Dannii Willis has been the main developer of the open source tool Parchment for a very long time (has it been 15 years already?). Parchment is a very cool interpreter for parser games, allowing anyone to play the games directly in the browser. Dannii applied in 2023 for an IFTF microgrant, asking the organization to cover the price of acquiring a used iOS device; this would allow him to test the Parchment interpreter on real hardware himself, which would lend itself to faster iterations. Dannii was also in particular very interested to test the compatibility of Parchment on iOS with UserVoice, and try to push the envelope around accessibility features for blind or low-vision players.

We just received his report, which has great detail on the project and the work he accomplished using the iOS device he was able to acquire with our support — work for Parchment, but also on other cool projects! Hope you enjoy reading this!

Thanks to the IFTF grant I was able to purchase a refurbished iPhone 13, which has allowed me to test and resolve some significant issues with Parchment.

First, some virtual keyboard improvements: mobile phones and tablets are commonly used via virtual keyboards. While on most websites these work smoothly, they pose a problem for an app like Parchment which wants to adjust itself to fit perfectly in the remaining visible screen space, so that the status window etc will still be visible. Unfortunately browsers don’t act the same way with their virtual keyboards, so keeping a consistent user interface for both iOS and Android is difficult. In late 2022 Chrome introduced a meta tag for specifying which behaviour an app wants. Firefox added support for it in 2024, but Safari still doesn’t support it. In addition, while Safari does support the VirtualViewport API, which allows you to be notified when the virtual keyboard is opened or closed, its resize events are quite delayed, up to 700ms, which feels very sluggish. With my iOS testing device I was able to find solutions for these problems, so that Parchment now has a very smooth and responsive interface on all browsers.

The next two projects haven’t been added to the stable version of Parchment yet, but have been shared for testing. As part of a major comprehensive update to Parchment, I have developed a new file system and dialog. Similarly to the general virtual keyboard updates, it needed a little bit of special care to get working in iOS. Second, I have finally added sound support to Parchment! The Glk API that Parchment is built upon supports three sound formats, AIFF, Ogg/Vorbis, and MOD. Unfortunately Chrome doesn’t support AIFF, and Safari doesn’t support Ogg/Vorbis! (None of them support MOD, though MOD files are also rarely used, so for now I’m not intending to support them in Parchment.) I have added a small audio decoding library into Parchment so that AIFF and Ogg/Vorbis can be supported in all browsers.

And I have also used the iOS device for a bonus project: Infocom Frotz! This isn’t part of Parchment, but seeing as I used my iOS test device to work on it, I’ll mention it too: this year I ported Frotz to the web, finally allowing Infocom’s multimedia (sound/graphics) games to be played online. Infocom’s version 6 of the Z-Machine was a big departure from its earlier versions, and so even today it is only supported by some Z-Machine interpreters. Its window model is not compatible with the Glk model that most interpreters now use, and so playing Infocom’s Z6 games has required a stand-alone Z-Machine interpreter rather than the multi-interpreters the community usually recommends (Gargoyle, Lectrote, Spatterlight, or Parchment). But just because the Z6 model doesn’t fit our modern Glk model doesn’t mean that interpreters like Frotz aren’t high quality. Frotz already has an SDL version, and Emscripten, which I’ve been using for years to port the Glk interpreters for Parchment, also supports SDL. So it didn’t take a lot of effort to build Frotz with Emscripten, thereby allowing the Z6 model to finally be supported on the web. It still needed some extra polishing, most notably that Emscripten’s version of SDL doesn’t support mobile virtual keyboards. But I have a lot of experience with that! And of course, there were more viewport issues in iOS.

The test iOS test device helped me accomplish a lot this year that I couldn’t have effectively tested otherwise. Even though the year is over I of course won’t be getting rid of the phone. So you can expect at least one more end of year report from me. Will Safari finally add support for the interactive-widget viewport meta tag? I can only hope so. See you then!

The IFTF Grant Admin Committee is pleased to announce that the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s microgrant program is returning (after a successful pilot last year). Do you have a project in the works that would benefit an interactive fiction community and could use a bit of funds to get it over the finish line? We would love to hear from you: applications for this year’s program are now open.

