| <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> |
| <!DOCTYPE pkgmetadata SYSTEM "http://www.gentoo.org/dtd/metadata.dtd"> |
| <pkgmetadata> |
| <maintainer type="project"> |
| <email>games@gentoo.org</email> |
| <name>Gentoo Games Project</name> |
| </maintainer> |
| <longdescription> |
| 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. |
| </longdescription> |
| </pkgmetadata> |