Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction • Hacker News Board

Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

#41

Post by skybrian » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 2:54 PM UTC

jlees wrote: post #30

kaoD wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yup. I don't know about excellent, but here's one I like:

The lady is in the lake,

The lady is holding her breath...

When the lady is sad and the window is plaid

Then end the game in death.

More: http://slesinsky.org/brian/code/i7_poetry.html

Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

#42

Post by kaoD » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 3:19 PM UTC

morgante wrote: post #29

defen wrote: post #11

Earlier 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,…

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 coul…

> Do other people see actual images when they imagine something?

Pretty much.

In my case the image is not very clear around the edges, but it's very sharp where my mind eye is directly looking at. The rest is a bit blurry and fluid, but the general spatial structure is still clear. I do see color too.

It doesn't actually feel like literally seeing. It feels more like the post-processing your brain does after the real sight is processed. I can even mind-see with my eyes open and it feels different, which suggests they're separate mechanisms. It feels kind of like a projection in the back of my mind.

I'd compare it more to remembering sight, with the ability to mix those memories and imagining them (e.g. I've never seen a pink elephant but I can mix elephant and pink color).

For more intricate shapes like people's faces everything is fluid and not very sharp though. I get the rough shape of their heads and obvious details like the hair and then I can focus on specific parts of their face but not the whole picture. I've never been very good at remembering faces, but I'm very good at recognizing faces (even strangers which I just happen to cross on the street), which also suggests those are different brain mechanisms too.

Memorable faces like Angelina Jolie's are easier to picture as a whole, but common faces are harder to picture, no matter how much I've seen them (it's easier to picture Jolie than my own mother).

Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

#43

Post by bobbyi_settv » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 3:24 PM UTC

mundo wrote: post #19

If this piques your interest and you're interested in programming history, you will very likely enjoy reading about the Zork Implementation Language and the Z-machine, on which Inform is based: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine And the original spec for game authors from Infocom is quite entertaining: http://xlisp.org/zil.pdf Good stuff. More generally, if you want a short ( http://pr-if.org/play/violet/

For further reading, I'd like to recommend the book Let's Tell a Story Together: A History of Interactive Fiction by Jimmy Maher. It is available for free from the author (in Kindle format or readable online): http://maher.filfre.net/if-book/index.html

The same author has also written many great blog posts walking through the history of interactive fiction http://www.filfre.net/about-me/sitemap/

His article about Ultima IV got 97 comments the last time it was submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020954

Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

#44

Post by zarfeblong » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 5:17 PM UTC

smoyer wrote: post #3

I'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…

The searchable (and generally nicer) view of the Archive: http://ifdb.tads.org/

Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

#45

Post by kaoD » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 5:20 PM UTC

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #37

gwillen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll probably get a chuckle out of the first five-or-so paragraphs of: http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ The referenced paper can be found here: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm

Wow, the Galton paper is amazing, thank you. To be honest I'm like the scientists that he questioned first... until I read this today, I always thought that the whole "mental imagery" concept was mainly a figure of speech, as when people say they feel butterflies in their stomach, and things like that. I can picture my breakfast table, but it's more of a conceptual sketch than an actual image. I can only focus my tho…

> By the way, what I can do is hear music in my mind [...] I wonder if other people also experience this.

I remember when I was a kid I told my older brother I could play music in my head just like if I had pressed play in a tape deck. He was really puzzled.

I still can do it and it is definitely accurate. I lack perfect pitch recognition but for some reason when I play music in my head it's played in its original pitch. I use this to my advantage to replace perfect pitch: I just play a song with a known pitch in my head and use that imagined pitch as a relative. This works wonders for interval identification too (e.g. the first two notes in The Simpsons are a tritone apart).

Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

#46

Post by morgante » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 10:55 PM UTC

rayalez wrote: post #39

morgante wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coul…

Yes. I used to be very bad at imagination, but then needed to learn it when I was learning how to paint. I've started with drawing a dot on the piece of white paper, and was closing my eyes for a few seconds, trying to imagine it. After that - moved onto simple shapes and colors. Then practiced imagining cars or people's faces. Sometimes you can take a car and "rotate" it in your imagination, or change colors and det…

I don't think it's fair to call this "imagination."

I have a very active imagination and can easily come up with entire stories, cities, and ideas in my mind. They're just encoded textually.

Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

#47

Post by morgante » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 10:58 PM UTC

ideonexus wrote: post #40

limelight wrote: post #13

Has 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…

For your Clinton Plan example, you might want to check out the Tangle JS framework for reactive documents. It allows readers to change a variable in a text and have other numbers change accordingly. http://worrydream.com/Tangle/

Yes, I'm quite familiar with Tangle and Bret Victor's other work.

While it provides an okay experience on the reader side, it's jut not usable on the writer side—in terms of composition, it's not much better than any other JS framework.

What I really need is a way of letting non-technical writers create interactive stories. Probably the most successful example of this is Excel.

Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

#48

Post by gojomo » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 11:51 PM UTC

defen wrote: post #26

gojomo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Thanks! Definitely agree what may seem a 'gap' from one perspective may fuel advantages in other dimensions. By analogy to software data, it's almost as if you're 'serializing' memories differently.

One last thing I wonder may be correlated: do you have a good sense of direction/navigation?

Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

#49

Post by indrax » Sun, Mar 29, 2015, 3:56 AM UTC

This seems like the Best. Language. Ever. Obviously not for everything, but the readability of code is off the chart, and IDE and the integration of the documentation with the IDE is really...neat.

I've been looking at this for a few hours, and I am floored.

Am I missing something in existing IDE's?

Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

#50

Post by taradinoc » Sun, Mar 29, 2015, 7:34 PM UTC

mundo wrote: post #19

If this piques your interest and you're interested in programming history, you will very likely enjoy reading about the Zork Implementation Language and the Z-machine, on which Inform is based: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine And the original spec for game authors from Infocom is quite entertaining: http://xlisp.org/zil.pdf Good stuff. More generally, if you want a short ( http://pr-if.org/play/violet/

If you enjoy reading about the Zork Implementation Language, you might also enjoy my project, ZILF, which is a working implementation of ZIL: https://sourceforge.net/projects/zilf/

ZIL is basically a domain-specific language on top of MDL, the Lisp-like language that was used to write the original mainframe Zork. The developers went on to start Infocom and split Zork into three parts that were small enough to run on home computers, creating ZIL and the Z-machine in the process.

The source code for mainframe Zork is still available, but the subset of MDL implemented by ZILF isn't complete enough to play it. Matthew T. Russotto has written a MDL interpreter to do just that: http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXprogrammingXmdlX...