Write it like you stole it 

JON INGOLD

As this is my first column in Edge, I thought I should introduce myself. Hello! I’m Jon Ingold, and I’m narrative director and co-founder of , which means that among other things I wrote or co-wrote all of Inkle’s games. I’m also reasonably well known (amongst game writers, anyway) for a talk I gave about interactive dialogue, which suggested a way to use subtext when designing choices to make conversations more sparkly. As you might gather from all that, I consider myself more of a writer than a game designer, despite having (co-)designed a lot of games. So why don’t I just bog off and write a book, eh?

Well, it’s a habit, I suppose. I wrote my first computer game in a notebook long before my family owned any kind of computer to test it on. Somewhat later, I discovered Inform, a programming language dedicated to making text adventure games, like the ones made by (and built directly on the technology of) the ’80s juggernaut Infocom, whose work, rather than Mario, Zelda or Sonic, represented my first real interaction with videogames. My brothers and I played all the Infocom games we could pirate onto our Amstrad PC 1512, including Deadline, a country-house murder mystery whose suspects moved around and could be manipulated; and Infidel, in which a doomed archaeologist deciphers ASCII-art hieroglyphics inside a buried pyramid. They cast long shadows: these are the games which directly inspired Inkle’s titles Overboard! and Heaven’s Vault.