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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
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<!DOCTYPE pkgmetadata SYSTEM "http://www.gentoo.org/dtd/metadata.dtd">
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<pkgmetadata>
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<maintainer type="project">
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<email>games@gentoo.org</email>
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<name>Gentoo Games Project</name>
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</maintainer>
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<longdescription>
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A Design System for Interactive Fiction
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Just as film might be called a form of literature which needs technology to be
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read (a cinema projector or a television set) and to be written (a camera),
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interactive fiction is read with the aid of a computer. On this analogy, Inform
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is a piece of software enabling any modern computer to be used as the camera, or
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the film studio, to create works of interactive fiction. To read the resulting
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works, you and your audience need only a simpler piece of software called an
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interpreter.
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In this genre of fiction, the computer describes a world and the player types
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instructions like touch the mirror for the protagonist character to follow; the
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computer responds by describing the result, and so on until a story is told.
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Interactive fiction emerged from the old-style "adventure game" (c.1975) and
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tends to be a playful genre, which must sometimes be teased out as though it were
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a cryptic crossword puzzle. But this doesn't prevent it from being an artistic
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medium, which has attracted (for instance) the former U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert
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Pinsky, and the novelists Thomas M. Disch and Michael Crichton. An interactive
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fiction is not a child's puzzle-book, with a maze on one page and a rebus on the
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next, but nor is it a novel. Neither pure interaction nor pure fiction, it lies
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in a strange and still largely unexplored land in between.
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Since its invention (by Graham Nelson in 1993), Inform has been used to design
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some hundreds of works of interactive fiction, in eight languages, reviewed in
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periodicals ranging in specialisation from XYZZYnews to The New York Times. It
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accounts for around ten thousand postings per year to Internet newsgroups.
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Commercially, Inform has been used as a multimedia games prototyping tool.
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Academically, it has turned up in syllabuses and seminars from computer science
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to theoretical architecture, and appears in books such as Cybertext: Perspectives
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on Ergodic Literature (E. J. Aarseth, Johns Hopkins Press, 1997). Having started
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as a revival of the then-disused Infocom adventure game format, the Z-Machine,
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Inform came full circle when it produced Infocom's only text game of the 1990s:
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Zork: The Undiscovered Underground, by Mike Berlyn and Marc Blank.
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</longdescription>
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</pkgmetadata>
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