From Zach:
In a throwback to the days of Infocom, Ben Collins-Sussman of Google walked us through the last 30 years in interactive fiction. If you aren't familar with IF it's a combination of a fictional book and a video game played/read on a computer. As you go through the story it simulates environments by describing them in in text and as a player you type text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Ben gave an awesome demo of the slick IDE used to create the games and a brief overview of the process he went through to create his first place game in the interactive fiction competition!
From Ben:
If you're interested in playing the latest, greatest Interactive Fiction from the indie game community, head over to ifwiki.org and try playing any of the IFComp winners of the past decade. I've also got my own personal short list of favorites. Finally, you can play two games I wrote here:
Make sure you download a reasonable Z-machine interpreter as well: either Zoom for Mac, WinFrotz for Windows, or Gargoyle for Linux. There are also interpreters out there for iPhone ("Frotz" in the AppStore), Android Phone ("Twisty" in the Market), and other esoteric platforms as well.
If you're interested in writing text adventures, grab the whole amazing IDE from the Inform website. It has great built-in docs. And come ask questions over in the forum at intfiction forum.