Interactive Fiction

Will Crowther and Don Woods combined code and content to tell an adventure story and thereby created a new genre of fiction and the industry that followed.

Dennis Jerz retells the whole story Somewhere Nearby.

Don Knuth so admired the program that he translated it to his own Literate Programming technology which greatly improves on fortran but still feels more like paper than a place.

The original adventure has been translated to Inform which offers a linguistic file format that can be compiled to run on the internet.

The original adventure has been translated to javascript and modestly presented within a period faithful terminal emulator. play

Minecraft, Second Life and many MUDs before them offer world creating commands "in game" which make them wiki-like in a real sense.

Lisp unifies code and data, which is cool, but a near miss for what I mean by code and content.

We argue in Song of Code and Content that collaborative construction of both is an appropriate medium for inventing the worlds future.