ChatGPT is Inform8: advanced narration experiments for interactive fiction

Submission statement:

I shared some experiments on r/interactivefiction I made last night with regards to writing interactive fictions using chatGPT and am posting it here because I think it could be interesting to the HN crowd.

Interactive fictions are text based role-playing games you play on your computer. They were popular in the 80s and the scene is still alive to this day (although not commercially) with amateur hobbyist writing dozens of IF each years.

The most popular way to write these games is to use Inform7. It's a lovely language that reads like English and encourages an aspect-oriented style of programming through the use of rules instead of functions or methods like in more conventional language (anybody interested in predicate dispatch should take a look at Inform7. Some really interesting ideas in there).

Well it turns out ChatGPT4 seems even more suited to writing Interactive Fictions in natural language than Inform7 itself. Yesterday I taught him some mechanism to support multiple layers of enunciation so that we can have interactive fictions told in the first person, past tense. In addition to that I made the plane of narration a playable world with its own player-character, sitting in a chair, listening to the narrator that you incarnate on the plane of the narrated action. You can even argue with the narrator in the narration's plane in order to alter the course of events in the narrated action plane. Oh and last hour I implemented support to save and restore games.

I'm in awe as this is something that I worked on a good 10 years ago for many months, and ChatGPT brought it alive last night. It just took me a few hours to write the prompts I showcase on this reddit post. As someone who took courses in interaction/enunciation linguistics, the results are amazing.

I think I need to experiment with it more and find ways to write more statically defined stories, but in terms of open world with content generation, this is top notch and billions of light years ahead in terms of what you can do with Inform7 in this domain.