From 1c5a048cbc6f20d35ea674fbf0094744e3e71ddb Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Mike Frysinger Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2003 19:19:26 +0000 Subject: metadata --- dev-lang/inform/metadata.xml | 41 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 41 insertions(+) create mode 100644 dev-lang/inform/metadata.xml (limited to 'dev-lang/inform/metadata.xml') diff --git a/dev-lang/inform/metadata.xml b/dev-lang/inform/metadata.xml new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..d3e2854ee365 --- /dev/null +++ b/dev-lang/inform/metadata.xml @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ + + + +games + +A Design System for Interactive Fiction + +Just as film might be called a form of literature which needs technology to be +read (a cinema projector or a television set) and to be written (a camera), +interactive fiction is read with the aid of a computer. On this analogy, Inform +is a piece of software enabling any modern computer to be used as the camera, or +the film studio, to create works of interactive fiction. To read the resulting +works, you and your audience need only a simpler piece of software called an +interpreter. + +In this genre of fiction, the computer describes a world and the player types +instructions like touch the mirror for the protagonist character to follow; the +computer responds by describing the result, and so on until a story is told. + +Interactive fiction emerged from the old-style "adventure game" (c.1975) and +tends to be a playful genre, which must sometimes be teased out as though it were +a cryptic crossword puzzle. But this doesn't prevent it from being an artistic +medium, which has attracted (for instance) the former U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert +Pinsky, and the novelists Thomas M. Disch and Michael Crichton. An interactive +fiction is not a child's puzzle-book, with a maze on one page and a rebus on the +next, but nor is it a novel. Neither pure interaction nor pure fiction, it lies +in a strange and still largely unexplored land in between. + +Since its invention (by Graham Nelson in 1993), Inform has been used to design +some hundreds of works of interactive fiction, in eight languages, reviewed in +periodicals ranging in specialisation from XYZZYnews to The New York Times. It +accounts for around ten thousand postings per year to Internet newsgroups. +Commercially, Inform has been used as a multimedia games prototyping tool. +Academically, it has turned up in syllabuses and seminars from computer science +to theoretical architecture, and appears in books such as Cybertext: Perspectives +on Ergodic Literature (E. J. Aarseth, Johns Hopkins Press, 1997). Having started +as a revival of the then-disused Infocom adventure game format, the Z-Machine, +Inform came full circle when it produced Infocom's only text game of the 1990s: +Zork: The Undiscovered Underground, by Mike Berlyn and Marc Blank. + + -- cgit v1.2.3-65-gdbad