[...]... 271 Actions Done by People 274 People with Plans 275 Orders 276 Extensions for People 277 Conversation: Three Systems 277 ASK/TELL 278 Conversation Framework... 1 67 Sniffing Out Some Fuel 169 Chapter 7 Logic and Control 173 Logic 173 Conditions 173 Variables 177 Variable Basics 177 Custom Kinds of Variables... later, after nearly 100,000 newsgroup posts mentioning Inform and something like a thousand stories written with the language, Nelson announced Inform 7, a radically new language entirely While the old Inform was “a computer programmer’s tool which aimed to be welcoming to creative writers,” Inform 7 “aspired to be the other way around”: a tool for making interactive stories that’s been designed first and... Artists) Our focus will be strictly on using Inform 7 to write interactive fiction, without spending much time on abstractions without practical examples Naming Conventions Consistent language is an important component of any instructional book, so briefly, here’s the rationale behind certain nomenclature choices Scholars of interactive stories have often struggled with what to call the pieces they talk... or leave them out C hapter 1 Understanding Interactive Fiction B efore you start creating your own interactive fiction, it’s important to understand the medium: its strengths and weaknesses, its tropes and clichés, its language, pacing, and flow If your experience with IF is limited to hazy memories, and especially if you’ve never encountered an interactive fiction before, this chapter provides a useful... then $9.95 Nobody wants it Interactive fiction has failed, just another short-lived fad in the early days of home computing, unable to compete with the superior technology superseding it Time passes Twenty years later, in 2010, a website tracking interactive fiction called the IFDB adds a newly written story to its archive every four days on average Projects to bring interactive fiction (IF) to cell phones,... Contents Introduction: Why Interactive Fiction? xix Chapter 1 Understanding Interactive Fiction 1 Blue Lacuna: An IF Excerpt 1 How to Play Interactive Fiction 5 Finding and Installing an IF Interpreter 6 Finding Stories to Play 7 Playing IF ... 67 The Index Panel: World 67 The TREE Testing Command 69 Table of Contents Chapter 4 Describing the Story World 73 The Description Property 73 Descriptions for Rooms 73 Text Substitutions and Getting BENT 77 Descriptions... and the one this book adopts, is to call it an interactive fiction, as in “Photopia is an interactive fiction about memory and death.” This seems less redundant than something like interactive fiction story,” and less awkward than something like “work of IF.” While most programming languages use the term “source code” to describe what the user generates, Inform and this book use the term source text... 3 67 The Transcript 369 Outside Testing 372 Finding Testers 372 Working with Testers 372 Signposting 374 Debugging Sand-dancer 375 Releasing .