By chance, I have just seen the BBT episode in which Sheldon is playing a text adventure. When he exclaimed “I’m using the best hardware, MY IMAGINATION” I didn’t know if to feel happy or humiliated.
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I used to work on a NeXT machine! It was the system that ran the digital paint and trace program Animo. I made dozens of commercials for Count Chocula, Reach Toothbrushes and Cookie Crisp, among other things. NeXT was the forerunner of OSX.
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Thanks for your observations. They make sense.
Maybe then it’s not a cultural shift, but the increase in program size, scope and complexity, and the move away from individuals writing the whole program, that increased emphasis on ‘coding’.
In the context that birthed me as a programmer, having an Apple II as a kid in the 80s, you wrote programs. The program did the whole thing you wanted it to do. It wasn’t a piece of something else. The same with all the how-to books and docs, and the columns in Creative Computing for programmers, and all the games were written by one-man-bands, with the odd creative component exception (music, graphics).
I think the main time people switched to the word coding in the 8-bit era was when using assembly. Because the translation of instructions into that language was so alien, it was indeed like using a code.
-Wade
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This forum is of course the best place for help, but hundreds of people have learned it as it from the documentation. Honestly basic functions are not that hard A chest is a locked container. A sword is in the chest. and it’s trickier implementations that can be difficult and require help - or someone to show you where in the documentation it is explained.
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As a side note I learned it from copying Emily Short’s open source game code
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The biggest problem with the docs for beginners is that a lot of people want to write a specific story. They don’t want to go through every chapter of the docs and learn all about Inform. They want to learn the things that will help them write the story they want to tell right now. And that’s the way a lot of people learn best-- by doing something they’re invested in. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read through the docs. But if it isn’t something I’m interested in right now, it will not stick. This has changed a little as I grow more comfortable with and more interested in Inform, but usually I just want to know where to find the examples that can help me do the thing I want to do.
Yes, but also it can be the very devil to find something that’s easy to do. There’s a lot of stuff that’s filed very randomly, and unless you know the correct search term (eg: printing a parser error), you need help finding it.
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This one likely isn’t too unpopular- but I cannot fucking stand the change in placement of the text box in the newer versions of Twine. Like, I actively despise it.
It’s a wretched overhaul of the UI, with it now being shafted to the side instead of being nicely centered, and I literally hunted through the uploads to find an older version to rollback to (being pretty unused to such things, I didn’t think to take note of the version I’d been using prior, just noticed ooh, new update is out!).
It’s apparently a permanent change, and will persist through future updates, so I’m just never ever going to upgrade the version of Twine I use currently. It works out fine for me since my games are so coding light anyways, so I’m unlikely to need any fancy pants macros or quality of life changes in the future, but it’s still a bafflingly ugly UI decision.
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What is the temperature inside a tauntaun?
Lukewarm.
Edit: Removed insensitive joke about dad jokes being potentially triggering for some.
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I learned Inform 7 (10?) by reading Jim Aiken’s book and searching this forum, and… I think it went pretty well? I asked questions here sometimes, too. I didn’t look at the docs much in those early days, though I have them open all the time now. I haven’t really used the recipe book much. I can immediately recall maybe four examples that I’ve done a lot with.
I guess I’ve been frustrated at times, but not a huge amount. I like the stories it lets me tell.
I spend more time writing about learning Inform 7 these days than I do making my own games, which might be surprising, but it’s just how things have turned out. Inform has done a lot for me as a writer, and I like sharing it with people.
I hope this isn’t controversial, but it might bear repeating: If you are trying to make interactive fiction, there are probably people who want to help you. This is a helpful community. People helped me, and we’ll help you, too.
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I’d like to request that people not use the phrase “trigger warning” flippantly/as a joke. It’s a term for a tool that some people rely on, and using it flippantly trivializes that.
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4 posts were split to a new topic: Empirical studies of trigger/content warnings
Sorry that I offended people. It wasn’t my intention.
Let’s resume hating on IF… and not each other. Let’s all hate together as one loving community. 
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While I’ve seen some good takes here I’m of an opinion that will win me no friends:
The parser interface is predicated on a lie, the lie that “you can type anything and the system will respond intelligently,” and this lie has doomed millions of players who would love interactive fiction into believing that IF is a failed sub-genre of expressive creation. They aren’t wrong for being mad at the parser interface for being too high of a barrier to entry, but the lie was too powerful a marketing ploy to not abuse expectations. Now we have generations of players who will never consider trying IF and it’s the parser’s fault.
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Here’s a much more mild take:
Solo journaling games are the most unexplored interactive fiction genre and they have the most potential.
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I am curious: does this come from a very distant time period? Because I don’t think I’ve ever been given that impression. Most of the instructions I’ve read have acknowledged the parser’s limited vocabulary. I think there is still appeal in the fact that there’s no telling what the parser might understand, in terms of solving puzzles. I think it’s more satisfying to get a quiz question right when it’s fill-in-the-blank rather than multiple choice. I think that that is still a valid appeal for parser games, even though the parser doesn’t pretend to understand “anything” you say.
