top expert

hello, wordpress.

I am Drew Cook. Where to begin? I like computer games and 1990s low-fi music. I have always needed a creative outlet. I used to play guitar and sing in a band (of sorts). I have tried hard to write poetry and fiction. I enjoy writing media criticism. Most recently, I am the author of a text parser game called Repeat the Ending.

top expert is a blog that is mostly about my creative work as an author of Inform 7 parser games. Occasionally, I may venture into the wider world of contemporary interactive fiction (or, broader still, games in general). I already have a somewhat successful–in 1980s adventure game terms–blog about Infocom games called gold machine. Because there’s an established audience there, I decided that I should make a new destination for discussing my own work.

And this is it! At least for a year, since I’m paying annually for the domain name.

stuff I’m working on now.

I’ll list these in release order/currency:

• At Gold Machine, I’m currently researching and writing about Trinity, one of Infocom’s best-loved games. I… respect it more than I like it, I think. Critics (most visibly, successfully, and eloquently Jimmy Maher) have possibly suggested that the historicity of Trinity‘s subject matter has compelling aesthetic value. What do I think? Well, just wait and see!
• An Inform 7 code extension called “Story Mode.” I’ll have info on that next time.
• I am preparing the final (I hope) release of Repeat the Ending. That should drop in December. I’m just waiting for IFComp and Ectocomp voting to close. It’s quite hard to compete with novelty, I’ve found.
• A small game with a story suitable for children set in the growing RTEverse (continuity of Repeat the Ending).
• A collection of young adult fan fiction set in the Zork universe.
• A large, as-yet unannounced “cave game” theorized to be the Zork Zero II fangame mentioned in the “Readers Guide to Repeat the Ending.”
• I hope to regularly update my series “Inform 7 for beginners” on Tumblr. Why did I begin that effort? Let’s save that for another day.

I’d like to post an update every week. It’s a lot easier for me to write this kind of reflective text than it is to do research and literary analysis.

What else? My partner and I have cats. We live in the American south. My bipolar disorder I is so nasty that I was awarded disability without a hearing. I have a personality disorder that I have worked very hard to overcome. I have a BA in English and philosophy, an MFA in creative writing (poetry), and most of the coursework completed for a PhD in English. I used to do Information Technology stuff for an automobile manufacturer.

Like most people, I have a number called age and a history of doing things.

what’s next.

My experiences writing my first Inform 7 extension, an accessibility feature called “story mode.”