Andrew Plotkin

Notable games: A Change in the Weather, So Far, Spider and Web, Shade

Aliases: Zarf

Website: Zarfhome is a pure-text site full of content, including all of Plotkin's IF games and much more.

Biography: Andrew Plotkin is revered as a top-notch storyteller. He burst onto the scene in 1995 with the competition-winning A Change in the Weather, then topped himself the next year with the breathtaking So Far, one of the most analyzed games in the history of IF. His games are puzzle-heavy and some feature very cruel timing; Spider and Web is the best example of this.

Plotkin is a joy to talk to; I thank him for being willing to answer these questions for me.

How did you get started playing text adventures?

My father brought home a brand-new computer, a copy of Zork 1, and the first three Scott Adams adventures. (Not the Dilbert guy.) This was in 1980 — just after the release of the Apple II+, electricity, and the stirrup. Text adventures were the best stuff out there.

No, wait, truly I tell you a lie. I had played the original Adventure (Colossal Cave) on a mainframe at my father's office, several months earlier. Dumb terminal, line printer, and all, with a huge stack of green-gridded fanfold paper as output. I solved the troll bridge puzzle entirely by myself; and I was hooked.

What IF work of yours are you most proud of, and why?

I go back and forth between answering So Far and Spider and Web.

So Far is more evocative, more intense, and I think I managed to get more emotional depth into it than anything else I've written. It also provoked a lot of discussion when it appeared. I would say it had a great deal of influence on the development of (early) modern IF. That pleases me, and not just on my own account. If I was able to widen the scope of IF's possibilities for the whole community — and, egotistically, I believe I did — then that's an achievement to be proud of.

Spider and Web is more clever and more intricate. It contains the single puzzle, or puzzle-scene, that I'm most proud of in my work. But it also contains a lot of partial successes. Some of the elements I tried to make compelling, such as the long-running conversation between the PC and NPC, came out pretty weak.

I'd say Spider & Web is a slightly better game overall, but of course by the time it appeared — less than two years after So Far — there was tremendously more variety and experimentation and talent whizzing around the community.

Besides your own works, what is your favorite work of IF from the past eight years?

I'm afraid I'm a couple of years behind the times, actually. I haven't played many of the most recent games. I keep up to date on the short games of the IF Competition, but between competitions I've been tracking other stuff than IF.

So, favorites... Anchorhead, for care and breadth. Worlds Apart, for encompassing an author's true inner world. Photopia, for rawness — or maybe I should say Little Blue Men. Rameses for — oh, the heck with it, I don't need to justify all of these.

A complete list would go on for a very long time, anyhow. Looking for perfect games is silly; I wind up looking for games that have something perfect within them. This happens more often than you might expect.

Do you generally enjoy graphic adventure games?

Well, I've written detailed reviews of — let me see — one, two, mmm, about forty-four graphical adventures. (Up to 48, if you count action games with strong adventure elements.)

Evidence is thus tending towards "yes".

I'm a couple of years behind in this category, too. Not because there are many graphical adventures — there are barely any, it seems — but because I'm playing on a Macintosh, and PC games are only accessible via an emulator. Recent games don't run well under emulation, even on the beefiest Mac.

Where do you see the IF scene going over the next few years?

Northwest.