''Photopia'' is a piece of literature by

Adam Cadre Adam Cadre (born February 5, 1974, in Silver Spring, Maryland) is an American writer active in a number of forms—novels, screenplays, webcomics, essays—but best known for his work in interactive fiction. Biography Cadre's 1998 piece ''Photo ...

rendered in the form of interactive fiction, and written in

Inform Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. Inform can generate programs designed for the Z-code or Glulx virtual machines. Versions 1 through 5 were released betw ...

. It has received both praise and criticism for its heavy focus on fiction rather than on interactivity. It won first place in the 1998

Interactive Fiction Competition The Interactive Fiction Competition (also known as IFComp) is one of several annual competitions for works of interactive fiction. It has been held since 1995. It is intended for fairly short games, as judges are only allowed to spend two hours pla ...

. ''Photopia'' has few puzzles and a linear structure, allowing the player no way to alter the eventual conclusion but maintaining the illusion of non-linearity.

Development

Adam Cadre has stated that ''Photopia'' was heavily influenced by '' The Sweet Hereafter'', a film that prominently features a babysitter and a bus crash. He submitted ''Photopia'' to the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition pseudonymously. He felt that his previous game '' I-0'' would inspire certain expectations in players, since in that game the playable character is a young college student who could be instructed to undress. Years later, he dropped the pretense that there was a real "Opal O'Donnell" who had submitted Photopia for him, stating: "it started to bother me that v1.0 of the Phaq had lies in it."

Reception

At the 1998

XYZZY Awards 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 ...

, the game won in the Best Writing and Best Story categories, and was nominated for Best Game, Best NPCs, Best Individual Puzzle, Best Individual NPC, and Best Use of Medium. In 1999, XYZZYnews gave the game a positive review, calling it an "amazing piece of work". In 2007,

Emily Short Emily Short is an interactive fiction (IF) writer. She is perhaps best known for her debut game ''Galatea'' and her use of psychologically complex non-player characters (NPCs). Short has been called "a visionary in the world of text-based ga ...

described the game as "hugely influential" and "ground-breaking." In 2012, while reviewing Winter Lake's '' Rat Chaos'', Short hyperlinked ''Photopia'' as a game that "plays with agency not in the usual ways ..discovering you have none." In 2015, the game won first place in the Interactive Fiction Database's "Interactive Fiction Top 50 of all time" contest.

References

External links

Author's websitePhotopia's entry in the Interactive Fiction Database
notes awards that the game has won, links to reviews, and provides links to the game itself. *{{moby game, id=/photopia, name=''Photopia'' 1998 video games 1990s interactive fiction Video games developed in the United States