Write it like you stole it
As this is my first column in Edge, I thought I should introduce myself. Hello! I’m Jon Ingold, and I’m narrative director and co-founder of , which means that among other things I wrote or co-wrote all of Inkle’s games. I’m also reasonably well known (amongst game writers, anyway) for a talk I gave about interactive dialogue, which suggested a way to use subtext when designing choices to make conversations more sparkly. As you might gather from all that, I consider myself more of a writer than a game designer, despite having (co-)designed a lot of games. So why don’t I just bog off and write a book, eh?
Well, it’s a habit, I suppose. I wrote my first computer game in a notebook long before my family owned any kind of computer to test it on. Somewhat later, I discovered Inform, a programming language dedicated to making text adventure games, like the ones made by (and built directly on the technology of) the ’80s juggernaut Infocom, whose work, rather than Mario, Zelda or Sonic, represented my first real interaction with videogames. My brothers and I played all the Infocom games we could pirate onto our Amstrad PC 1512, including Deadline, a country-house murder mystery whose suspects moved around and could be manipulated; and Infidel, in which a doomed archaeologist deciphers ASCII-art hieroglyphics inside a buried pyramid. They cast long shadows: these are the games which directly inspired Inkle’s titles Overboard! and Heaven’s Vault.
They were games described in text and played via text. The player typed imperative commands such as OPEN THE FREEZER, REMOVE THE SWORDFISH and ATTACK THE POLICEMAN WITH THE FROZEN SWORDFISH, and the game would attempt to perform the action and describe the result. Internally, there was a complex world-state model but, obviously, a lot of the time it didn’t work and it was easy to type a reasonable command that the game couldn’t parse or process.
Infocom’s games were substantially more interactive and responsive than their modern-day equivalents
The frustration of this parser system is now legendary, but the truth is as children we didn’t notice it: as with any game, you quickly learned the boundaries of the simulation and they became insignificant compared to its freedoms. Never mind that you couldn’t DISARM the grenade or UNPLUG the telephone; you could THROW the grenade and PICK UP the telephone, and that was enough. In fact, Infocom’s games were substantially more interactive and responsive than their modern-day adventure equivalents: there were never any dogs you couldn’t pet (well, TOUCH), and no doors you couldn’t at least try to open. If you saw a book, any book, you could open it, read it, and then, say, drop it down a well.
But the simulation
