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Jon Ingold (born 1981) is a British author of interactive fiction and co-founder of inkle, where he co-directed and co-wrote 80 Days, and wrote Heaven's Vault and Overboard!. His interactive fiction has frequently been nominated for XYZZY Awards and has won on multiple occasions, including Best Game, Best Story and Best Setting awards for All Roads in 2001. Ingold's works are notable for their attention to the levels of knowledge that the player and player character have of the in-game situation, with the effect often depending on a player who understands more than the character or vice versa. Ingold has also written a number of plays, short stories and novels.
After graduating from Cambridge, Ingold worked as a mathematics teacher in London. He later co-founded the company inkle, which has created several award-winning interactive stories, as well as the Inklewriter web tool for interactive fiction Reprinted from Game Developer and the open-source ink scripting language. Ingold told Gamasutra that he had found potential players of interactive fiction were frustrated by the parser interface, which led him and his colleagues to develop Inklewriter as a non-parser-based alternative.
inkle has produced several games which have won numerous awards, including multiple IGF awards for narrative.
In All Roads (2001), the narrative viewpoint shifts between a number of characters in Renaissance Italy, as if a separate entity is controlling each of them in turn. The player is challenged not just to solve character-specific puzzles, but to understand the logic behind the changes of character. The game was the first ever to win both the Interactive Fiction Competition (taking first place out of fifty-one entries in 2001) and the XYZZY Award for Best Game. It also received the XYZZY Awards for Best Story and Best Setting. The Electronic Literature Organization anthologised All Roads in the first volume of its Electronic Literature Collection. English professor Alf Seegert has used it as a case study in how interactive fiction can "generate presence", commending Ingold's integration of puzzles into the narrative.
Dead Cities (2007) was Ingold's contribution to the "H. P. Lovecraft Commonplace Book Project", a collection of interactive fiction based on Lovecraft's unpublished notes that was assembled for an exhibition at the Maison d'Ailleurs in Yverdon-les-Bains (Switzerland). It won Best in Show among the three English-language entries. Interactive fiction author Emily Short wrote a favourable review, calling the game "strange and challenging, evocative and opaque like Lovecraft's own stories". However, Eliza Gauger's review for Destructoid criticised the parser as inadequate and the writing and pacing as inferior to those of Ecdysis, another contribution to the Project.
In Make It Good (2009), the player controls a police detective investigating a murder in a house. Reviewers considered that this premise was inspired by Infocom's mysteries such as Deadline (1982), but that Ingold's detective was distinguished by his moral ambiguity and concealment of information from the player. Emily Short commented that the distancing of the player from the protagonist brought out the "alienation and cynicism of genre noir". John Bardinelli called Make It Good "a superb piece of interactive fiction on many levels", praising its active non-player characters and challenging puzzles. Graham Smith felt that it was "probably the best text adventure about being an alcoholic detective" and enjoyed the way the game's complexity make it feel more like a story and less like a puzzle.
Ingold was the writer for Textfyre's The Shadow in the Cathedral (2009), a steampunk adventure story that was one of the few commercially published interactive fictions of the 2000s. In a column for GameSetWatch, Emily Short described the game's prose as an important element in its worldbuilding.
Interactive fiction
The protagonist of Ingold's Fail-Safe (2000) is the only living person on a damaged starship, who makes a distress call and asks for instructions. Commands entered by the player are treated as delivered to him within the story, collapsing the distinction usually made in IF between the parser/narrator and the player character. Out-of-story actions such as saved game are disabled and little text is displayed to the player apart from the survivor's dialogue, features which Jay Is Games reviewer John Bardinelli praised as contributing to the game's immersiveness.
All Roads
All Roads is a 2001 interactive fiction computer game by Jon Ingold that placed first at the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition. It also won the for Best Game, Best Setting and Best Story and was nominated for Best Individual Puzzle and Best Writing. The game is story-oriented and features few puzzles, though in a sense is one big puzzle, since the player's goal is to decipher the meaning of the game after completing it.
Bibliography
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Jon Ingold has published short fiction in several issues of Interzone magazine: Bibliography of Interzone magazine
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