Jon Ingold

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Jon Ingold is most known as the author of multiple influential interactive fiction works, but he has also written a number of plays, short stories and novels. He has been nominated for many XYZZY Awards and has won several.

[edit] Interactive fiction works

Jon Ingold's interactive fiction is notable for its interrogation of the relationship between the player-character and the player, and most of his games explore this notion in one way or another. The best examples are Fail-Safe (in which the player is talking to the player-character over a radio, hampered by constant interference), Insight (in which the player-character knows a lot more about his world than the player) and All Roads (in which it's not at all clear who - or what - the player-character is).

Recently, his game Dead Cities (2007) won Best in Show in the Lovecraft Commonplace Book Exhibition, and will be displayed along with four other games at the Museum of Science-Fiction and Utopia, Switzerland.

Other works are more fun: the Mulldoon sequence (currently two games) is puzzle-based. The first game, The Mulldoon Legacy (1999), is reputedly the longest text-game ever written; the follow-up, The Mulldoon Murders (2002) is much shorter and darker in tone. Till Death Makes a Monk-Fish out of Me (2002, 2nd place in the Interactive Fiction Competition, and nominated for four awards) is a black comic science fiction story.