Andrew Plotkin

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Andrew Plotkin, also known as Zarf, is an award-winning interactive fiction author and an important figure in the modern interactive fiction community. Plotkin was one of the earliest writers to use Graham Nelson's Inform development system, and one of the first since Infocom's heyday to explore the boundaries of interactive fiction as an artistic medium. Many later authors cite him as a primary influence. He has won many awards within the community, and is frequently interviewed for magazine articles about interactive fiction.

[edit] Contributions

Andrew Plotkin holds two XYZZY Award-related records: for most XYZZYs won in one year (5, with Spider and Web) and for most XYZZYs won in total: 14. His most influential games are:

Freefall (1995; Tetris clone - possibly the first so-called Z-machine abuse)
A Change in the Weather (1995; winner of the 1995 IF Comp's Inform division)
So Far (1996; winner of many XYZZY Awards that year, including for Best Game)
The Space Under the Window (1997)
Spider and Web (1998; winner of many XYZZY Awards that year, including for Best Game)
Hunter, in Darkness (1999; winner of the XYZZY Awards for Best Individual Puzzle and Best Setting)
Shade (2000; winner of the XYZZY Award for Best Setting)

Other Andrew Plotkin games include:

Lists and Lists (1996), an introductory course in the Scheme programming language
The Dreamhold (2004), a general IF tutorial game
Delightful Wallpaper (2006; sixth place in IF Comp and winner of Miss Congeniality)

He has also made major technical contributions to the medium, designing the Blorb archive format, the Glk I/O platform, and the Glulx virtual machine, and implementing Glulx Inform and several interactive fiction interpreters for the Macintosh and X.

He also wrote the former shareware puzzle game System's Twilight. Plotkin appears as a character in Being Andrew Plotkin, an interactive fiction game by J. Robinson Wheeler somewhat based on the film Being John Malkovich.

While a student at Carnegie Mellon University, Zarf was one of the early members of the Carnegie Mellon KGB. He created the organization's signature Capture the Flag with Stuff [1] game, which is now played by several hundred students every semester.

He has also made contributions to the Icehouse community, both in designing the game Branches, Twigs, & Thorns and the creation of several custom sets of pieces. During 2006 he was involved in the open source on-line game platform Volity and has created, or assisted in the creation of, on-line versions of the pyramid game Treehouse and other Looney Labs titles to showcase the platform.