Inform, Game Rules, World State, and Interfaces

Chapter 2 uses the Inform programming language to discuss the relationship between game rules, world infrastructure, and game interface. Inform is a relatively accessible, natural-language coding language for creating what are best known as “text adventure” games. These were the first commercially available games for computers, popularized shortly before home game consoles hit the market in the early 1980s. This programming language has the advantage of both accessibility and a very direct relationship between coding, game rules, world-building, and player interface. This chapter lays out the relationship between game rules, the world “state,” the implied infrastructure in that world, and the way that players access it via the text interface. Obviously other kinds of authoring languages and graphical design environments like Unity and Unreal offer more complex and indirect relations between design and rules, but Inform provides a simple way to lay out basic principles that later chapters complicate.