Today, IF is probably the best-preserved cross-section of video game history we have. Every game, from Zork through Infocom's latter-day output, through every game made with Inform from the 90s until today, is playable and runs on any machine you could name; there are almost as many ports of the z-machine as there are ports of Doom.

A fantastic historiography of interactive fiction from its inception to today, written by Bruno.

IF has long had an arms-length relationship to video games at large. It is a genre and a surrounding community that is insistently noncommercial, relentlessly critical-minded, insular (and at times, though not so much today, exclusionary). It's more like a (large, unruly, eccentric) extended family than anything that could be described as a "fandom."

Of course, as would be expected from the title and from... recent history, this also touches on the increasing and disgusting practice of the use of generative AI in interactive fiction. Not only does this feel creatively insulting, it feels particularly galling in a small, bespoke scene like intfic.

AI sells the promise that you don't even have to imagine something; that your vague impulses, half-formed ideas, or just the result of a delusional conversation with a machine can become productized for an audience of none. The effect has been immediately toxic to all sorts of institutions that take submissions from all comers—from literary magazines like Clarkesworld to open-source code hosting service Codeberg.

The good news is that people will always want to create things, and will always create the best things. Better things than AI will, and ever could.