05Jun2006 2213: Viva La Xanfar

Interactive fiction - or text adventures - goes back to the oldest of the old school. Sure, maybe the first videogame had graphics, but for a long time personal computers had only the most rudimentary monitors. Text adventures were the solution...and they still are.

I speak of the recent release of Inform 7, a cross-platform development environment for making text adventures using a subset of English. Read that part again. Then go check out the gallery for an example of how stupidly easy it is to create stupidly simple games.

I can state that the reality is not quite so rosy; Inform 7 can get complicated very quickly. Why can't I "switch the lever on" or "switch it", yet Inform lets me "switch on the lever" or "try switching the lever"? Madness.

It's important to note that although you can play games as you're writing them, it doesn't seem to be possible to play "released" games from other people. For that you will need Zoom (Unix/Mac) or probably this thing (for Windows). And then you will need a game, such as my first attempt.

Incidentally, I just noticed that each paragraph of this post starts with an I.