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Inform 7
July 30, 2007
I presented recently at the
ALA Techsource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium. As
I noted earlier, I used
ProfCast to record the presentation. The movie has been posted if you care to hear/watch about
Interactive Fiction.
In the presentation, I recommend the use of
Inform7 for writing Interactive Fiction. The beauty of this software - available as a free download for Mac, Windows and Linux - allows users to write their game instead of having to code it. With an incredibly strong natural language parser, Inform7 interprets your writing and compiles it as proper computer code. For example, writing "Room 241 is a room" creates a new location called Room 241. We can then place items in Room 241 by writing "Chris is a man in Room 241" which is interpreted as create a new object that is a person and then place that object in Room 241. As noted in the presentation, there is a
n excellent tutorial that will get you started with Inform7 in about an hour available from
BrassLantern.org.
Writing text adventures is a great way to engage students in a new and very creative writing process. It also aligns beautifully with most of the
National English Language Arts Standards from NCTE and IRA which provides strong support for bringing Interactive Fiction to schools.
Posted by Chris Harris on July 30, 2007 | Comments (0)
