Welcome to SPAG, the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games.
SPAG was an Internet magazine dedicated to criticism, reviews, and the preservation and furthering of the art of Interactive Fiction. Founded in 1994, SPAG was a pillar of the IF community for more than two decades.
SPAG was founded by G. Kevin Wilson and published regularly through 2011 by Magnus Olsson, Paul O'Brian, Jimmy Maher, and David Monath. It was then revived from 2013 to 2016 by Dannii Willis, Matt Carey, and Katherine Morayati. Since 2016 it has been dormant.
As of 2025, the SPAG web site is maintained by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation. This site is no longer updated. Some links (to obsolete versions of IFDB and the IF Archive) have been modernized, but many other links are out of date and do not work.
If you have questions, please contact
info@ifarchive.org
rather than any of the addresses listed in SPAG back issues.
Most recent issues
Issue 64
- Letter from the Editor and Call for Submissions
- Top Threes: Brendan Patrick Hennessy (Birdland)
- Hugo Labrande, “>SOLVE ZORK: Teaching an AI to Play Parser IF”
- Katherine Morayati, “I’m Your Forgotten Past: The Dubious History of Interactive Film”
- Lisa Brunette, “Evolving Storytelling in Hidden-Object Picture Games”
- Cat Manning, “SPAG Specifics: Caelyn Sandel’s Bloom”
Issue 63
- Letter from the Editor and Call for Submissions
- Hugo Labrande, “SPAG Specifics: Paulo Chikiamco’s Slammed!”
- Katherine Morayati, “You Are an Online Clickbait Satirist. Can You Hack It in the IF World?”
- Ted Casaubon, “Safeguarding your IF Awards from Animal Attack”
Issue 62
- Letter From the Editor and Call for Submissions!
- Hugo Labrande, “>JUSTIFY, HEIGHTEN, SAY YES: Interactive Fiction as Improv”
- Marius Müller, “Poetry Is What Gets Lost in Translation: Notes on translating PataNoir and Sunday Morning”
- Rowan Lipkovits, “Choose Your Own Path: Taking CYOA IRL with the Active Fiction Project”
- Capsule reviews of the games in ParserComp and Spring Thing’s main garden
- Christopher Huang, “Macdougal and Me at the Spring Thing Fair”: a longer-form, fictionalized overview of Spring Thing
- Katherine Morayati, “SPAG Specifics: Matthew S. Burns’ The Writer Will Do Something”
Issue 61.5
- Letter from the Editor and Call for Submissions
- Katherine Morayati, “2014: The Year That Was”
- Victor Gijsbers, “SPAG Specifics: Puzzles in The Hours”
- SPAG Valentines!
Issue 61
- Editorial: Welcome back!
- The Modem Squeals of a Guilded Youth — Rowan Lipkovits talks to Jim Munroe
- Sam Kabo Ashwell, “Depicting Grief — An interview with the author of Eurydice”
- Felix Pleșoianu, “Andromeda Apocalypse — Backstage with Marco Innocenti”
- Joey Jones, “Shared Worlds — Collaboration in interactive fiction”
- Mark Ricard, “SPAG Specifics: Creating, inverting and making good the detective genre”