Conversational interfaces - people talking with machines using natural language - are becoming increasingly popular. This form of interaction has its roots in interactive fiction (IF), a genre of computer game that stretches all the way back to 1975 and is best known for games like "Adventure" and "Zork." In this workshop, we'll look briefly at the history of interactive fiction before diving into the Text Adventure Development System (TADS, available at
tads.org), a freeware IF authoring tool first released in 1988. TADS3 features a powerful and well-designed system for modeling independent conversational actors, as well as the ability to connect our works to the wider internet. By the end of the workshop, you'll have learned a solid approach to programming conversations (in any framework), and be able to share your own IF works over the web.
