I played a lot Lords of Midnight (and Doomdark’s Revenge) on my Amstrad 464 when I was a kid. Turns out there’s a dedicated labour of love to port the games to modern platforms. I just downloaded the OS X port, so there goes my weekend.
After reading this account of a wonderfully surreal text adventure game, you’ll probably want to play AI Dungeon 2:
A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling games, and playing it is strangely surreal, repetitive, and mesmerizing, like dreaming about playing one of the games it was trained on.
The opening of this blog post warned the cockles of my heart:
I have a rule about conferences: go once.
Like all rules, it can be broken — usually when Jeremy Keith is involved — but not often.
Awww! That’s so nice!
Here’s the transcript of Ethan’s magnificent closing talk from New Adventures. I’m pretty sure this is the best conference talk I’ve ever had the honour of seeing.
The Ballad Of Halo Jones is 35 years old this year.
Where did she go? Out.
What did she do? Everything.
Here’s a thorough blow-by-blow account of the workshop I ran in Nottingham last week:
Jeremy’s workshop was a fascinating insight into resilience and how to approach a web project with ubiquity and consistency in mind from both a design and development point of view.
Westley came along to my workshop at New Adventures …and liked it! (phew!)
I have long been a proponent of progressive enhancement on the web, perhaps before I knew the true value of it to the people that use the things we build for the web, but Jeremy has always been able to expand my understanding of its importance in the wider scope of things, how it inherently builds resilience into your products, and how it makes it more widely available to people across the world, in vastly different scenarios. The workshop itself was fluid enough to cater to the topics that the attendees were interested in; from over-arching philosophy to technical detail around service workers and new APIs. It has helped me to understand that learning in this kind of environment doesn’t have to be rigorously structured, and can be shaped as the day progresses.
Read on to discover how I incorporated time travel into the day’s activities.
Here are the slides for the opening keynote I delivered at the New Adventures conference in Nottingham on Thursday. They make no sense out of context like this. You kinda had to be there (or suggest to some other conference that I should deliver this talk again—hint, hint).
A thoroughly enjoyable adventure game in your browser. You are the AI of a colony starship. Humanity’s future is in your hands.
The fascinating history of interactive fiction from adventure game to hypertext.
The split between parsers and hyperlinks reminds me of different approaches to chatbots: free text entry vs. constrained input.
Text to +1 (669) 238-3683 to play now!
Oregon Trail, updated for our times. There should be appreciably less dysentery in this game.
You are on a website. There are exits to the north, south, east and west.
>...
The Internet Archive is now hosting early Macintosh software emulated right in your browser. That means you can play Adventure: the source of subsequent text adventures, natural language parsing, and chatbots.
Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as ADVENT, Colossal Cave, or Adventure) is a text adventure game, developed originally in 1976, by Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe. The game was expanded upon in 1977, with help from Don Woods, and other programmers created variations on the game and ports to other systems in the following years.
In the game, the player controls a character through simple text commands to explore a cave rumored to be filled with wealth.
Naomi Alderman:
The text adventure, like poetry, tends to attract a small band of devoted fans rather than hundreds of millions of casual players. And yet, those who care about writing know that they are where the form starts; and I can’t help feeling that videogames in general would be better if they took as much care over their words, and over their narratives, as text adventures do.
One of the most fiendish user-unfriendly (but oh-so-witty) adventure games of all time is now online for you to enjoy with some added graphical flourishes.
Hypertext adventure.
This might well be the best thing Wired has ever published. I wish every article were in this format.
Documenting all the ways you could die in a choose-your-own-adventure book.