How to Play Interactive Fiction

(An entire strategy guide on a single postcard)

Written by Andrew Plotkin -- design by Lea Albaugh

This is a handy IF-for-beginners card that we came up with for the People's Republic of Interactive Fiction Hospitality Suite at PAX-East 2010. If somebody is sitting down in front of an IF game for the very first time, this card should give him or her an idea of what commands will work -- and what commands are likely to work. It's not trying to teach everything an IF expert would know; it's just conveying the pattern. Several formats are available:

• The card as PDF (263kb)
• The card as PNG (44kb)
• The card as PNG, 300dpi (675kb; print-quality at 7x5 inches)
• The card as SVG (26kb)
• The card as JPEG (90kb)
• The card as HTML (not identical, but renders a good approximation for web browsers)
• A tar.gz package containing all of the above (998kb)

Some translations as well:

• French (PDF), (also JPEG, PNG 300dpi, SVG), courtesy of ifiction.free.fr
• Spanish (PDF), (also PNG, PNG 300dpi, SVG, HTML), courtesy of Depresiv
• German (PDF), (also PNG, PNG 300dpi, SVG), courtesy of amaraterramia
• Italian (PDF), (also JPEG, PNG, PNG 300dpi), courtesy of marco falcinelli

If you want to do primary editing, your best shot is to use Adobe Illustrator and load the PDF file. (It uses the "Arno Pro" font, in several weights.) The SVG file was also generated by Illustrator, and is unfortunately difficult to edit in Inkscape; fonts are named slightly inconsistently, and the letter spacing comes out wrong. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This means you can freely use the IF card in any form: print it out, package it with a game, translate it, reformat it, remix it, whatever. You must attribute the work, as shown above, and you must keep your version of the work under the same license as this. For more, contact the PR-IF mailing list.