1. Inform: Authoring Interactive Fiction
Week 3
LCC 2700: Intro to Computational Media
Fall 2005
Ian Bogost
Intro to Computational Media W eek 2: Properties of the Medium

2. Adventure Games Collosal Cave Adventure (early 70s)
MIT Students Dave Lebling and Mark Blank discovered in 1977
Lebling, Blank, Anderson, and Daniels created Zork
The four founded Infocom in 1979
Wrote a special language called Z-machine that interpreted such game files
Infocom swallowed by Activision in mid-80s
Z-machine reverse-engineered in early 1990s.
Intro to Computational Media W eek 2: Properties of the Medium

3. Interactive Fiction Derived from the Adventure Game
Revival of the format for procedural-literary ends of all kinds
A space-based genre
A puzzle-oriented genre
Sample of play:
Intro to Computational Media W eek 2: Properties of the Medium

4. What is Inform? System for creating text adventure games
A programming language
…that compiles to Z-Machine file types
…which can be played on a Z-Machine interpreter
…which exist for just about every platform
Intro to Computational Media W eek 2: Properties of the Medium