Something like ten years ago, Graham Nelson created the computer language Inform for people to write Infocom-style text adventures in. Now, though, Inform has been completely rewritten so that programs look (kind of) like English text, and the programmer has a slick interface to get data about their game from– branching trees of events, indexes of objects created in the program, maps… Inform 7.

I can’t wait until I have time to play with this. Natural-language programming for adventure games seems to be a win-win situation; to the extent that it’s truly natural, the programmer has a wonderful tool, and to the extent that it’s not, you get appealling passages like this:

 A thing can be whole or ruined. A thing is always whole.   To obliterate (item - a pictorial thing):      now the item is ruined;      now the item does not incriminate the player.  

 Before burning something which is protected by an important impervious thing (called the protector):      say "[if the noun is the player]You barely feel anything, thanks to[otherwise][The noun] resists flame, thanks to its link with[end if] [the protector]." instead.  

 A monster is a kind of person. A monster can be hostile or indifferent. A monster is usually hostile. Definition: A monster is scary if its strength is 50 or more. Definition: A monster is feeble if its strength is 10 or less. Some kinds of monster are defined by the Table of Monstrous Beasts.   Instead of asking a monster about something: say "[The noun] is unreachable on most levels." 

Review copies of this album have the sound of a crying baby drowning out the music for about five seconds once a minute. The idea, of course, is that reviewers can still form opinions about the record but the promos will be worthless for resale or for ripping and sharing on the net. And yet, the critics have to listen to the crying too. It’s not pleasant.

How many records have you heard in the past year so good that you’d bet money on people liking them more than they dislike the sound of a crying baby? This isn’t even close.