The first time I saw someone playing a computer game was around 1981, at the Puffin Club expo. The hall was filled with stands for my favourite authors – Joan Aiken, Rosemary Sutcliff, Lucy Boston – but the biggest queue was for the bank of computers where children took 10-minute turns playing a "text adventure". I queued up, took my go, typed "N" to go north and "look" to look around me. I can't remember the game, but I can remember the sense of wonder that this was a story you could talk to.
Text adventures are still around. They're called interactive fiction now, and there's an annual award for achievement in what has become a hobbyist's field. The best of these manage to be both literature and game: All Roads casts you as an assassin in Renaissance Venice, whose secret method of operation only becomes clear as the game progresses, while Slouching Towards Bedlam tells a creepingly horrifying Victorian steampunk tale.
Serious novelists are also now creating games that foreground story and text. Kate Pullinger has written Inanimate Alice, an interactive online story with gamelike elements. Penguin's 2008 We Tell Stories combined great writing with gameplay and had contributions from Toby Litt and Mohsin Hamid. I've thrown my hat into the ring too with the game-inspired The Winter House, which is set in the same house as my latest novel – but 100 years earlier.
Novels and computer games occupy different ends of the cultural spectrum, but have in common the creation of imaginary worlds that beckon us to enter. As a child, all I wanted was to walk into my favourite stories; interactive fiction is making that possible.
