Abstract

Well-known interactive fiction writers (including http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Plotkin), have argued that a rule-based approach to writing interactive fiction, as opposed to the current, object-oriented approach, is a natural way of thinking about writing interactive fiction. Unfortunately, vanilla logic programming is unable to conveniently deal with some of the situations that come up frequently when writing interactive fiction, such as state and exceptions to rules.

One way of dealing with state is to use linear logic programming rather than vanilla logic programming. Just as propositional logic is the logic of (simple) knowledge, linear logic is the logic of consumable resources—each assumption must be used exactly once, rather than being duplicated or erased at will. I will give an introduction to linear logic and linear logic programming and follow it up with some examples of it is applicable to writing interactive fiction.