Interactive Fiction

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small demo here.

What is IF?

A Brief History

Before the first person shooter there was the second person thinker

The Setting

The mid-70s
Computers are big
No graphics (mostly)

1976: Adventure

Based on a real cave!
- The Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky
- Specifically, Colossal Cave
Magic, treasure, and whatnot...

Developed by Will Crowther
Expanded by Don Woods
DEC PDP-10
Fortran
Rudimentary parser

It was a hit

1979: Infocom

Then Adventure hit MIT and everything changed The Inform Designer's Manual, Graham Nelson

The largest and most widely-known company producing IF
Zork, A Mind Forever Voyaging, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Sophisticated parser
Cross-platform adventures
Feelies

Deadline

A Mind Forever Voyaging

Bought by Activision in 1986
Shut down in 1989
Trademark abandoned in 2002

1989: Legend Entertainment

Gateway
Eric the Unready
Spellcasting

Modern Times

Commercial IF slowly died
But the spirit lived on!
- Usenet groups
- InfoTaskForce
- Competitions
- A conference!

Windows kernel

And then... something magical happened

But we'll get to that

Authoring

ZIL

Zork Implementation Language
A derivative of MDL
- Which is a derivative of Lisp
Created by Infocom

There's a modern compiler!
And an old manual :)

<OBJECT DEMO>

Inform

Created by Graham Nelson in 1993
- Inform 6 released 1996
- Object-oriented, procedural
Inform 7 released 2006
- Natural language programming
- Declarative, procedural
Compiles for Z-Machine and Glulx

A demo is a kind of thing


A table is a supporter in the Great Hall.
The description of the table is
"[if nothing is on the table]It's a table, Jim.[end if]".
Instead of examining the table for the first time:
	say "Dammit, Jim! I'm a parser, not a descriptionist!"

TADS

Text Adventure Development System
- Michael J. Roberts, 1988
Similar to C, C++ and the like

#include <adv3.h>

Twine

System for CYOA games
Created by Chris Klimas in 2009
- Now maintained by the community
Author-friendly

(if:$examined != true)[Demo!]

ink

Developed by inkle
A narrative scripting language for games
Integration with Unity

=== demo ===


Welcome to the house of horrors!

-> intro

=== intro ===
In front of you, you can see a table.

+ {not table_first_time} [Examine the table] -> table_first_time
+ {table_first_time} [Examine the table] -> table_second_time