C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

I've been making a miniature toy Penguicon. You can run around in it and interact with artificially-intelligent miniature versions of people you might recognize. It's a shame Randy Milholland of "Something Positive" isn't returning this year--- had I made one for last year's Penguicon, it would have included something like this:

> GIVE FANFIC TO RANDY

You hand the crumpled sheaf to Randy Milholland. His eyes, as they traverse the lines, lose their light by progressive stages. Finally he slumps into the sofa. "I've lost my will to live," he says.

Rippy the Razor Blade walks into the Consuite.

> EXAMINE RANDY'S WILL TO LIVE

It's no longer here, it's lost. Maybe you can find it.

The sort of game you can play using an interpreter program like WinPlotz used to be called a "text adventure". Occasionally the word "storygame" tries to get traction and fails. The term of art has come to be "interactive fiction". The difficulty in naming results from so many simultaneous categories: programmers call it a simulator parser or a conversational interface, authors call it narrative prose, and gamers call it a puzzle game. Just as in the blind descriptions of Rudyard Kipling's elephant, they are all correct.

This project is experiencing feature creep like mad. I'm using it for a learning experience, and the more I discover the InForm system can do, the more I build in. It now simulates the player's mental and physical condition along several dimensions. I'm actually toying with the idea of having the game ask you for your LJ username, and building a programming track from your interests list, so you can plan out how to maximize your "fun" points score as the weekend goes by. I'm also realizing how many games Andy Looney has designed which you could play against him in the game room.

But no, this thing has to get out the door some time. I'm not going to program in every flower planter in the lobby. Building the hotel convention center and its contents is mostly finished, but the markup has run to the thousands of words. This is to say nothing of the pseudocode that scripts the behaviors, events, and puzzle mechanisms.

This is so fun, I think I need to find an organization for Interactive Fiction and see if I can get on the Board of Directors or something. Yeah, I'm that excited about it.

Let me tell you a bit about user interfaces as it relates to Interactive Fiction. An interesting thing happens when people get really good at writing text adventures. They're trying to manage the state of your knowledge: not too much too soon, not too little too late, see? Because it's a puzzle. Also they're trying to motivate you, carefully adjust to your expectations, respond to your constant errors, and put you at precisely the right frustration level, see? Because it's a game. They're also trying to predict and manage how you feel about it, see? Because it's a literary drama with a plot, setting, and characters.

All of those things involve them modeling the human, not modeling the computer system.

And what happens -- aha! -- when such people are also programmers? Not just any programmers, but programmers in the area of natural language interface. What happens when the best of them get together and program a development environment and framework, and then design the user interface for it, and then write debugging error messages and step-by-step documentation for it?

You get software that seems to read your mind, that's what. InForm 7 (available free for Windows, Mac and Linux) has the most kickass debugging error messages and step-by-step documentation I've ever seen.