Andrew Plotkin

In 2019 he created and co-chaired with Adri Mills NarraScope, a games conference focusing on interactive narrative, adventure games, and interactive fiction.

On June 24, 2014 Plotkin released the source code for several of his games for educational purposes.

More recently, he was featured on CNN Money for successfully raising over $31,000 using Kickstarter for development of a new interactive fiction piece called Hadean Lands for the iPhone and release of the resulting iPhone game framework as open source. Plotkin was also featured prominently in the 2010 interactive fiction documentary, GET LAMP.

As of 2007, Plotkin holds two XYZZY Award-related records: for most XYZZYs won in one year (5, with Spider and Web) and for most XYZZYs won in total: 18. His most influential games are:

He has also made contributions to the Icehouse community, both in designing the game Branches & Twigs & Thorns, and the creation of several custom sets of pieces. During 2006 he was involved in the open source on-line game platform Volity and has created, or assisted in the creation of, on-line versions of the pyramid game Treehouse and other Looney Labs titles to showcase the platform.

In 1997, Plotkin developed a rethemed version of Dmitry Davidoff's social game Mafia, replacing the "mafia" characters with werewolves. Plotkin's version of the game subsequently became popular at universities and conferences in the United States, with a set of cards being produced by Looney Labs.

Andrew Plotkin (born May 15, 1970), also known as Zarf, is a central figure in the modern interactive fiction (IF) community. Having both written a number of award-winning games and developed a range of new file formats, interpreters, and other utilities for the design, production, and running of IF games, Plotkin is widely recognised for both his creative and his technical contributions to the homebrew IF scene.