Lost Boy

RDF Adventure Game

Liam Quinn wrote an adventure game using RDF (data). Found via the SWIG chump, and noted here so I can find it again in the future.

I was reminded of it after stumbling across Inform a design system for interactive fiction that's been around since 1993.

Since its invention...Inform has been used to design some hundreds of works of interactive fiction, in eight languages...It accounts for around ten thousand postings per year to Internet newsgroups. Commercially, Inform has been used as a multimedia games prototyping tool. Academically, it has turned up in syllabuses and seminars from computer science to theoretical architecture...

This is exactly the sort of thing that could be a huge time sink for me. I used to spend vast amounts of time playing, designing and running role-playing games. No surprise there huh?!

Apparently Inform is based on a world model and accompanying rule system that deals with "rooms, items, vehicles, duplicates, containers, doors, things on top of other things, light and darkness, switching things on and off, opening, closing and locking things, looking up information in books, entering things, scoring and much more".

I've always been a frustrated game designer, that's why I used to spend a great deal of time on this project. Maybe there's still time. Text based adventure gaming is still all the rage isn't it?