The all but forgotten genre of Interactive Fiction may very well be ready for a comeback, thanks to a very recent advancement which makes writing works of interactive literature more accessible to those who are better at plotting stories than they are at writing code.

Inform 7 is the latest edition of Inform, one of the most popular programming languages used to write works of Interactive Fiction. The first beta of Inform 7 was released April 30th, 2006, and its presence caused a shakeup in the IF community as a whole because of its radical new approach that flies in the face of IF tradition and conventions.

Normally to write interactive fiction one would need to have a firm grasp of Object-Oriented programming languages such as C. Writing even basic elements of an IF story, like adding a room and allowing the player to travel from that room to another adjoining room, required typing out long streams of convoluted code. This is best exemplified in Wikipedia's sample code for a small, bare-bones room coded in Inform 6. As such programming languages tend to be extremely finicky when it comes to what code you're typing in, even the slightest error could break your entire game, causing you to have to go hunting for the bug responsible and fix it.

This structure makes writing IF difficult, especially if you don't have the mind of a computer programmer. Languages like Inform 6 can be next to impossible for the non-technical layperson to even learn, much less use effectively. There are GUI programs out there like ADRIFT which requires no knowledge of programming at all and reduces the functionality of languages like Inform to an easy to use point-and-click menu-driven interface. However, programs like these lack the power and flexibility of a programming language, and can easily frustrate IF writers who've advanced beyond the novice stage and want to do more and more complicated things.

Inform 7 retains the power and flexibility of an object-oriented programming languages while becoming so easy that even the most non-technical writer can pick it up and use it. It accomplishes this by using what is called Natural English (a subset of the English language) as its programming language. What used to require writing complicated lines of code can now be accomplished by writing a natural, easily readable and understandable sentence in plain English. Wikipedia provides a very nice example of this. Note that this example code is for the same game which was linked to earlier in this article. Take a moment to compare the two source codes and decide which one is easier to write.

Having taken this new language for a spin myself, I can personally say that if is very easy and feels very natural. While writing a short game to learn the ropes I actually spent more time brainstorming story ideas and plot elements and much less time contemplating how I am going to get a technical feature to work. It took me only an hour or two to learn all I needed to write a basic game, whereas learning to do those same things in the TADS language took days.

A mind that is technical enough to master a programming language tends not to be abstract enough to master storytelling, and vice-versa. Inform 7 stands a good chance of bridging the gap between the two, allowing writers with abstract minds to write compelling works of interactive fiction without being hampered by the technicalities of a complex programming language, and programmers writing IF to focus more on honing their writing skills. April 30th 2006 may very well be remembered as the day Interactive Fiction took its first step out of the shadows and re-emerged as a viable form of entertainment.

Inform 7 Homepage