More on recent activity in the interactive fiction community:

Graham Nelson's announcement of the Inform 7 public beta formally sets the stage for this new language.

Stephen Granade has written an article on Inform 7.

The journal of the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games (SPAG) issue #44 is out, including an interview with Graham Nelson and Emily Short on Inform 7.

In the Download section of the Inform 7 web site, you'll find Graham Nelson's white paper on natural language and IF [PDF], worth a read.

IF Comp 2006, the main annual interactive fiction competition, is now open for submissions and prize donations.

Meanwhile, Spring Thing 2006, the other main annual interactive fiction competition, has just ended. Visit the site to see and download the winners.

The Treaty of Babel is a new metadata format for interactive fiction story files intended to work with all major story systems going forward. I gather that tool support is still in progress (libraries are available), but the standard has been finalized.

Zoom, one of the best interpreters for Z-Code (Infocom and Inform 6) and Glulx (Inform 7) format games for Mac OS X and Unix, has a new 1.0.5 release that introduces support for Treaty of Babel metadata.

Windows Frotz [EXE installer download], one of the best interpreters of Z-Code and Glulx format games for Windows, has a new 1.09 release that introduces Treaty of Babel support, among several other features.

In a conversation on rec.arts.int-fiction about programming computers with natural language, Craig Latta mentioned his project, Quoth, which proposes that an interactive approach to the programming process could make natural language control more effective. The video demo is compelling.

With Inform 7 comes a minor bug fix release for Inform 6, version 6.31. As Graham has always stated in conversation about Inform 7, I imagine there will be continued interest in Inform 6.

Amazon.com has discounted the hardcover edition of the Inform Designer's Manual to $22.02, down from $34.95. I'm guessing this is entirely coincidental to the release of Inform 7 (the Designer's Manual covers Inform 6), but is rather a reaction to print-on-demand resellers that try to undercut Amazon's list price offerings. Regardless, I'm pleased to see it. (The paperback is still listed at $29, so that's weird. But whatever, makes no difference on my end.)

I have to say, I'm totally amused by the Inform 7 source snippits being posted to rec.arts.int-fiction. It's just bizarre to see source code in a newsgroup message that looks just as much like English as the rest of the message. I'm so used to computer language punctuation helping me context shift between English explanations and the code under discussion. It's too early to tell if this is a fault or not, but it is weird. It's very easy to read; no comment on how easy it is to write until I've actually tried it.

Lots of great follow-up discussion on rec.arts.int-fiction, if pseudo-natural language computer interfaces are at all interesting to you.