Published on the Web (online journal)

Inform is a system for creating adventure games, and this is the book to read about it. It translates an author’s textual description into a simulated world which can be explored by readers using almost any computer, with the aid of an ‘‘interpreter’’ program. Inform is a suite of software, called the ‘‘library’’, as well as a compiler. Without the library, it would be a major undertaking to design even the smallest game. The library has two ingredients: the ‘‘parser’’, which tries to make sense of the player’s typed commands, and the ‘‘world model’’, a complex web of standard rules, such as that people can’t see without a source of light. Given these, the designer only needs to describe places and items, mentioning any exceptional rules that apply. (‘‘There is a bird here, which is a normal item except that you can’t pick it up.’’) This manual describes Inform 6.21 (or later), with library 6/9 (or later), but earlier Inform 6 releases are similar. Since its invention in 1993, Inform has been used to design some hundreds of works of interactive fiction, in eight languages, reviewed in periodicals ranging in specialisation from XYZZYnews (www.xyzzynews.com) to The New York Times (see Edward Rothstein’s ‘Connections’ column for 6 April 1998). It accounts for around ten thousand postings per year to Internet newsgroups. Commercially, Inform has been used as a multimedia games prototyping tool. Academically, it has turned up in syllabuses and seminars from computer science to theoretical architecture, and appears in books such as Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (E. J. Aarseth, Johns Hopkins Press, 1997). Having started as a revival of the then-disused Infocom adventure game format, the ‘‘Z-Machine’’, Inform came full circle when it produced Infocom’s only text game of the 1990s: ‘Zork: The Undiscovered Underground’, by Mike Berlyn and Marc Blank. Nevertheless, Inform is not the only system available, and the intending game designer should shop around. This author at least has long admired the elegance of Mike Roberts’s Text Adventure Development System (TADS).

Interactive fiction is a game genre that has been around for quite some time now and has a rather in-depth history to it. We’ve already taken a look at part of the genre, primarily text and graphical adventures. But today I’m going to talk about some other things that are important to interactive fiction!

So, I’m sure that many of us as kids read Choose Your Own Adventure books (or CYOA); novels where at the end of each page you were asked to make a choice as to what to do and then would be directed to a different page depending on your actions. Sometimes you’d make it to the end, sometimes not.

And if you’re wondering just what these books have to do with video games, the answer is a surprising amount! So let’s take a look at these types of books.

This paper presents Comme il Faut (CiF), an artificial intelligence system that matches character performances to appropriate social context, with the goal of enabling authors to write high-level rules governing expected character behavior in given social situations, rather than specific fixed choice points in a curated narrative structure. CiF models characters with a complex set of traits, feelings, and relationships, who can form intents, take actions, relate to a shared cultural space, and remember and refer to past events. A set of authored rules encodingappropriate behavior within a specific story world allow these characters to select actions to take (and respond to actions by others) in a manner consistent with their own personal and social concerns as well as a shifting interpersonal context. Through the development and release of Prom Week, a complete game using CiF as its narrative engine, we show how the system successfully creates complex narratives that are unique for each player and directed by those players' attempts to make progress towards story goals. We also show how CiF continues to be used in several in-progress interactive experiences (Mismanor and IMMERSE), speaking to the utility and flexibility of its design.(from: proquest. date:17.sep.2020)

“Dial” is a new collaboration by Lai-Tze Fan and Nick Montfort, a generative emoji-embedded poem representing networked, distant communication.

Two voices are isolated from one another, yet connected by the passing of time over changing seasons. The work is both a dialogue and a representation of monologue over time; time itself can be adjusted using the dials, by clicking the clocks at the bottom of the project.

Climatophosis is inspired by the current climatic change in the world. In fact, the title of the poem is coined from Climate and metamorphosis. It is all about who is to be blamed for the climate change? -It is the same humanity that refuses to respect the nature. On the other hand, nature is renewing itself because it is tired. It is a call for masses to respect nature and be freed from the consequences of climate change.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/climatophosis/)

The Deer is a rhythmic, image-driven literary psychothriller about a physicist who hits — what appears — to be a deer. As he returns from the scene of the accident to his childhood home, long-forgotten memories flood his consciousness, and he must come to terms with the fact that his past, and reality as he knows it, are not what they appear. This piece is an interactive text/recording and/or a performance piece which carries the user through the text line by line. As the narrator becomes more and more emotionally fraught, audio effects bend the narrator’s voice to the point of incoherence, mirroring the breakdown of language in the face of trauma.

"March Madness, 1974" is a fictionalized work in found-text form by Richard Holeton. The text splices together real and imagined events, which take place over the course of a month in March, 1974. The fictionalized story follows two students, named "R" and "U," who fall in love while studying at the Stanford overseas campus in Tours, France.

The month begins with news of Richard Nixon's indictment for his role in the Watergate scandal. The daily entries are, in part, a record of current events and cover a range of topics including: politics, crime, economics and celebrity drama. These news bites are cut together without context. However, the most recurring themes are those of death and disaster: a major airplane crash, a deepening global recession and missing and murdered college women. Despite the atmosphere of dread, as evoked by the news media, the youth remain optimistic and the final entry describes the couple venturing out into the world "full of hope."

In terms of the factulaity of the story, some of the 'news' appears to be clipped directly from the headlines. However, certain facts, like the day serial killer Ted Bundy murdered his first victim, were not publically known at the time. The narrator's special knowledge of events further blurs the divisions between "found" and "made" text. As one of the reports reads: "It can be hard to tell the real signals from the false ones" (March Madness, 1974, March 13).