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

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