Teaching with Inform

Tue, Dec 7, 2004

I’m seriously considering asking students to create an Inform project for my “Addiction and Necessity” Introduction to Literature course next semester. I haven’t yet done much research into whether anyone else has tried this particular pedagogical gambit, but I think it could prove interesting.

A long-standing wish is to create an enter an interactive fiction into the annual contest. I missed this year’s, but I might still make the Spring Thing. My idea involves a murder mystery, which doesn’t seem to have been particularly popular in modern if, executed with considerable surrealism. I’m particularly interested in how the medium allows you to withhold information about the character that you play and how a given player’s attempts to make that character conform to their reactions can be subtly thwarted.