Kindle gets text-based adventure games
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
"Before computer games arrived on the scene, kids amused themselves with choose-your-own-adventure books that allowed you to explore fantastic worlds that were described without the aid of fancy graphics.
"As computers became a little more powerful, these were translated into text-only adventure games that retained the spartan aesthetic, but allowed the player a little more control over their exploration of the world. For example, you'd type "north" to move north, where you'd then "look" around a scene before deciding how to interact further."
Uh... No.
"Colossal Cave", the first text based Adventure game: 1976, by William Crowther, running on a PDP-10. By '77 it had been ported to Unix.
"The Cave of Time", the first Choose Your Own Adventure book: 1979.
It seems clear that the development of Adventure-style games and the interactive novel were independent of one another.
> ...the Editors of the Guide were sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Traal literally (it said "Ravenous Bugblatter beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists" instead of "Ravenous Bugblatter beasts often make a very good meal of visiting tourists") they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening's ultragolf. http://flag.blackened.net/dinsdale/dna/book2.html
It seems to me that the two ideas developed more or less in parallel. It says something about the way that culture develops that this idea arrived in print only when digital technology was just making it possible (but far from mainstream).
Dungeons and Dragons also independently arrived at the same time--first published in 1974, so clearly in development before that. It seems like our culture was just ready.
It's a website that lets you play the games[1]. A minimalist website, slightly more minimal than any I've seen which does this, but a website nonetheless. Any device which has a web browser has access to this website, the Kindle is just an example of one.
They could've labelled it for the Nook, or Sony's e-readers, or anything. The iPhone has access to it as well. It's news only because someone decided such websites are worthy of news, and made one into a high-profile example.
The only thing which has any relevance to the Kindle is that there's a referral link to buy one on the site.
> Of course, with the e-readers' lack of a backlight, you won't be able to play in the dark. But that's probably just as well. You might get eaten by a grue.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/04/26/nook-passes-kindle-sale...
I think I've seen one Nook 'in the wild' on public transit in Boston. I often see people with kindles, sometimes more than one person on a subway platform. And I've been seeing even more lately - people using the new black ones.
I'd love to see real figures for both, but I haven't heard of any.
It might seem expensive compared to the latest hollywood movie but think of it as enabling a computer nostalgist to preserve our history.
Plus he isn't just making movies, but like you say, preserving history with his massive archives.
I guess twitter/SMS also :(
I'm a big fan of playing games I find on the Interactive Fiction Archive -- http://ifarchive.org
Good stuff.
I applied to enter the kindle developer program, saying I was interested in doing an interactive fiction interpreter, but I've heard nada.
I think it did.