Tabbed out on the Oregon Trail | Hacker News Reader

Tabbed out on the Oregon Trail

blog.zarfhome.com

114 pointstobr22 comments

The author mentions Jason Shiga's Meanwhile as one of the only other books using this flowchart+tabs "gameplay" system. Meanwhile is one of the best experiences I've ever had reading a book, including it's hidden/unreachable pages, it's circular and looping options, fourth wall breaking, etc. I highly recommend it - I also recommend all of Shiga's other works, such as Demon[1] and Fleep[2]. It seems he's also got another book in this style[3], which I'd missed the news of and have immediately ordered.

[1] http://www.shigabooks.com/ [2] http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/fleep/ [3] https://www.amazon.com/Adventuregame-Comics-Leviathan-Jason-...

Why would you have unreachable pages? What purpose does that serve? I feel like I'm missing something.

When you’re flipping through the book, going from a choice you made on page 17 to a result on page 94, you cannot help but see parts of stuff on pages 18 through 93. Sometimes these things are captivating and surprising - how the hell do you get from “exploring your aunt’s spooky house looking for grandpa’s will” to “riding dinosaurs”? Sometimes you even abandon the choice you made and start working backwards through the book, looking for the path that leads to riding dinosaurs on page 42. Possibly this is “cheating”. Possibly this is just the book equivalent of looking up a video game puzzle’s solution. You could argue both ways. It’s certainly breaking the basic rules outlined in the front of any game book, of starting at page 1 and reading until you’re told to turn to another page.

Having pages with crazy stuff on them that cannot actually be reached by starting at page 1 and turning pages as directed by the official narrative plays with this experience. For more thoughts on this I would suggest finding a copy of “UFO 54-40”, which is probably the first book to do this. Play it straight for a while.

And do it with a real book, not a PDF or a Twine adaptation or something. The whole point of this is an artifact of the fact that you can’t stop the reader from glancing outside the rails as they flip through the book.

Very cool idea! I think you can somewhat allow for this on a single page html document with sections linked together by section IDs. While you can indeed jump to the "next" section that the narrative allows, via an anchor link to the next section, you can also scroll up or down on the page to see stuff you aren't narratively supposed to see.

Spoilers for Meanwhile:

https://imgur.com/a/51u80NR

Yours makes more sense. Is just absurd. I like that.

Love the Oregon Trail and Powell's--it's a magical book place.

I had a chance to work with one of the original Oregon Trail creators on a board game concept these past three years. Don is a true pleasure to work with and has a sharp mind plus great stories. Highly recommend HN folks look up his GDC talk or send him some work (he's open to select projects) https://www.linkedin.com/in/donrawitsch/

Powell's is great. On the top floor is a rare book room with tons of old books, including a copy of the Journals of Lewis & Clark in its original binding with all the maps in tact. They were the first to map the eastern and western river valleys that the Oregon trail crossed.

They used to have an incredible technical bookstore a few blocks away. Sadly, it closed over 10 years ago.

It moved to i think the forth floor and is as big as ever, just way more dense. But yes, in my younger years the technical bookstore over looking the park was a monument not to be missed.

Yes, I recently rediscovered it.

Man, in the 90's when I was learning about a lot of manufacturing processes, that tech book store was a gold mine!

I would get the pre-computer era books and those contained all the manual, analytical geometry means and methods. Awesome skill builders for the time.

I still use that stuff when making things sans a nice shop environment today.

My first internet account was at techbooks.com

ISP run on a Sun Sparc 10 and a few Linux boxes. I could dial in at 9600 baud, just smoking fast! Ahem.

It became teleport.com later.

Fun times.

In any case, Powells books is very highly recommended.

I miss the old computers on display, though.

the author's own games: https://eblong.com/zarf/if.html

Andrew Plotkin is one of the best IF authors there is, in my opinion.

Highly recommended the following:

Spider and Web: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=2xyccw3pe0uovfad

Shade: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=hsfc7fnl40k4a30q

So Far: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=rcrihauxixy48svr

>best IF authors there is

Never seen the acronym IF before, so for those in my position: IF = interactive fiction

Spider and Web is a particularly neat bit of storytelling, and I'd highly recommend it.

"Don't be absurd," he says. "You're no more a sightseer than the Old Tree in Capitol Square; and if you'd had enough sense to walk away from that door, you wouldn't be here. You don't and you didn't and are; we caught you. And you're going to start by telling me how you got through that door. Do you understand me?"

Without spoiling too much: it's a story about a spy infiltrating a military complex, told from the perspective of that man being interrogated after being captured. It's an unconventional narrative approach which does a nice job of giving the player some direction.

Hadean Lands is also very cool

Where's the walking-dead node? I've been staring at the state diagram for a bit and haven't managed to find it.

I think it's around level 7, where there is an additional grey node on the way to a red node. All other red nodes appear to be leaves of branches/decisions (i.e. immediate consequences).

https://imgur.com/a/zBQiLpo

This is cool! I love Oregon Trail and did not realise there is a chose your own adventure book. Thank you.

There are many. My kids read them in fourth grade - this particular one I had not seen before. Lots of fun.

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