As a highly respected IF author, people often stop me on the street and ask: "Stephen, what are your favourite works of IF?" And I usually ignore them and walk away, grinning smugly to myself. But sometimes I regret this self-imposed aloofness, so here I offer my ten favourite works of IF, in no particular order.
As a highly respected IF author, people never stop me on the street and ask: "Stephen, what are your least favourite works of IF?" Which is a pity, because I don't need much provoking to spit bile about some of the worst crap people have stuck on the Archive. Besides, where I come from we have a saying: "without contraries is no progression." And this holds as well for IF as for any other sphere of life. Good and bad games are equally necessary to further the medium; just as the best games show us what the medium can do, the worst games show us what it shouldn't do. In a sense, the good games are only so good because the bad games are so bad. So it seems inappropriate to give one list without giving the other.
I'm undecided as to whether lists with shallow commentary are even worse than lists with no commentary at all, but I suppose it doesn't hurt to try and justify some of these choices. So click on a game title for some shallow commentary.