In our first year, we provided funding to support four great projects:

• Improve accessibility features for Parchment on iOS (Dannii Willis)
• An IF Workshop for writers in Indonesia (Felicity Banks)
• Audiobook Documentation for Inform (Ryan Veeder)
• Chronicling the history of annual IF awards (Brian Rushton)

As the list of last year’s awardees might suggest, the goal of the grant program is to support projects that benefit the interactive fiction community at large (rather than funding the commission of new games, for instance). We especially love projects that provide tangible benefits to a community of IF players or makers in their work to preserve, maintain, and inspire the continued growth of this medium. Proposals are evaluated by an independent committee of advisors (distinct from the grant admin committee) for merit, feasibility, and potential impact.

Our budget for the grants program remains small: we have $3,000 of funds in total to split between awardees, with a maximum award per application of $1,000. (Requesting a smaller amount is okay and helps us support more projects.) To preserve our volunteer bandwidth, we will not consider funding projects needing less than $150. We will ask you to submit a simple budget to back up the amount you are asking for, as well as a few details about your project and its scope, but we try to keep the application process as simple as possible.

Some fine print: Grant awardees will be asked to submit a report nine months after receiving funds, meaning our funding is best-suited for projects that will be accomplished in under one year. Please note that those directly involved in the grant process (i.e. Grant Admin Committee members, Grant Advisors, IFTF Board Members) cannot apply. Those who have been banned from IFTF activities are not welcome to apply. If you are connected to someone involved in the process, please disclose that in your application so we can make appropriate plans to avoid conflicts of interest.

If you’re interested in applying or learning more about the process, please check out our grant guidelines. Applications will be open until October 31, 2024, and we except to announce accepted projects by January 31, 2025.

If you have any questions, please reach out to grants@iftechfoundation.org. We can’t wait to see the ideas the community comes up with!

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!

Ryan Veeder is a 2023 IFTF grant recipient who recently completed his project and reached out to share it with us, and we are absolutely blown away by the effort and love put into this project, which can be found by clicking here.

Screen reader technology, while helpful, can fail to accurately render the specific punctuation use and other formal considerations that are critical to learning code. Ryan’s experience helping vision-impaired users get started with Inform 7 inspired him to create spoken-word documentation for this popular language for creating parser interactive fiction.

We spoke with Ryan about the triumphs and challenges of his project:

“Putting the audiobook together was more fun than I expected. Anyone who’s familiar with Writing with Inform remembers the friendliness and cleverness in its narrative voice, but only when I started recording did I realize that voice was really a character that I’d get to perform and interpret.”

In addition to honing his voice performance, Ryan also discovered that, “as I recorded these sections, it dawned on me very, very slowly that I hadn’t included the examples in my outline—and the examples contain a lot of the most useful (and most entertaining) material! So, just when I thought I was almost done, I realized there were 42 more tracks I needed to record.”.

“I’m very grateful to IFTF for the opportunity to pursue this project. Discovering Inform through the documentation was a huge thrill for me thirteen years ago, and it’s really exciting to think I can help provide that same thrill to a broader audience.”

-Ryan Veeder

We love cheering the successes and sharing in the lessons of our grant recipients, and we’ll continue sharing them here as they come. If you’re interested in participating in our grant program, keep an eye on this blog for updates on this year’s grant application period.

In September 2023, we opened our grant program for the very first time. The program exists to disburse small amounts of money in support of projects that serve the interactive fiction community. Since then, half a dozen Grant Advisors have reviewed each submission, providing their recommendations to the grants committee, who ultimately selected four projects to fund. We are happy today to announce our first batch of funded projects through this grants program!

Interestingly, we saw great diversity in the projects submitted, which altogether touch on the very different areas of interactive fiction. Thank you to everyone who submitted their ideas! Below, you can learn about the awarded projects and the people behind them.

iOS Test Device for Parchment – Dannii Willis

Dannii Willis is the main developer of Parchment, a web interpreter that lets users read and play through interactive fiction on the web. Dannii will receive $500 in funds to purchase an iOS device, allowing him to more accurately test how Parchment functions on the iOS version of Safari, as well as test Parchment’s accessibility in UserVoice. An iOS-native device will help Dannii run these tests and iterate faster than with other tools, in service of supporting iOS users in the community and those who rely on iOS accessibility features.

