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wikimaze.me

82 pointsgleitz42 comments

I loved playing Mindmaze, the trivia game inside Encarta '95, and was upset that I couldn't find a similar game anywhere online. Distraught and a little nostalgic, I recreated it as WikiMaze in HTML5. I've tried to keep the game true to its classic form with a slightly updated take on the graphics and gameplay.

The questions are generated on the fly from Wikipedia. For any folks that are looking for an easy place to get trivia questions, check out the API (e.g. http://www.wikimaze.me/api/v1/get-questions/?limit=5)

Give it a spin and let me know what you think!

This is awesome, I remember playing this as a youngster, in the library on the computers there.

It is also available as an app in the iTunes Store

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wikimaze-free/id475157639?ls=...

<3 HTML5 apps!

Can you talk more about how you create the questions?

I'm guessing the answers are always article titles, and you look for articles that have a neat leading summary which is easy to perform anaphor-substitution on. But, how do you pick the candidate wrong answers, and have you developed any other tricks for handling problematic/ambiguous summaries?

I'll be writing a series of blog posts about the architecture of the game as well as more info about the API at http://blog.wikimaze.me/

At a high level you are mostly right. The incorrect answers are generated using http://www.freebase.com/ (now a Google product)

Lots of pages have to be thrown out, but after analyzing thousands of articles it was relatively straightforward to know when you had a good page versus a bad one.

I'd love to see a more interactive, "HTML5-y" (sorry) Wikipedia, like Encarta back in the day. More prominent audio/video; interactive maps, charts, etc. Sure, we essentially have the same content on the Web now, but not tied together like it could be.

And of course, more MindMaze couldn't hurt.

EDIT: Processing[1] seems like a perfect fit for such a thing. Open, fairly easy to use, focused on interactive graphics, and compiles to JavaScript so it works with most browsers (and Java too, so can even include IE6 in the party)

[1] http://www.processing.org/

Qwiki[1] aims for a more interactive (albeit Flash-dependent) presentation of mostly the same information that's in Wikipedia.

There's also a site called 'Ultrastudio' that aims to supplement encyclopedia articles with illustrative applets.

[1] http://qwiki.com

[2] http://ultrastudio.org/

Personally, I'd like wikipedia to stay the way it is, but others can build on top of wikipedia's content. They are having trouble as it is, with getting more contributors and spam.

This is amazing, thanks for putting it together. Really fuels my already-intense Wikipedia addiction - I was one of those kids that read encyclopedias for fun and still get into Wikipedia reading sessions with dozens of tabs open.

I hope this will be a fun way for you to discover new and interesting articles.

This is great! But when I get 3 wrong in a row it just goes to a black screen and nothing happens. Is that supposed to happen?

If you guess incorrectly twice, it will show you the right answer. If you click a third time, it will take you to the Wikipedia article for that answer. Sounds like you got sent to the Wikipedia article but it didn't load?

Looks like it, yep. I'm having the same problem on other sites though so it might be a haywire Chrome extension or something. Still may be worth looking into (latest stable Chrome on mac osx) - good luck!

afterthought - perhaps open the wikipedia article in a new tab.

Does it work when you're offline? Or does it require a connection to grab data from Wikipedia?

it caches questions for when you're offline o/\o

There is cache manifest support, so after initially loading the game it will save a bunch of questions and you can play offline. When you reconnect to the net it will sync your score and maze progress.

Does it save a bunch? Like, can I play for an hour without repeats?

And does it use cache manifest to store the questions, or localStorage?

(I've been working on both lately at work, so I'm curious how yours works!)

It saves between 10-20 questions, but it could easily go much higher. The cache.manifest says "even if I am offline, still load the page". The localStorage is a database that holds the questions.

I'll be writing a series of blog posts about the architecture of the game, as well as more info about the API

http://blog.wikimaze.me/

Cool, that was going to be my next question. /me subscribes

Will there be a way to play via browser that breaks it out of the phone interface? I'm having a blast, the only thing that bothers me is playing in the small area inside the iPhone.

Sure! You can go to the iframe directly at http://www.wikimaze.me/app

Awesome, thanks a bunch :)

EDIT: I just made the leaderboard.

Mindmaze was a favorite of mine in my younger days; I'm glad to see it revived. This is just for my nostalgic needs, but I'd love to see the original music here :P

Great suggestion! Will add that in the next version

Is it just me, or is this hosted out of Google?

  $ dig +short wikimaze.me
   216.239.32.21
   216.239.36.21
   216.239.38.21
   216.239.34.21

  $ whois 216.239.32.21
   ...
   GOOGLE, INC
   ...

   $ dig +short -x 216.239.32.21
    any-in-2015.1e100.net.

AppEngine all the way!

Whoops - just saw that!

I guess I always figured Google would give AppEngine some separate allocation/reverse DNS like EC2.

I would have thought that too, but I know there are some superfast edge servers that reroute to their datacenters.

Do you scrape wikipedia as questions are asked or are you working from a static data set?

The questions are pulled live, but I save old q's so I don't have to crawl the same page twice.

This brings back memories of Encarta, brilliantly executed.

Very interested to see how the API develops, would love to use it for http://quizipedia.org

I'll be writing a blog post on the API soon. Stay tuned to http://blog.wikimaze.me

Very cool, I like the timed release of further article context.

And the maze part is surprisingly fun given that it is basically pointless / orthogonal to the rest of the game.

Make sure you use a unique name. Otherwise you'll get into others accounts with their scores. Good idea, poorly implemented.

If you want to keep your account "secure", login with Facebook, Twitter, or Google. I know that might turn some people off so I included the username login as well.

Future versions will let you set an optional password to "save" the username.

Meh. You could also tie the user to the device or browser and avoid a first time user entering the game with 2k points and the map nearly complete. Give a new user a good experience and maybe they will use your login mechanism and become a repeat user. Otherwise they might just think the game is broken and never return. I wondered why it said I had answered over 40 questions when I only answered 2. Makes for a poor user experience.

ooh harsh

thimmy is right though gleitz, he is wayyyy better than you

fantastic app. Well done on a great product, I hope it makes you filthy rich :)

I hope it makes everyone filthy smart! It is running on App Engine so the server costs aren't too terrible.

Half of all the proceeds go to Wikipedia for providing such great questions.

https://venmo.com/gleitz?txn=pay&note=for+awesome+trivia...

awesome. unlimited trivia questions generated by wikipedia.

also of note is that dynamic generation of "similar topics", so that the multiple choice remains difficult. +1 for freebase!

this rules.

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