Jon Ingold

Biography

Ingold began writing interactive fiction as a teenager, after searching online for information on Infocom and discovering the Inform programming language. He published his first major work, The Mulldoon Legacy (1999), just before starting a Mathematics degree at the University of Cambridge. It was only a month later that he could view the Usenet newsgroup devoted to interactive fiction; he later recalled, "it's still one of the most startling moments of my life when I loaded up rec.games.int-fiction and there were Mulldoon posts everywhere". Ingold continued to write IF during the university holidays and also reviewed films for a student newspaper. A trip to Venice provided the setting for his All Roads (2001).

After graduating from Cambridge, Ingold worked as a mathematics teacher in London. He later co-founded the company inkle, which has created interactive stories for tablet computers, as well as the Inklewriter development system. 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.

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 saving progress 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.

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.