Was it Masquerade?
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And that’s the key to most thing. It’s the same reason why I end up with Raspberry Pi OS, instead of other OS. It’s the reason why ZIL is not as popular as I6, despite being mostly the same.
We all need help when we first started. There is no community without good feedback. Good support is paramount to the future of IF. There’s no new people, and therefore, no future without it.
Whatever the future of IF is, it doesn’t have to be the most user friendly, or one that runs on most computers. But it has to be the most people supported platform. IMHO.
Edit: If all else fails, there’s collaboration. Douglas Adams didn’t code HHGTTG. So, there.
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I think most of y’all have heard me say this before, but the language that an IF system uses is arguably the least important factor in making it popular.
Most people decide to use an IF system because they see a game that they admire, and they say, “I want to make a game just like that! Whatever system the author used to make it, I’ll use that system, too!” Admirers don’t seem to directly care about any of the details of the system, except that if it’s too hard for them to learn the system and finish a game, that’s a major factor in achieving true popularity.
This makes it difficult (nearly impossible) for new systems to defeat existing popular systems. The new system has to be so much better that it’s worth starting a new community of practitioners from scratch, and it has to be better in a way that the existing community simply can’t adopt the new idea(s) into their existing community/tools.
I believe that Inform 7 crossed that bridge by working hand in hand with community leaders (popular IF authors) to deliver a tool that they liked, that they felt like they had a hand in shaping. In 2006, when Emily Short shipped Bronze in Inform 7, and Stephen Granade shipped Child’s Play, it proved that Inform 7 was a serious design system in which admirable authors could make sophisticated works of IF, and that IF players could read the source and understand it. That set the stage in 2008 for Violet and Blue Lacuna, and from there, Inform 7 had fully achieved community liftoff.
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Inform 7 has been much easier for me to learn than other languages I’ve attempted. I’m not a programmer really, although I have technically programmed some things. Thinking through the logical parts of programming while having to remember an abstract language at the same time requires a lot of mental resources. I bounced off of the game Suveh Nux pretty hard while others found it easy. I think the issue was that I was having to solve a puzzle, understand the rules of how spells worked, and translate into an invented language all at once. Pulls my ADHD brain in too many directions. Inform 7 code looks like what it does, to my mind at least. I still have a lot to learn about the language and how to make more complex things happen, but I can make a simple game without much problem. Having a community to ask questions was a major help as well. Speaking of which, there are Discord servers for Interactive Fiction and Inform 7. There are some helpful folks over there, but overall the activity is pretty dead. Helping noobs in realtime is the future of IF, or at least that’s how I’m going to tie that observation into this conversation.
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I hate to get involved in the forty-seventh “Why do people like I7” thread on this forum, but I will say that Hadean Lands could not have been written in I6. The I6 library doesn’t scale very well past a certain point. The coding effort to add new stuff blows up.
(I could tell with Dreamhold that headaches were appearing in the horizon.)
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Could Hadean Lands been written in TADS, either Adv3 or Adv3Lite?
Thank you
I don’t know. I’ve never used TADS.
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I think Inform 7’s rule system suits parser IF more than traditional object oriented models, especially when you’re mixing and matching agents (PC and NPCs) and multiple nouns. Other languages could implement a rules system (obviously, as I7 compiles to I6), but the only other one I know of that does is Dialog. I7 descriptions (filter functions) are very powerful and ergonomic too. So while it’s definitely still complex programming, I think features like these might make it considerably more accessible for people without a broader programming background.
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Are “rules” just behviours on object superclasses. Or are they global conditionals?
That’s interesting. Can you elaborate? (please, without pulling you into the 47th I7 conversation 
)
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Sounds like a good reason to learn TADS…
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Inform’s rule system is very flexible, but the main use is with actions. Rules are lists of functions each of which can have a condition which must be met for the function to be run. For actions the conditions match on the verb, the actor, the noun, and the second noun. All of those can be classes rather than specific instances. Inform will sort the rule conditions by specificity, so that more specific rules run before more generic ones, and you can manually order rules if needed. Rulebooks can also say whether a single matching rule should run, or all rules.
