New/Old Tech - Inform 7

My favorite new technology is not new. It's a natural-language game engine for creating text-based interactive stories. Inform 7

The latest version of Inform 7 was released in 2022. Aaron Reed's excellent and completely usable book was published in 2011. The game engine was created in 2006, as a rebuild of a project which was introduced when I was still getting carded for cigarettes (1993). This is a good and appropriate pace for technology.

I am just getting started with it, but the whole ecosystem is marvelous. Building a game with Inform is a very unique instructional arrangement -- narrating instructions to the machine in human language. It feels more like working with a LLM chatbot, than traditional coding.  However!  The underlying engine has a consistent logical structure -- much more like traditional coding than LLM.

To get an idea of what you can do, this KansasFest presentation by Carrgington Vanston does a great job of showing what's possible, even in the first few minutes.