Brian Rushton is a 2023 IFTF Grant recipient who has recently completed his project, and we are delighted to share his success with you!

The annual Interactive Fiction Competition and XYZZY Awards have a history stretching back decades, and these events have been integral to developing and celebrating the art of interactive storytelling. Brian Rushton, a prolific IF reviewer and chronicler of community history, received a IFTF microgrant to revise and extend his year-by-year writeups of these key community events, helping to preserve this history for decades to come. You can access Brian’s project directly by clicking here.

We had an opportunity to speak with Brian on completion of his book, where we discussed the lessons and discoveries made in the course of his process.

“It gave me more of a sense for more modern games. I had spent so much time in the past playing old IFComp games that I had the top 3 games memorized for many years. But I had trouble even remembering winners from recent years. So this really helped me see new games from a new viewpoint. My overall sense is that skill and polish are at a higher level now than ever before.”

Brian also shared in the challenges he faced while working on the project:

“Citations were hard! I wanted to add them for two reasons: one, out of hopes that people would discover new games or old forum conversations that could help them. The other was to ensure that I was quoting people correctly. But it was so hard to track them all down; I ended up having to write Python programs and learn more about regex and api to automate most of the citations. There ended up being over 900!”

The funds from the grant made it possible for Brian to leave a part-time job to focus on the project, which included adding 13 more articles, including seven more IFComp history articles and six more XYZZY Best Game award articles, as well as updating Spring Thing’s history to the present day. Brian also added almost a thousand citations as well as implementing hyperlinks, an epub version, and an index.

“One feature of my grant is that the book would be free forever. It’s something I’d like to add to, and I imagine keeping it updated at the IFArchive. If it were useful in an academic setting, I’d be happy to have a version of it published as well, but I intentionally kept the style more chatty and conversational, so it lacks some of the rigor that is more popular in academia. So my current plan is to keep it on the IFArchive, Github, and similar hosting sites!”

We’re all so excited to see this book come to fruition, and so appreciative of the love and care Brian has put into this living document.

“This book simply wouldn’t exist without the IFTF’s help. I did the fun parts years ago, and all that remained was a lot of hard work, and I didn’t have much time. The funding from the IFTF gave me both the time to work and the accountability to get it finished. I definitely appreciate the fund and hope that it helps others as well!”

There are so many fantastic ways we’ve seen people in this community engage with what they love, and the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation wants to help in whatever way we can to bring these things into the world. If you know of an IF-related project that may be in need of some help getting to the finish line, then stay tuned to this blog for updates on this year’s grant application period!