I don't think I'd choose Ink for parsing open-ended responses. Ink is an interesting language--it gives up some elegance in its programming syntax to gain more

I don't think I'd choose Ink for parsing open-ended responses. Ink is an interesting language--it gives up some elegance in its programming syntax to gain more of a prose-like feeling. (I think the level of tradeoff is roughly comparable to HTML templating languages like Jinja2--it's an open question how an interface like Ink compares to block-based languages for beginners, but I'm optimistic). I am planning to include the ability to prompt for text input in an upcoming release, but the intent is more to support in-game identity-building. For example, you could prompt for the player's name and then refer to it later. I haven't looked much in to languages for open-ended interactive storytelling, but I thought Nick Montfort's dissertation was pretty interesting--a technical treatment of a system for heavy-duty worldbuilding. I'm also interested in using this system for language learning, particularly in multilingual classrooms/contexts. In some of the early classroom workshops, students were exploring how they get treated differently (and some people open up more) when speaking different languages.