Playfic, my little interactive-fiction platform, turned one year old on Friday. I rounded up some recent news about it just last month, so I’m not going to retread that territory.
But I was starting to feel guilty about ignoring it, so I added some new tools for exploring the archive of 650+ games, sketches, and silly experiments.
You can now see the most popular games, all the games I’ve featured, the most recently published games, and my personal favorite, the games with the longest source code.
This surfaced a whole bunch of interesting games I hadn’t seen, so I freshened up the featured section with some new picks.
Playfic was always intended to be an experiment, yet another tool of creative expression and a quick way for people to experiment with Inform 7. I really wasn’t expecting much out of it, but I’ve been happy to see people slowly discover the community and find new uses for it.
Update: Releasing any platform for creative expression often comes with unintended consequences. For Playfic, one of the biggest surprises was seeing it used by educators, something I never intended.
Most recently, I just discovered this high school teacher using Playfic to teach interactive fiction in the classroom. I was a little stunned to see a room full of high school students playing interactive fiction for the first time on iPads, starting with Cooper’s first game:
Games being created by high-school students and played by high-school students. How awesome is that?
Hey, that’s our friend and dear colleague Jason Sellers. Yes, he and many of our colleagues draw on our National Writing Project perspective of teachers teaching teachers to learn and grow together. Particularly, an element we all have in common is to study our practice, dig into parts of it, and then share them with teach as you see Jason doing here.