There’s an Interactive Fiction Writing Month event going on right now, and I’ve decided to take part in it. Hey, it can’t be any worse than NaNoWriMo, right?
Anyway, if any of you dear readers want to give this thing a whirl as well, do let me know. It seems like it’s going to be interesting. As it stands now, I’m already happily tinkering with the nifty natural language goodness of Inform 7. It’s almost like not programming… which means it’s almost like not doing real work!
I described I7 to someone the other day as “It’s kind of like writing a short story to some weirdly autistic kid…” Many of the examples are almost more interesting to read through their source than to actually play, and that alone is quite fascinating to me. I haven’t read The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time yet, but I wonder how much it resembles I7. (I’ve also been wondering what an I7-based multiplayer experience might be like… Possibly the closest thing we might ever see to Myst’s concept of writing linking books. I’ve also been imagining some autistic daemon avatar that you could /tell I7 sentences to and watch the world change.)
Anyway, I’ve decided to follow the IF Writing Month, along with the other things I’ve got going on. I’ve got an I7 game with the boringly generic working title of “Amongst the Stars”. I’m up to 500+ words, 3 rooms and 4 other things according to the post-compile report. It’s even got a cutesy “above the banner” intro to set the stage; a couple of paragraphs that somewhat ape the original Myst intro, but maybe darker… I may not “officially” post my work in progress to the planned IF Writing Month drop box, but I’ll at least post the weekly snapshots on my blog. (I’ve been keeping it in source control as well, and may post the entire repo history somewhere at some point as well…)
On the other side I just started Lacuna Blue and am already quite jealous of Reed’s work thus far. (Just finished Chapter 1.)
Adam Cadre wrote something regarding IF and autism once… it’s located here: http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/10910.html
And my I7 game for this week is tentatively called “Breaking and Entering”.
Please note that there is little similarity between the fictional “autism” of The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time and any real kind of autism. While I respect Adam Cadre greatly for his work, by using that book’s character as a shorthand for autism he is misrepresenting the autistic mind. I don’t know anything about Inform 7, and I don’t know any severely autistic people firsthand, so there may be a connection. But if there is a similarity between Inform 7 and the character of that book, then there most likely isn’t.
I myself have a sort of neurology classified as a minor kind of autism (Asperger’s Syndrome), and my brain works in exactly the opposite way (relative to normal people). I have tremendous difficulty noticing details, which is why I tend to have a lot of trouble playing standard perception-and-puzzle-driven adventures. Text adventures included.
Deirdra, I very much look forward to seeing what you pull off in this medium. Considering the character-driven style of your previous work, it’ll probably be the kind of text adventure I like.
“I’ve also been wondering what an I7-based multiplayer experience might be like…”
You can look up the multiplayer I7 library and server Guncho — it’s quite neat.