsmith as he. Ever since the Game Which Dare Not Speak Its Name, I've come up with titles long in advance of actual competition parameters, and this game was no exception. I had the title in mind months before a SpeedIF actually came around to put it in.

A related work to IF, but not a work of IF in its own right, is my big baroque Do-Anything-You-Want-It-To Inform Makefile. It's got all sorts of fiddly bits, including automated abbreviation computation and padding stripping, and the ability to produce z3 games (given appropriate libraries) or Glulx (given an appropriate compiler). In addition, I have a stub file I always use to start my projects.