two hours, albeit
often more honoured in the breach, has had a decisive effect in diverting
designers from Infocom-sized “novels” into short stories.
This freed up the form for greater experimentation, but meant that
few large games were created in the late 1990s. The annual September
event – shrewdly timed, after long university vacations –
has also had the unfortunate effect that games are held back and
then all released at once, in the breaking of a monsoon after a parched summer.
But for the quantity of fine work stimulated, and the number of newcomers
attracted, the competition can only be considered a triumph. Its
success has also spun off a number of alternative contests and forms
of recognition, such as the annual and Oscar-like XYZZY Awards. The
most ludic, madcap events are the SpeedIF contests, begun by David
Cornelson inOctober 1998, in which just two hours are allowed to
write a complete game. The rubric for SpeedIF 13: “The game
will take place in a Chinese restaurant. It will feature one or more
of the following animals: pigeon, elephant or badger. There will be
some kind of sculpture made of mud, and some character will be obsessed
with either HAL or Doraemon, the robot-cat from the future (or
both)…”

A growing appreciation of the medium's potential for
art has characterised turn of the century interactive fiction. One
provocative example was Nick Montfort's showing of a hardback edition
of ‘Winchester's Nightmare’ at Digital Arts and Culture
in Atlanta, in October 1999: ten decommissioned laptops converted
to run an Inform game. Formerly property of the Internal Revenue Service,
several still bore the U.S. Treasury seal of an eagle holding a key.
Even shown