Book & Volume

The text adventure--once the purview of geeks and computer scientists seeking to push the edge of mainframe computing technology; now an arena for serious writers and academics looking to explore the intersection between literature and interaction.

Case in point.

Book & Volume is a Z-engine game--implemented using the same technology that Infocom used, back in the day. Too retro for the conventional market, but finding another outlet: it's a highly literary work with serious artistic ambitions, recognized by the Iowa Review of all things--a journal you probably have never heard of, unless you are a short fiction writer, desperately trying to find a venue for your work in a world where markets for short fiction are few. And if, say, you are an obscure SF short story writer with credits in the degraded pulps, and find that Z-machine games are appearing in the effing IOWA REVIEW, you think.... Well, this isn't the world I grew up in.

And you feel, perhaps, a twinge of jealousy, until you play the damn thing, and realize:

Okay. This deserves it.

When Java has finished loading, click on the black area and press any key.

Play by clicking on the black box above and typing; if no black box appears, you need to install Java on your machine.

But! playing here doesn't allow you to save your progress. If you want to do that, you need to download and install a Z-machine interpreter on your computer, then download this game's file and open it with that interpreter.

(If the black box, but no text, appears, try reloading and waiting a bit.)

Awards

2006 Slamdance Guerilla Games Festival Finalist (withdrawn in protest over the exclusion of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from the festival)

Medi@terra festival selection

Published in the Iowa Review Web, July 06. (For those geeks among us--Iowa Review is a serious literary journal, and any mainstream writer would willingly sacrifice his left testical to have a short story there.)