This project is an interactive fiction — a narrative-focused, text-based game — that tells the story of the Baha’i Temple in Wilmette, Illinois. I do not follow the Baha’i religion myself, but my family had a Fourth of July tradition of going to the state park just down the street from the temple, so it has always been a fascination of mine.
The History
In my sophomore year of college I took a course called Mapping Inequalities. For our final project we were encouraged to choose a moment or place in Illinois history that we would research and write a game for. The Baha’i temple came to mind, and my professor agreed that it was worthy of a project.
Before starting my research I was quite ignorant. Coming from a family of Hindu background, I had just assumed that the Baha’i temple was a Hindu temple and was just named “Bahai”. I had never gone inside, only explored the surrounding gardens which didn’t hint at any religion in particular. In case you don’t know, Baha’i is actually an Abrahamic religion established in the 1800s. They have one temple on each continent, and it just so happens that the North American one is in Wilmette.
If you want to learn about this history yourself and/or are a fan of interactive fiction, you can try the demo here.
The Technology
During the course of Mapping Inequalities we learned the Inform 7 programming language. It’s most interesting feature is that it is a natural-language-based programming language. This honestly provided a bit of a challenge for a student like me who came from a programming background compared to other students from other majors. However, I had a lot of fun learning its conventions and attempting to flex my muscles a bit by developing (perhaps overly-) complex game mechanics in some of our projects.
While I don’t expect to use Inform 7 again, it was a good learning experience to see the endless possibilities of programming.