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Andrew Plotkin
Andrew Plotkin (born May 15, 1970), also known as Zarf, is an American programmer and writer. He is a central figure in the modern interactive fiction (IF) community. Having both written a number of award-winning games and developed a range of new file formats, interpreters, and other utilities for the design, production, and running of IF games, Plotkin is widely recognised for both his creative and his technical contributions to the homebrew IF scene. Interactive fiction Plotkin was one of the earliest writers to use Graham Nelson's Inform development system, and one of the first since Infocom's heyday to explore the boundaries of interactive fiction as an artistic medium. Many later authors cite him as a primary influence. He has won many awards within the community, and is frequently interviewed for magazine articles about interactive fiction. Plotkin has also made major technical contributions to the interactive fiction medium, designing the Blorb archive format, the Glk I ...
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Syracuse, New York
Syracuse ( ) is a City (New York), city in and the county seat of Onondaga County, New York, United States. With a population of 148,620 and a Syracuse metropolitan area, metropolitan area of 662,057, it is the fifth-most populated city and 13th-most populated municipality in the state of New York (state), New York. Formally established in 1820, Syracuse was named after the classical Greece, Greek city Syracuse, Sicily, Syracuse (''Siracusa'' in Italian), a city on the eastern coast of the Italian island of Sicily, for its similar natural features. It has historically functioned as a major Intersection (road), crossroads, first between the Erie Canal and its branch canals, then of the Rail transport in the United States, railway network. Today, the city is at the intersection of Interstates Interstate 81, 81 and Interstate 90, 90, and its Syracuse Hancock International Airport, airport is the largest in Central New York, a five-county region of over one million inhabitants. Sy ...
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Spider And Web
''Spider and Web'' is a piece of interactive fiction written by Andrew Plotkin. ''Spider and Web'' begins innocuously enough: the player's character, an apparent tourist, has wandered into a blind alley. Upon trying to leave the alley, however, the character is confronted by a voice sneering that this is a lie and threatening dire consequences if the truth is not told. Gradually, the player pieces together that the main character is an unnamed spy who is being interrogated by an equally anonymous enemy. Through interruptions and prodding, the interrogator reveals that the spy was captured in the process of infiltrating an installation under the guise of a tourist. Most of the commands the player gives are actually part of a story the character is telling to the interrogator. Any part of the story that the interrogator disputes is challenged; the player is executed after a number of these "challenges". Thus, the player's main goal is to tell the captors a plausible story to ex ...
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Kickstarter
Kickstarter, PBC is an American Benefit corporation, public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York City, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of April 2025, Kickstarter has received US$8.71 billion in pledges from 24.1 million backers to fund 277,302 projects, such as films, music, stage shows, comics, journalism, video games, board games, technology, publishing, and food-related projects. People who back Kickstarter projects are offered tangible rewards or experiences in exchange for their pledges. This model traces its roots to subscription model of arts patronage, in which artists would go directly to their audiences to fund their work. History Kickstarter launched on April 28, 2009, by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler. ''The New York Times'' called Kickstarter "the people's National Endowment for the Arts, NEA". ''Time (magazine), Time'' named ...
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CNN Money
CNN Business (formerly CNN Money) is a financial news and information website, operated by CNN. The website was originally formed as a joint venture between CNN.com and Time Warner's '' Fortune'' and '' Money'' magazines. Since the spin-off of Time Warner's publishing assets as Time Inc. (and their subsequent sale to Meredith Corporation and later, to IAC's Dotdash), the site has since operated as an affiliate of CNN. History CNN Money launched in 2001, replacing CNNfn's website. Time Warner had also announced an intention to relaunch the CNNfn television network under the CNN Money moniker, but those plans were apparently scrapped. Prior to June 2014, the website was operated as a joint venture between CNN and two Time Warner-published business magazines; '' Fortune'' and '' Money''. In June 2014, Time Warner's publishing assets were spun-out as Time Inc.; as a result, all three properties launched separate web presences, and CNN Money introduced a new logo that removed ...
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The Dreamhold
''The Dreamhold'' is an interactive fiction game by Andrew Plotkin, released in 2004. Its primary purpose is to be a tutorial to interactive fiction; because of that, the "core" of the game is relatively easy to finish. To make it more appealing for seasoned IF players, Plotkin added an "expert mode", which can be activated early in the game and makes certain puzzles harder. It won the 2004 XYZZY Awards for Best Puzzles and Best Use of Medium. On June 24, 2014, the author released the source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ... for educational purposes.Old Zarf code
by Andrew Plotkin (June 24, 2014)


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Scheme (programming Language)
Scheme is a dialect of the Lisp family of programming languages. Scheme was created during the 1970s at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) and released by its developers, Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman, via a series of memos now known as the Lambda Papers. It was the first dialect of Lisp to choose lexical scope and the first to require implementations to perform tail-call optimization, giving stronger support for functional programming and associated techniques such as recursive algorithms. It was also one of the first programming languages to support first-class continuations. It had a significant influence on the effort that led to the development of Common Lisp.Common LISP: The Language, 2nd Ed., Guy L. Steele Jr. Digital Press; 1981. . "Common Lisp is a new dialect of Lisp, a successor to MacLisp, influenced strongly by ZetaLisp and to some extent by Scheme and InterLisp." The Scheme language is standardized in the offic ...
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Shade (video Game)
''Shade'' is a 2000 interactive fiction video game developed and published by Andrew Plotkin for DOS. Story ''Shade'' opens with the nameless protagonist awakening in his studio apartment before sunrise. Examining the apartment reveals that the protagonist is preparing to depart on a trip to Death Valley. After the protagonist locates his plane tickets and begins addressing the various tasks on his to-do list, the appliances and furniture spontaneously crumble and transform into piles of sand upon touch. The apartment slowly becomes buried under dunes of sand. The sand disappears briefly, suggesting the experience was illusionary, but then the protagonist feels dizzy and sits down. The apartment vanishes and the protagonist is suddenly outside and in the middle of a desert. The protagonist notices a small humanoid figure walking across the sand; interacting with the figure causes it to move more and more sluggishly until it eventually passes out and dies. The figure then says to ...
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The Space Under The Window
''The'' is a grammatical article in English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pronoun ''thee' ...
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XYZZY Award For Best Game
The XYZZY Awards are the annual awards given to works of interactive fiction, serving a similar role to the Academy Awards for film. The awards were inaugurated in 1997 by Eileen Mullin, the editor of ''XYZZYnews''. Any game released during the year prior to the award ceremony is eligible for nomination to receive an award. The decision process takes place in two stages: members of the interactive fiction community nominate works within specific categories and sufficiently supported nominations become finalists within those categories. Community members then vote among the finalists, and the game receiving a plurality of votes is given the award in an online ceremony. Since 1997, the XYZZY Awards have become one of the most important events within the interactive fiction community. Together with events like the Interactive Fiction Competition and Spring Thing, the XYZZY Awards provide opportunities for the community to encourage and reward the creation and development of new work ...
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