<story><title>Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction</title><url>http://www.inform7.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mundo</author><text>If this piques your interest and you&amp;#x27;re interested in programming history, you will very likely enjoy reading about the Zork Implementation Language and the  Z-machine, on which Inform is based:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Z-machine&lt;/a&gt;
And the original spec for game authors from Infocom is quite entertaining:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://xlisp.org/zil.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;xlisp.org&amp;#x2F;zil.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Good stuff.  More generally, if you want a short (&amp;lt;1hr) and amusing example of IF, try this: 
&lt;a href=&quot;http://pr-if.org/play/violet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pr-if.org&amp;#x2F;play&amp;#x2F;violet&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction</title><url>http://www.inform7.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>limelight</author><text>Has anyone used something like this for non-fictional contexts? I&amp;#x27;m really enthusiastic about the future of interactive journalism, particularly in terms of tailoring journalist narratives to each reader.&lt;p&gt;For example, I think coverage around the announcement of a new tax plan should adjust to the given user (ex. &amp;quot;Under Clinton&amp;#x27;s plan, your taxes will increase by 5%, to $14,000 annually.&amp;quot;). Unfortunately, there just don&amp;#x27;t seem to be many good tools for allowing non-programmers to encode manipulable facts into their narratives.</text></comment>