Inform: Authoring Interactive Fiction Week 3 LCC 2700: Intro to Computational Media Fall 2005 Ian Bogost Intro to Computational Media W eek 2: Properties of the Medium

Adventure Games Collosal Cave Adventure (early 70s) MIT Students Dave Lebling and Mark Blank discovered in 1977 Lebling, Blank, Anderson, and Daniels created Zork The four founded Infocom in 1979 Wrote a special language called Z-machine that interpreted such game files Infocom swallowed by Activision in mid-80s Z-machine reverse-engineered in early 1990s. Intro to Computational Media W eek 2: Properties of the Medium

Interactive Fiction Derived from the Adventure Game Revival of the format for procedural-literary ends of all kinds A space-based genre A puzzle-oriented genre Sample of play: http://www.inform-fiction.org/introduction/sample.html Intro to Computational Media W eek 2: Properties of the Medium

What is Inform? System for creating text adventure games A programming language …that compiles to Z-Machine file types …which can be played on a Z-Machine interpreter …which exist for just about every platform Intro to Computational Media W eek 2: Properties of the Medium