The art of interactive fiction, an outgrowth of text adventure games from the earliest days of computer gaming, has been surprisingly steady with development and activity for the last two decades. There are a dozen or so major computer programming languages and game design systems (and dozens more less major), and hundreds of games written by hundreds of authors. The IF community primarily resides on Usenet (another relic too active for mothballs), and, to those with experience with and a stomach for Usenet buffoonery at least, the community is strong, smart and well-intentioned.

One of the more popular IF development systems, Inform (see also), has been holding steady in its last major public incarnation, Inform 6, for a while now. The community has long known that its virtuosic inventor and core developer, Graham Nelson, has been working on a major overhaul of the language, known as Inform 7. Graham has been working on this massive project mostly in private for several years, with the help of a few major authors and scholars. News of I7 activity has been highly sought-after.

Accomplished IF author and Inform 7 collaborator Emily Short recently announced a few short works written in Inform 7, along with some information about the current status of the project. The immediate response, surprisingly, was one of confusion, perhaps from the expectation that we would learn something about I7 from these examples. The actual intent was merely to release a few games which also happen to be examples in the upcoming I7 documentation.

I mention the games because I like them a lot, as games. Bronze is a fabulous game for introducing interactive fiction to people who have never played a text adventure, including an innovative in-game help system and a nice booklet. Damnatio Memoriae features fancy interactions with the world model the author claims was not realisticly possible in Inform 6. The Reliques of Tolti-Aph, Graham's own contribution, will take further play for me to describe properly, but is fun and includes a nifty "feelie" booklet.

("Feelies" are a throw-back to Infocom text adventures that came with an assortment of papers and toys meant to represent objects from the game. They were once intended to discourage piracy, or encourage sales depending on how you look at it, but nowadays are just for added fun. Feelies are rare in contemporary IF; most authors barely have enough time to get the game working properly.)

To play any of these games, download an "interpreter" for your computer (Windows Frotz for Windows, Zoom for Mac OS X and Zoom for Unix), and the "story file" for the game from the links above.

(People who have played IF via an interpreter should note that these are Blorb 2.0 files, not Z-machine files. Only a few interpreters, such as these two, support Blorb 2.0 at the moment. Inform 7 will probably motivate all of the major interpreters still in development to adopt the new standard.)