Obtaining IF

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Overview ] [ Good Thinking ] [ Recognizing ] [ Representing ] [ Other Skills ] [ Pausing the Reading Process ] [ Self-Evaluation ] [ Recommended ] [ Top Fifty Stories ] [ Arthur ] [ The Firebird ] [ Winter Wonderland ] [ Photopia ] [ The Enterprise Incidents ] [ Obtaining IF ] [ Communicating ] [ Getting Stuck ] [ Managing IF ] [ Writing IF ] [ Field Study ] [ Try It! ] [ Print References ]

Fortunately, interactive fiction is inexpensive and fairly easy to find.  You can buy most of the best commercially published interactive fiction, for both PC and Macintosh computers, in one magnificent collection called The Masterpieces of Infocom.  The Infocom Home Page offers advice on how to purchase this collection and other Infocom products.  However, Masterpieces has become quite difficult to find in the last few years.  One company that has offered it is the British firm Interdata Developments, on the web at http://www.lacegem.com/  The price was around fifty US dollars, but the item is currently out of stock.  Masterpieces is sometimes available on ebay (http://www.ebay.com).

It is also possible, though not really legal, to download all the Infocom stories from the web.  Those who offer the stories in this way often include disclaimers like this one, from Achim J. Latz:

"Copyright by Infocom, Inc. Provided for non-commercial use only, with the sole intent of making information available that would otherwise be lost.
To whomever presently holds the copyright to the information contained in this page: if you think the existence of this page violates your copyright,
please complain to achim@latz.org and this page will be removed." 

Newer interactive fiction, as published on the Internet, is mostly free, though you have to know a bit more to get it to work.  You can find detailed instructions on obtaining this sort of IF, via "Fun and Learning With Interactive Fiction," using this link.

An IF Starter Kit for Teachers
This kit provides all the programs and data files you need to run nineteen works of interactive fiction, including The One That Got Away, The Firebird, Winter Wonderland, Small World, The Magic Toyshop, Photopia, The Enterprise Incidents, A Bear's Night Out, and Paul O'Brian's Earth and Sky trilogy of superhero stories.  The kit also contains lots of other resources on the stories, including walkthrus and hints.  To use this kit, create a directory for it on your computer's hard drive and then download the kit, using this link.  The kit is large, about nine megabytes in size.

Next, go to the directory you created, and open, or unzip, the program you downloaded.  It's called tea_kit.zip.  

Next, go to the directory containing the unzipped files and run the program called Pcmenu.exe.  This program will offer you a choice of eleven IF stories.  To play one of the stories, type in its number and press the Enter key.

Return to Teaching With Interactive Fiction

Return to Teaching and Learning With Interactive Fiction