Teaching Indonesian Authors to Write IF – Felicity Banks

Novelist Felicity Banks will receive $1,000 to fund an IF workshop for 10-20 English-speaking writers in Indonesia at a writing festival next year, focusing on Twine and ChoiceScript. Felicity knows Indonesia well and is experienced in such workshops, especially for raw beginners; the funds will cover necessary travel requirements. Her project is inspired by the benefits that diversity brings to the IF community, and she intends to serve Indonesia’s vibrant writing community by helping them participate by introducing them to the medium and planting a seed towards a budding Indonesian IF community.

Writing with Inform Audiobook – Ryan Veeder

Based on his experience helping blind users get started with Inform 7, Ryan Veeder saw an opportunity to translate “Writing with Inform” documentation into an audiobook format, thereby making it more accessible to the wider IF community. While assistive technology like screen-reading software can help users who rely on it, it often fails to accurately represent the specific punctuation use and other formal considerations that are critical to Inform 7 code. Therefore, Ryan will receive $400 to start producing a few chapters of Inform 7 documentation in a bespoke audiobook format, to demonstrate the utility and feasibility of such a resource.

Improvements to Pre-Existing IF Research – Brian Rushton

Brian Rushton is a prolific chronicler of the history of IFComp and the XYZZY awards, and is the most active reviewer at the Interactive Fiction Database. Based on the positive reception his writing has earned in the community, Brian wants to fill in the years missing from his history and touch up existing research. He will receive $500 to devote his time toward continuing to write the history of IFComp and the XYZZY awards from about 2016-2022, as well as revising and editing other essays to be more professional, along with standardized and uniform citations. The resulting work will be disseminated for the community’s benefit.

It’s inspiring to see the variety of projects proposed in this cycle, each of which serve the IF community in different ways. We thank all applicants, and we’re excited to see how the awarded projects develop! And we would also like to thank this year’s Grant Advisors, who volunteered their time to review the projects and formulate a recommendation for IFTF: thank you very much to Grim Baccaris, Kate Compton, Emilia Lazer-Walker, Juhana Leinonen, Colin Post, and Kaitlin Tremblay!

Congratulations again to our first batch of funded projects, and keep an eye out for our next grant cycle!

On January 1, 2024, IFTF appointed four new directors to its board: Albert Bassili, Leena van Deventer, David Cornelson, and Mark Sample. We would like to thank Judith Pintar, Lydia Pauly and Jan DeLozier, all of whose time on the board has concluded in recent months, for their time and service to the organization.

The incoming cohort continues to expand IFTF’s global reach beyond the United States and Europe, bringing geographic representation from both Australia and the Middle East. They also introduce further diversity of experience in games, narrative, and interactive fiction, with backgrounds in community organizing, academia and commercial game development. All of their personal and professional experiences enhance IFTF’s ability to meet the needs of a continually-growing international community of designers, writers, artists and players.

The IFTF is delighted to announce that we are opening our very first grant program! We are seeking to disburse small amounts of money to projects serving the interactive fiction community. Projects might include the development or maintenance of tools for writing and sharing IF, educational initiatives to promote IF, or research projects that will shed new light on IF history. We will consider proposals for any type of project that advances the culture and artform of interactive fiction!

The total pool for this round of the grant program is $3,000. Individual proposals can request up $1,000 and must request at least $150.

Please refer to the full guidelines before applying. Feel free to reach out to the Grants Administration Committee with any questions: grants@iftechfoundation.org!

The application portal is now live and will remain open for submissions through the deadline of October 27, 2023. Submit applications here.

Please note: this is very much a trial run for us! The response and interest that we get from this call of proposals, as well as how the process goes and feedback from applicants, will inform our approach, i.e. subsequent rounds, future funding, etc.

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation is currently seeking applicants for its board of directors!

The board is responsible for IFTF’s strategic leadership, making sure that all its programs fulfill the organization’s mission and adhere to its values, while also evaluating new projects and directions. Joining the board is also an excellent way to earn experience in leadership, business and philanthropy while building relationships with leaders in narrative gaming.

