As I described in my article "> Read Game" in The Escapist issue 7, there is still a small but devoted audience for interactive fiction (text games). Now IF fan Graham Nelson has released Inform 7, the latest version of a venerable program many IF authors use to craft their stories.

By text game standards, Inform 7 is really quite the big deal:

Original Comment by: Shih Tzu
http://www.flammie.net/vse/
Huh. I had heard vague things about Inform 7 being in the works, but I had no idea they were introducing a whole natural-language-input thing. That is crazy. I'll have to see exactly how that works.

On the other hand, maybe this will finally make me get up off my butt and learn how to actually write IF.

Original Comment by: John H.

(Ah, it's the Paranoia XP guy again, cool.)

I find in my own game writing that I have to start with a good concept to give me the motivation to write, then I have to use the energy I get from that to power me through the process of learning the language and APIs needed to realize it. This has resulted in a long trail of abandoned game projects winding behind me into the temporal distance.

I hope this system works well. I expect that it might, but if doesn't it could be very bad. (I can't get the notion that this could end up being a Z-machine port of COBOL out of my head....)