Kat Dancing

I need a tee-shirt that says "I *heart* Inform 7", and the scary thing is, for most of you it will require a long explanation to understand how pathetically geeky that is.

This is because most of you are going "What the heck is Inform?"

Well, Inform is a programming language for writing text adventure games.

A small percentage of you are nodding sagely. An even smaller number may have heard of, say, the annual competition or be familiar with a few of the modern games. A rather larger number are saying something like, "Oh, you mean like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? I remember playing that back in the 80s... you mean people are still writing those?"

And by far the greatest number of you are saying "Text what?"

I adore text adventure games. They're like those dorky Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books in middle school, only with loads more stuff and you don't have to flip pages. I've been playing them since I was eight and trying to build one myself since I was fifteen, which is the geeky bit, and failing because I am a) easily distracted and b) really bad at programming, which is the pathetic bit.

I am, however, even more pathetic at drawing, so for several years now I've been using Inform the programming language as a way of making maps that don't lead to me having an Embarrassing Episode with the pencils. And really, it's very helpful, because I am absolute crap at visualizing, and what writing a series of adventure-game-style rooms did was force me to visualize stuff like layout, and transport, and what the average member of a far-future society would keep on her desk, and thus there were less of the dreaded white rooms and everyone was happy, except me, because I kept forgetting the semicolons and breaking my compiler.

And then, lo, there was Inform 7.

Inform 7 is "a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language. What this means in practice is that instead of writing something like this:

H_Station siebel "Quarters of Siebel Nix"
with description "These are the personal quarters of Siebel Nix, the station's senior telepath. They are roughly the same size as a Director's quarters, as per regulations, though to you they seem slightly smaller. Perhaps it's an optical illusion.",
e_to sbed,
w_to qdea;

I can write:

Quarters of Siebel Nix is a room in Harmony Station. "These are the personal quarters of Siebel Nix, the station's senior telepath. They are roughly the same size as a Director's quarters, as per regulations, though to you they seem slightly smaller. Perhaps it's an optical illusion." East of here is Siebel's Bedroom. West of here is Quarters Hallway A.

It does not come with a chorus of angels, but it really, really ought to.

And yes. I am pathetic. And geeky. But largely pathetic. I admit to this only in hopes that someone, somewhere out there, is as pathetic as I am and will join me in squee-ing over the enabling of programming-deficient poor visualizers with bad drawing skills to geek out and pretend it's writing.

Oh, right. Writing:

Writing Progress:

Today's Progress: 693 words.
Comments: I have been suffering not so much from writer's block as writer's apathy. Which is to say, there's a lot preventing me from writing: the fact that I work eight hours a day at a highly physical job, the housework, the Dan-feeding, the seeing-off of the brother to his new life in Atlanta, the consoling of the mother (see previous item), the various angsts of readjusting to a live-in relationship after a hiatus (aka, "what do you mean, alone time?"), the Monthly Curse, the annoying and so far unstoppable invasion of ants into my kitchen. But I have written under similar, and far worse, circumstances. But when this is combined with a bit of the book where I need to write some mildly difficult scenes -- nothing hairy, just setup and oh-god-I-don't-know-these-characters-yet, but stuff I can't skip over because without it I won't know how to write the *good* scenes -- and is further combined with a couple of days when I skipped writing for what were no doubt good reasons, and thus had to come back to aforementioned difficult scenes cold -- well, basically, yeah. I get on the wagon, I fall off. Repeat as necessary until the bloody thing actually goes somewhere.

Or I, you know, go insane. Whatever.

Snips: Got to introduce a minor antagonist, who is slippery and thus made for 700 words' worth of pounding my head on the computer. But I got some good ones in the end. Like:

Zanni was using his pleasant voice. Joey, in her few months of dealing with Safety, had grown to hate Zanni's pleasant voice; he kept his knives in it.

or:

For a bare moment Zanni's poise slipped, anger turning his face to angle and bone as he realized how she'd played him: but it was only a moment. In the next he was leaning back as well, returning her smile with a gamester's grace.

The actual scene is, of course, utter wank. But it moved the damn wagon a bit. Right now, that's all I ask for.