Wiki as Text Adventure Game

The first computer programs I ever wrote were text adventure games. It was bliss. I didn't spend much time playing games. For me it was all about the writing.

How about you? Did you ever write 'interactive fiction?'

The basic genre consists of a story that moves from one location to another. The hero of the game, that's you, can collect "things" as you go, and certain impasses are reached if you don't have the correct "things".

There is fighting. There are monsters. Puzzles. Traps. There's an abundance of description. And plenty of adventure.

Here's my current idea: write a wiki-style site where contributors don't just write webpages, they construct text adventure games.

Wiki-style formatting would do for the text. And for the game mechanicsm itself, there would need to be some simple features provided by the platform.

Hyperlinks and standard web navigation would take the place of those cumbersome command parsing consoles that leave you furious trying to guess the programmer's intent.

Here are the things I think you'd need for starters:

Some kind of 'state-bag' to act as your inventory. Your pocket contains string, matches and lint.
A declarative way of indicating items that the player can collect. You find 57 gold pieces
A way of increasing or decreasing scores against a player. You have 12 days remaining, and you have 14 health points
A way of trading items. The witch offers you the invisibility potion in exchange for 3 gold pieces.
A way of keeping some options hidden unless you have or do certain things. If Skillset.Contains(Romance) then Paragraph3.Visible = true.
A fighting routine that can combine the use of weapons, skills, armory, and luck.

With those basic building blocks, I think some pretty fantastic stuff could be created.

Who's up for the challenge? Come on lazy web, create for me (or find) a wiki-style web site for authoring text adventure games.

And now for some gratuitous linking.

Scott Adams, pioneer
Scott Adams, Java -- Online java version of classic scott adams text adventure games.
hitch hiker's interactive
'Inform 7' is a package for writing redistributable interactive fiction on windows, mac or linux.
NetHack, and rogue
Heroic Adventure! -- a roguelike game on CodePlex
Hunt the wumpus, aka Jeff Atwood
Iraqi Invasion

It's funny how multiple people can be thinking along similarly unusual lines at the same time!

I've been thinking about text adventures / MUDs quite a bit lately. Not on wikis (though that's a good idea!) but available at the prompt / telnet in the usual way.. but that allow the participants to run actual code within the adventure "Second Life"-style as well as interact with the environment in a richer way than has been done before.

With such a tool / environment, I think there could be a rather interesting way to teach or demonstrate computer science concepts, especially to people who aren't academic (Likewise, with your wiki idea, it'd be a way to demonstrate various Web concepts and technologies to people green in that area.)

How about learning a program language as a text adventure game:

http://poignantguide.net/dwemthy/

What a great idea Leon... how about taking it one step further... you'd need an application for this of couse ;)

What if, as an author, you could then publish your game as a 'choose your own adventure'? It would be like an electronic version. You would need a way to validate that all paths end somewhere etc.

Sounds exactly like a MUD/MOO - something I haven't played with in years. LambdaMOO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambdamoo) is (AFAICT) the best known and is entirely capable of doing everything on your list.

Obviously you would rewrite to create a modern one (with a better scripting language for starters) since the LambdaMOO codebase is very old, but as you say, some of your (and my) first programs were in this style - it's not hard.

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