>examine interactive fiction

Posted on August 16, 2008 by Jacob Joaquin

Yesterday, I blogged about my first foray into the world of Interactive Fiction. While searching the web last night, two things in particular grabbed my attention.

The first is a blog post at Dorophone titled “On Inform 7, Natural Language Programming and the Principle of Least Surprise.” The article is clearly written from the viewpoint of a coder. The author does an excellent job of examining the “natural” qualities of Inform 7′s syntax, discusses many of the positives and negatives of programming in such an environment, and compares it to other languages such Inform 6 and python.

The other site is Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction. Emily Short writes both interactive fiction and about interactive fiction. After briefly browsing her articles, which I plan to revisit in the near future, I was left with the impression she has developed a mastery of the medium. The information found here is invaluable to anyone interested in interactive fiction, including novices, veterens, and everything in between. I discovered this site thanks to @christophernies, who recommended Galatea, an IF written by Emily Short.

Writing Interactive Fiction with Inform 7

Posted on August 15, 2008 by Jacob Joaquin

I’m learning Inform 7, a programming language designed to create interactive works of fiction for the same Z-Machine used for many text classics such and Zork and Planetfall. My inspiration comes from Adam Parrish‘s >frotzophone, “an interface for making music with interactive fiction”.

So far, I’ve put in about three hours. Within this time frame, I’ve already been successful at creating some very rudimentary, yet interactive environments. The syntax of Inform is by far the highest level language I’ve personally ever encountered; Coding requires the use of real english language. That fascinates me, and at the same time, hard for me to wrap my brain around.

Below is the in-game action of a demo I wrote to learn the language, followed by the actual code used to create the work.

The Hack-o-torium An Interactive Fiction by Jacob Joaquin Release 1 / Serial number 080815 / Inform 7 build 5T18 (I6/v6.31 lib 6/12N) SD


Hack-o-torium

This room looks like an astromech spewed its guts all over place, as each nook and cranny is filled with odd electrical devices, wires, resistors, etc.  You hear the busy street traffic below.
A simple but well crafted wooden staircase is here.
A large wooden table resides near the giant windows.
On The large wooden table is a bottle (closed) (in which is a clear brown liquid).

>climb stairs
Continue reading →

Survey on Musical Instruments

Posted on June 18, 2007 by Jacob Joaquin

“The Acoustic, the Digital and the Body: A Survey on Musical Instruments”

“In the autumn of 2006 we conducted a phenomenological, qualitative survey on people’s relationship with their acoustic and digitial instruments. This is part of an ongoing research.”

The survey is still open if you wish to participate.

via HectorC on the Csound Mailing list.