Now you have to earn it.

Cause enough shit, and you'll win the respect of your peers and collect enough punk points to escape the suburbs.

Sometimes it takes a few minutes for the java applet to kick in, and once it does you have to click on it before you start typing. If it doesn't -- and you've looked in the advanced preferences to make sure that your browser is java-enabled -- you're better off downloading it and playing it offline. There's an online version that doesn't use Java here, however.

Clicking on it downloads an MP3 by the Weakerthans, courtesy of G7 Welcoming Committee. Let me know if you know of a good online punk rock radio station!)

If you're enjoying yourself, you can download the game for free to run on PC or Mac (other systems should grab the data file and go here to find a game engine for their system). So you can play without being online and SAVE and RESTORE the game in progress, which makes it easier to explore the alternate endings.

To get a sense of how to play these kind of games, you might want to read this transcript of Trapped! On A Bus!

Have you EXAMINED everything around you? Have you checked to see what you have in your INVENTORY recently? If you're trying to get useful things out of characters, ASK [person] ABOUT [something] will be the most revealing. There's also some handy shortforms: x(amine), l(ook), i(nventory), and the compass directions n,s,w,e. Keep in mind that 80% of the commands needed to win the game are in the format VERB NOUN (ie. ATTACK STU). If you'd like to see how far into the game you are, check your SCORE, and you can UNDO one turn.

Hints are not provided, on the basis that they're for fucking posers. Plus they take the satisfaction out of winning.

Punk Points, A Video Game in Three Acts (release 2, serial number 010108) was written with Inform in the summer of 2000 and revised with the gracious help of Jonathan Blask, Susan Bustos, Liz Clayton, Sean Lerner, Emily Pohl-Weary, and the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup folk. The web-version is enhanced by the work of Scott Waters (design and illos) and Matthew T. Russotto (java). If you liked this, you might like to check out another game we made called Monopoly: The Media Edition or check out my book Everyone In Silico.

Probably. It's less daunting then you might think -- due to the fact that the best interactive fiction programmers have to be able to write themselves, there's a lot of good tutorials and manuals. If you're curious as to what the code to games written in Inform look like, click here to see what my sloppy-but-workable first game looked like under the hood. A good resource is Brass Lantern.