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It does. For a lot of time the main point of IF was the somewhat “open world” and how you could, like, pile things of top of each other but that’s frankly never the case unless there’s a puzzle about it. And yes, “being able to do what you want” was the second most occurring marketing after “you live your own adventure”.
@severedhand i refused to watch movies like Terrifier ecc because they were marketed as too much for an audience to sustain. Then went to YouTube to find the most gruesome scenes are the same old same old. So yes, in my case the warnings were THE reasons I felt worse than needed. But I still understand the need of them.
Also, going to YouTube proved to me those were pointless movies. So I saved bucks by staying at home.
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I understand the value of the debate aimed at comparing the strengths and weaknesses of various IF production systems. However, beyond the technical considerations—which are interesting in themselves—all I feel toward the creators of these systems (Inform, TADS, Twine, ChoiceScript, and others) can be summed up in one word: gratitude. I have no strong opinions or negative judgments; the authors of these systems owe me nothing, and I’m genuinely happy to be able to use what they offer.
So far, I’ve really only explored Inform (and spent a few curious hours on the other languages I mentioned). I’m convinced that, in the long run, I’ll use other systems or languages alongside Inform for different stories with alternative narrative formats. To some extent, I think it’s actually great that these IF production systems or languages are imperfect—that they have biases, gaps, limitations, blind spots, and impose constraints.
I know this might seem hard to grasp; perhaps my mindset has been too shaped by intensive practice in strategy. But all these “imperfections” aren’t obstacles to my creativity—they’re springboards to enhance it, frameworks I use to focus on what I consider essential: trying to make the player dream a little.
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I’ll see your “hundreds of people who learned Inform from its slipshod documentation” and raise you many hundreds more who could have learned Inform, and who could be using it to tell interesting, meaningful stories.
Even Dwarf Fortress has a functioning tutorial now. This isn’t an impossible task. It’s just clearly an impossible task for the person(s) who attempted to provide it.
People here—including you!—have been super kind and helpful, and I’m grateful for that. But I wouldn’t have had to waste your time with such a basic question if the documentation had simply told me, “By the way, you can’t ‘exit [noun],’ despite ‘get out of box’ being a completely rational first instinct.”
Why doesn’t it say that anywhere, despite there needing to be at least two extensions I can name (one of which written by Short herself) fixing this issue?
That’s what I mean.
And hunks of chapter 2 are spent telling me about headings and extensions, when it hasn’t shown me how to make anything over which I’d want to put a heading! Nor do I yet know whether I need an extension, because I haven’t yet been shown what vanilla Inform can do.
It’s all backwards.
I’m not trying to make Realistic Top Chef: the Parser Game, but I also made Walk from Room to Room Looking at Things: the Parser Game within thirty minutes of opening the IDE, and I’d like to make something else now.
If Inform had a list somewhere of the exact phrases required for creating rules (not just “This is the ____ rule:” but something like, “You can start a rule or check with When, Before, Instead of, etc…"), I’d be flying at this point.
But the documentation fails as reference material.
Specific example:
If the LISTS chapter told me the short list of things it’s possible make lists of (numbers, text, etc…), I could’ve implemented my audio recorder mechanism so much quicker.
My finished code works like this:
The tape is a list of text that varies.
and then each relevant action has the line:
add “____” to tape.
And then when you press the play button (part of the recorder):
say “[tape].”
It’s so cool that it works how I wanted it to work!
No thanks to the documentation…
The LISTS chapter gives the example:
let L be a list of numbers.
Which, by the way, is NOT the way to word this in the code, unless it’s a temporary list (but good luck learning that from the documentation). EDIT: To further confuse the matter, I just noticed that the section where this example appears is called “Constant Lists” (SAD TROMBONE)!
If it’s a standalone rule for a constant list, you must write it as:
L is a list of numbers (that varies? I still don’t know when or whether this is necessary, because, once again, it’s never explained, it just inexplicably appears in some of the samples).
but let’s continue with the doc’s example. I didn’t want to make a list of numbers, so I kept looking and found:
let L be {"apple”, "pear", "loganberry"};
makes L a list of texts…
But it took me runtime error after runtime error and multiple attempts to fabricate circuitous rules making sounds things and lists of things before I discovered that “text” needs to be singular in the rule itself!!! Despite how it’s described in the above example!!!
What could’ve taken me minutes took days.
That’s a nightmare, and a complete failure of the “PhD-level documentation” to pay attention to itself.
I’m clearly not overreaching my own abilities, I’m overreaching the documentation’s ability to serve its purpose. And I didn’t have to reach very far.
I’m happy some people have successfully learned Inform from the documentation. In fact, I’m impressed.
The IDE certainly frames itself like that’s supposed to be how it works. Would be wonderful were it the case. Too bad after decades the “tutorial” is still basically a three-ring binder of chicken scratch.
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What’s a solo journaling game?
-Wade
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This is one of the best-known: Thousand Year Old Vampire
The physical book is beautiful, but there’s also a cheaper PDF-only version available.
I don’t know a lot of solo journaling games, but I love this one and I’m eager to discover more.
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