Invited Speakers

Jon Ingold (Inkle Studios)

Ink: an interactive fiction language for humans

Interactive fiction languages tend to be specialised subsets of "real" programming languages, with assumptions about the user interface built into their core. But who cares about any of that when you're trying to write a good story?

When inkle began developing ink, a scripting language for interactive fiction, we started from the other end, by doing what writers have always done: marking up text with signifiers.

The result is a programming language built for humans that turns a lot of traditional coding practice upside-down, prioritising flow over structure, fluency over complexity, patterns over abstractions, gotos over gosubs and the declarative over the procedural.

In this talk, Narrative Director, writer and ink co-designer Jon Ingold will outline the principles, inventions, discarded dead-ends and discovered affordances of, frankly, his favouritest-ever programming language.

Speaker bio: Jon Ingold is the Narrative Director of inkle, a multi-award-winning independent developer of narrative games. He was co-designer of the widely-used ink scripting language for interactive fiction, and his talks on narrative design and interactive scripting are referenced across the industry. He has won the UK's Writer’s Guild award for Best Writing in a game twice.