Volunteer terms on the board are two years in length and represent a highly visible opportunity to advocate for, support and preserve interactive fiction as an art form. Serving on the board does not require previous board or nonprofit experience, and requires as little as two or three hours per month in time commitment.

IFTF leadership strongly believes in increasing the diversity of the organization, and anyone throughout the interactive and hypertext community is welcome to nominate themselves through a handy submission form

While anyone is encouraged to nominate themselves, the board also welcomes nominations on behalf of others. Feel free to share the open call with contacts you think would be a good fit. If you know someone who would be a great board member and you think would appreciate the team reaching out to them, please email board@iftechfoundation.org.

The deadline to submit is September 30, 2023. Afterward, the current IFTF board of directors and advisory board will review applicants through November 15, 2023. You can find more information—including duties, expectations, qualifications and full details of the application timeline—in the submission form.

On March 14, 2023, Justin Bortnick was elected president of IFTF by the board of directors. Justin is now the second person to fill the role, succeeding IFTF co-founder Jason McIntosh.

Justin is an IFTF veteran, having worked on the NarraScope committee for several years and serving as one of the event’s original organizers. Outside of IFTF, Justin teaches in the University of Pittsburgh’s Digital Narrative and Interactive Design Program, where his research focuses on how industrial game design methodologies have been repurposed in a new era of online misinformation and propaganda. He has also worked as a writer and designer on a number of alternate reality games and video games, including Frog Factions 2, an IndieCade 2017 Nominee.

What will Justin focus on in the role? “My primary goal is to make sure things keep running smoothly,” he says. “But more broadly, I’d like to build stronger networks with other organizations and increase IFTF’s presence at events like IndieCade, GDC and others in the interactive fiction and gaming space.”

Now celebrating our second-ever president, we look forward to new possibilities in our mission to ensure the ongoing maintenance, improvement, and preservation of the tools and services crucial to the creation and distribution of interactive fiction.

You can learn more about IFTF’s leadership, or join former president Jason McIntosh in celebrating Justin’s new role over on the Interactive Fiction Forum.

I have fond memories of visiting my local library as a kid, checking out a ballooning list of books and borrowing CD-ROMs of some favorite PC games that my family otherwise couldn’t afford. The library was (and still is in my adult life) an essential resource for discovering new worlds and the people who create them—but across the board, they tend to lack detailed archives of interactive fiction in their catalogs, despite extensive representation of other media.

Enter Colin Post, assistant professor of library and information science at the University of North Carolina – Greensboro, who is “part of a team conducting research to develop a licensing framework designed specifically to facilitate the collection of independent-made digital games in libraries.” Colin has announced a series of focus group sessions, in association with NarraScope, that asks independent game creators at any experience level to share their thoughts on collecting narrative games in libraries.

There will be two virtual sessions: Wednesday July 12 from 7-9pm ET and Tuesday July 18 from 12-2pm ET. Both sessions will involve “a listening and discussion session with other independent game creators on a number of issues critical to licensing games for library collections.” Notes from these discussions will be shared on the IntFiction forum for those who are interested in the topic but unable to attend.

Why Collecting Narrative Games Matters

“While libraries have long collected games released on physical media, libraries are currently very limited in their ability to collect and provide access to digital-only games distributed through online storefronts or via creator or community websites,” Colin shared at NarraScope 2022. This practice becomes all the more difficult as digital becomes the primary means of distribution for media like games.

Colin continued to build on these concerns at NarraScope this year, focusing on promoting discovery and access through cataloging methods. And this is key, because while IFTF has built robust archives like the Interaction Fiction Archive and the Interactive Fiction Database, they’re more likely to be used by those who are already devotees to the artform. Library collections, meanwhile, can circulate to different and broader communities.

“By cataloging narrative games, we’re upholding these works—and their creators—as part of the bibliographic universe,” Colin noted in his recent talk. For example, catalog information could link a reader interested in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Shelley Jackson’s hypertext work Patchwork Girl, aiding in interactive fiction’s discovery.

How to Participate

You can find all the details for Colin’s focus group sessions here. Both sessions are free and open to anyone interested in attending, but advance signup is required.