Sadly, the links to the manuals from this page http://inform7.com/learn/manuals/ are broken.
Oddly, the manual download links have been broken for a while, but the full manuals are included in the IDE download, which works great.
Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction
21–30 of 51 posts
Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction
#22I took a very non-traditional English class my freshman year of college, and we had an assignment that required us to use this language. From a traditional programming standpoint, I found this platform very difficult to use, though I was never really got too deep into what it was capable of.
> I found this platform very difficult to use
Indeed. When you read IF coded in Inform it all seems to make sense, but when you have to program it you realize you're just learning a very difficult and idiosyncratic syntax.
Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction
#23Has anyone used something like this for non-fictional contexts? I'm really enthusiastic about the future of interactive journalism, particularly in terms of tailoring journalist narratives to each reader. For example, I think coverage around the announcement of a new tax plan should adjust to the given user (ex. "Under Clinton's plan, your taxes will increase by 5%, to $14,000 annually."). Unfortunately, there just d…
I was just thinking about this today because of the Germanwings crash. What if instead of a news article you were presented with a page which somehow led you through a knowledge graph of the topic based on questions or actions by the reader?
When news is just breaking there would obviously be lots of dead ends, but perhaps if people kept inputting the same sort of question it would get flagged and become more important as the story develops. For example in the case of the plane crash, after hearing the initial reports of the pilot being locked out my immediate thoughts were:
- What is the lock mechanism like? Can the door be opened with force?
- How is the lock controlled?
- How is the altitude for autopilot set? Is it easy to set 96 feet instead of 9600 feet?
- Is there any record of the copilot's vitals before the crash?
- Why wasn't there another person in the cabin while the pilot stepped out?
What would be great is if I could see a list of topics, select one, and then either highlight sections/tags to follow up on, submit a question, or follow a link to an existing question. The UX here would be a very interesting study I think.
Inform> Scream expletives at reporter
That's not a verb I recognize.
The simplest way to do this would probably be to get a team of interns to trawl the net looking for what people are talking about after a story breaks (such as top voted Reddit comments), rephrasing them as necessary, and then turning them into tags which people reading the story can then subscribe to. Readers could select existing ones or see them fuzzy completed as they input their own questions. Hmmm.
Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction
#24I've been playing with this for a while and, while I don't have any games released, I continue to be in love with this genre. I'm one of those people that has a real mental picture of what I read (frequently better than what movies portray). There's a huge community of IF fans and producers which really runs more out of love than profit. There's also an archive where you can download a lot of games (or even play them…
> I'm one of those people that has a real mental picture of what I read It's always interesting to me when I hear people say this, because I can't understand it at all. If you ask me to close my eyes and visualize a car, I don't actually see anything. I can recall what a car or a specific car looks like, but I don't actually "see" it in any sense. Same with reading - I don't (can't) actually visualize the characters,…
This is fascinating to me; as is the Galton reference ~gwillen points out, which suggests about 3% of people don't form mental images at all. I haven't previously met anyone who disclaims all such mental visualization, so may I ask a few questions?
Can you draw pictures of things without consulting a present example? (If only slightly or very abstractly, have you ever tried improving this skill?)
If I were to ask you what's the color of Santa Claus's outfit, I suspect you could answer. Is that simply because you remember written or verbal communication naming that color? Do any other aspects of Santa's usual depiction come to mind at the same time, simply as a side effect of being asked about the outfit color?
Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction
#25I've been playing with this for a while and, while I don't have any games released, I continue to be in love with this genre. I'm one of those people that has a real mental picture of what I read (frequently better than what movies portray). There's a huge community of IF fans and producers which really runs more out of love than profit. There's also an archive where you can download a lot of games (or even play them…
> I'm one of those people that has a real mental picture of what I read It's always interesting to me when I hear people say this, because I can't understand it at all. If you ask me to close my eyes and visualize a car, I don't actually see anything. I can recall what a car or a specific car looks like, but I don't actually "see" it in any sense. Same with reading - I don't (can't) actually visualize the characters,…
Out of curiosity, is it different if you read a book aloud with someone? I don't usually form mental pictures that much when reading, but I found sometimes a few months or a year after reading a book aloud with my wife, I would be sure I was remembering the movie, only to realize I'd never watched it! :-)
Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm one of those people that has a real mental picture of what I read It's always interesting to me when I hear people say this, because I can't understand it at all. If you ask me to close my eyes and visualize a car, I don't actually see anything. I can recall what a car or a specific car looks like, but I don't actually "see" it in any sense. Same with reading - I don't (can't) actually visualize the characters,…
This is fascinating to me; as is the Galton reference ~gwillen points out, which suggests about 3% of people don't form mental images at all. I haven't previously met anyone who disclaims all such mental visualization, so may I ask a few questions? Can you draw pictures of things without consulting a present example? (If only slightly or very abstractly, have you ever tried improving this skill?) If I were to ask you…
> Can you draw pictures of things without consulting a present example?
