Part of IFTF’s mission is to support communities of interactive fiction players and makers in their work to preserve, maintain, and inspire continued growth of the medium. In 2023, we put out a call for a pilot program of microgrants (under $1000) to directly support people and projects serving a community of interactive fiction practitioners. In our first year, we helped fund four unique projects touching on accessibility, outreach, access, and community history. We hope to continue the microgrants program in future years as funding allows.
The four projects below, funded in the 2023/24 grant cycle, speak to a range of community needs, passions, and inspirations, and involve work continuing through 2024.
Parchment is an established web interpreter that lets users play and read interactive fiction online, making it far easier for authors to distribute games and players to access them. Our microgrant is helping the program’s creator, Dannii Willis, improve the program’s functionality on iOS devices, and specifically to better test and improve accessibility features for blind or low-vision players.
Novelist Felicity Banks is bringing interactive fiction to writers in Indonesia with a workshop focusing on popular languages Twine and ChoiceScript. Felicity has led similar workshops for beginners before and knows Indonesia well, and is excited to introduce writers there to the medium, hopefully planting a seed towards a budding Indonesian IF community. Our microgrant is helping her travel to the Ubud Writers’ Festival, lead workshops for 10-20 students, and keep in touch with them to provide support over the next few years.
Based on his experience helping blind users get started with Inform 7, author Ryan Veeder saw an opportunity to create spoken-word documentation for this popular language for creating parser interactive fiction. Screen reader technology, while helpful, can fail to accurately render the specific punctuation use and other formal considerations that are critical to learning code. Our microgrant is helping Ryan pilot this project to demonstrate the feasibility and utility of an audiobook edition of the Inform manual.
The annual Interactive Fiction Competition and XYZZY Awards have a history stretching back decades, and these events have been integral to developing and celebrating the art of interactive storytelling. Brian Rushton, a prolific IF reviewer and chronicler of community history, received a microgrant to revise and extend his year-by-year writeups of these key community events, helping to preserve this history for decades to come.
We would like to thank our Grant Advisors for this cycle, who evaluated the proposals: Colin Post, Grim Baccaris, Kate Compton, Em Lazer-Walker, Juhana Leinonen, Kaitlin Tremblay.
Funding for future microgrant cycles depends on the generosity of IFTF donors. If you’re interested in helping to support future projects like those above, please donate to IFTF directly here or get in touch to chat about a sponsorship or other options!