I think rules are much more accessible because, for example, if you’re writing code to handle what happens when the mother character rings the dinner bell compared to the player, and what happens when the player hits the bell rather than ringing it properly, or when the player rings some other bell, you don’t need to think about whether it would be best to attach code to the bell objects, or the character objects, and how to match the character to the bell and the appropriate action. You just write rule headers saying “Carry out mother ringing the dinner bell”, “Carry out the player hitting the dinner bell with the bread stick” etc.
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Thanks for the explanation. Rules are global conditions on classes sorted by specificity. got it.
Drop “on classes”.
I have to say, the natural language parsing of Inform7 is intriguing to me in a lot of ways, and why I love it, it just gets out of the way for me. I do a lot of shell work and *nix scripting in my day job (computer forensics/cyber incident response). I am a super lousy programmer, but a decent scripter. I keep wondering if the language could be used in other ways, and have read that it is, but outside of my discipline.
Would you mind pointing me/inviting me to some?
TADS’ adv3Lite includes a rules extension which “allows Inform7-style rules and rulebooks to be defined in a TADS 3 game.” I’ve never used it and can’t speak to its features or limitations.
What’s my take on the “Future of Interactive Fiction?” It’s not about coding languages.
How about the future of inspiring untapped creative vision to write IF, finding new audiences, and expanding from a niche (and nostalgia-inducing) video game format into a more widely-accepted form?
Beyond the rise of e-books for traditional fiction—a game-changer—there’s been a surge of big serialization platforms like Kindle Vella, Radish, GoodNovel. They’ve brought fan fiction—very niche only a few years ago—into the mainstream with web/mobile readers and pay-as-you-go installments.
I can’t find the publisher at the moment, but one upstart produces a reader app where the serialized stories are told as SMS bubbles between the characters (shades of Sarah Willson’s superb Closure). Radish has gone so far as to hire soap opera writers who plan stories in writer’s room, where the group hashes out plot developments and individual writers are assigned episodes around the table.
This new breed of serialization publisher fosters communities around each work or series, bringing readers to the author. Reader comments and suggestions can act as a feedback loop to the writer(s), encouraging them to go one direction over another, developing secondary characters, and so on.
Is this interactive fiction? No. But the surge of popularity in serialized fiction didn’t involve fan-fiction writer debates of Scrivner’s vs. Microsoft Word vs. Google Docs. Fresh blood coming into the scene, and an eager drive to get their stories into the hands of readers, launched all this.
Mostly, though, I cherish the idea that a single person can develop and release an IF game. That used to be a given in the video game industry; now, video games are produced more like major motion pictures. (Looking at you, Rockstar.)
I find something unique and valuable in a single focused mind bringing to bear its creative vision for an audience. You get that with poetry, (some) novels, and interactive fiction, but little else today. I like to believe there remains a healthy readership in the world, and they love being involved in their stories. That’s my focus.
Unless we really simply want IF to become a genre where the writers and readers are one and the same. If so, the future of IF looks increasingly like the literary-magazine field, with MFA students and professors publishing and critiquing each other’s work. That’s a possibility too.
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This.
I actually think the future of IF is being able to make games easier than they are now. That’s making the game, not playing the game.
Controversially, i don’t think the future is in better parsers. parser input will remain, but take a back seat. They might even be simpler than they are now.
Nor, as you mention, is it about coding languages.
Game serialisation is something I’ve been wanting for years. I’d like to try making a serialised game. We’re talking episodes of a series, each one having a small plot, fitting into a series length wider plot. If it’s popular, then there can be a series 2 etc.
So, indeed, the format of games (eg stand alone vs series) could be a future significant change. And, of course, with serials there are brands. Which is another attractor.
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I agree. I have never had any success getting young folks to play IF, but they are interested in Inform 7. That’s the gateway. Once they start playing around with I7 and telling their story, they want to play something by someone else. And now my 14 year old niece is playing IF, because she got hooked on I7 first. So making games easier to code leads to wanting to use the program, which leads to playing.
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I think this is a worthwhile thing to ask. The discourse here tilts heavily toward coding and technical matters because that is the userbase. Cultural phenomena are usually characterized in terms of audience experience.
Having spent some time in that world (I have an MFA in poetry, have edited a couple of books, and have very briefly taught writing at the college level), I hope this is not the case.
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