On a scale of 1-10, my drawing ability is, generously, a 1.
> If only slightly or very abstractly, have you ever tried improving this skill?
"Improve drawing ability" is sort of on my back burner of things I should do - think, "I should buy a boat" cat meme. Even if I were consulting a present example, though, my ability to draw something would be very poor, so maybe it's just lack of training?
> If I were to ask you what's the color of Santa Claus's outfit, I suspect you could answer. Is that simply because you remember written or verbal communication naming that color?
I know it's red, but it's a purely verbal phenomenon. Thinking about it now it does sound strange - I know red when I see it, but I honestly cannot conjure up an image of "red", or any other color besides black, if I close my eyes.
> Do any other aspects of Santa's usual depiction come to mind at the same time, simply as a side effect of being asked about the outfit color?
Not unbidden, but if I think about it - grandfatherly, big white beard, ruddy cheeks, white-fur fringed red suit, black boots, portly. It's not necessarily from remembering written or spoken descriptions, though - it's more like my visual memories get encoded verbally.
FWIW I've always done exceptionally well on tests of verbal ability (perfect score on SAT and GRE verbal sections, for example) so maybe the part of my brain that should be doing visualizations is doing word stuff instead? Or, maybe since I lack that component I've had to make up for it by becoming better at language? I'm not sure.
Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction
#27Has anyone used something like this for non-fictional contexts? I'm really enthusiastic about the future of interactive journalism, particularly in terms of tailoring journalist narratives to each reader. For example, I think coverage around the announcement of a new tax plan should adjust to the given user (ex. "Under Clinton's plan, your taxes will increase by 5%, to $14,000 annually."). Unfortunately, there just d…
I was just thinking about this today because of the Germanwings crash. What if instead of a news article you were presented with a page which somehow led you through a knowledge graph of the topic based on questions or actions by the reader? When news is just breaking there would obviously be lots of dead ends, but perhaps if people kept inputting the same sort of question it would get flagged and become more importa…
Yup, I think this is actually one of the more interesting problems on the web today. We have access to more and more information than ever, but it's not organized in good navigation or narrative structures.
Interestingly, I actually think where the innovation is needed is on the input side. It's possible to produce a structured and personalizable story today, but it requires long programming lead times. We need to create systems which make it possible to build such stories at the speed of news.
--- (Shameless plug, but if anyone is interesting in this problem space I'm currently hiring. Email morgante@cafe.com if interested.)
Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me, the language is interesting because it could be used for other things...or to put it a different way interactive fiction seems a useful design abstraction for other real world tasks. What would it mean to wire inform up to arbitrary hardware as a primary user interface?
Infocom themselves tried such a thing many years ago - IIRC it was a db interface language called Cornerstone. Somewhat obviously, not a great success.
Wouldn't that have been with a different language? Inform 7 is a vastly different language from Inform 1-6 (which were relatively Algol-like), and only came out in 2006.
Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction
#29I've been playing with this for a while and, while I don't have any games released, I continue to be in love with this genre. I'm one of those people that has a real mental picture of what I read (frequently better than what movies portray). There's a huge community of IF fans and producers which really runs more out of love than profit. There's also an archive where you can download a lot of games (or even play them…
> I'm one of those people that has a real mental picture of what I read It's always interesting to me when I hear people say this, because I can't understand it at all. If you ask me to close my eyes and visualize a car, I don't actually see anything. I can recall what a car or a specific car looks like, but I don't actually "see" it in any sense. Same with reading - I don't (can't) actually visualize the characters,…
It's interesting to hear from someone else who also doesn't form mental pictures.
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure I understand what other people mean when they say mental pictures. If I close my eyes and try to imagine an elephant, I find myself describing the elephant essentially with words. There's nothing like an "image" in my mind, though I do sometimes have mental ideas without sentences (for example, I could easily imagine a flow chart right now).
Do other people see actual images when they imagine something?
Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction
#30I took a very non-traditional English class my freshman year of college, and we had an assignment that required us to use this language. From a traditional programming standpoint, I found this platform very difficult to use, though I was never really got too deep into what it was capable of.
> I found this platform very difficult to use Indeed. When you read IF coded in Inform it all seems to make sense, but when you have to program it you realize you're just learning a very difficult and idiosyncratic syntax.
Some Inform code would make excellent poetry, however.