Killing time, and goblins
Fighting Fantasy project
I would have loved these back in my D&D days. Choose Your Own Adventure + dice combat.

AIDungeon
interactive fiction in 2019 is wild

I just won a game by getting broken up with and then crying. Which ... I play games to escape from real life, not to recapitulate it.

Seriously beautiful voxels and pixels
Pixels and voxels: the long answer

Also, holograms are almost sorta a thing now? (They had to have known that short clips of primitive, flickering but recognizable holograms looks exactly like a scene of out sci-fi: "then, our scientists discovered a new way to bend light.")

Everyone has one great piece of interactive fiction in them
TODO figure out a reason I need to use inklewriter to write some Infocom knockoff bullshit.

Beyond Zork
I'll show you game mechanics ...
The main thing systems like Inform added over really old-style [interactive fiction] was more explicit modeling. An old-school way of doing things would be to write lots of chunks of text, parsers, code that causes things to happen, etc.; to the extent a world really exists, it's only because all the stuff you've thrown in is consistent with each other, the same way a world exists in a novel. Systems like Inform, instead, add an explicit declarative model of a world; there are objects with properties and locations, possible actions with preconditions and effects, containers and reachability, etc. A lot of the action and text is then attached to that model, and interactions and output are partly generated from it.
One thing still hardcoded in that model is style. The fact that a car is in the room with you and visible to you is explicitly modeled (not just buried in a canned snippet of text), but the style of how that's presented to you isn't explicitly modeled. Is it a matter-of-fact "There is a car here", some kind of dramatic gothic description, a vague offhand description, etc., etc.? The way to control that in standard IF is by attaching canned text snippets to different events. If you want style to change based on gameplay events, you write multiple canned text snippets and then write code to swap them in and out. And of course just informing the user of an object is one of the simpler kinds of output, so it gets more complex if you want to change style for, say, ongoing action, or want to present things in other than strictly this-is-happening-at-present narrative order, etc. You end up with tons of hacks like: an event happened now in the world model but we want to tell it to the player later as a flashback, so suppress the normal output and set this flag, then attach a callback to some other event that will replay the tell-about-this code later when we want it.
The main new thing Curveship adds to that is an explicit model of narration. It's motivated by a view in narratology (a sort of formalist variety of literary theory) that narratives are composed of an abstract "what really happened" component plus a narrational "how I am telling the reader about what happened" component. Since IF systems only have the first explicitly, Curveship adds the second too.
via

Playing
LUDU5 is a UCLA grad student gaming organization. High-brow, low-brow, films, shootouts.

Side effects of the game Rock Band
I like Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" a lot less now that I know the whiny-ass lyrics.

Like finding out your girlfriend is a basketball fan
"Nintendo" translates into English as "Leave Luck to Heaven".

You know those games like Civilization, where you get to pick "research chemistry first, then engineering, etc"? I always liked that more than building houses. This game is just the good part.

Tetris, only you slot states / countries into their proper places. Would be nice to improve my crappy sense of geography before I travel.

Joi: "You get up. They cue up a random presentation. You ad lib it." Morbid fascination here; same part of the brain that urges me to sprint through traffic.

Flash game, apparently based on something in Warcraft III. NSFW, if you know what I mean.

Katamari Damarcy - A Critique
Part One, Part Two
"Over the next few weeks I will be introducing you to eight schools of criticism – Biographical, New Critical, Marxist, Structural, Jungian, Psychoanalytical, Feminist, and Post-Colonial – giving a little history behind each, and showing how they can be used to critique the video game Katamari Damacy for the PlayStation 2."

(I refuse to use the title leet-speak)
Someone finally did it: they're writing a book publicly, soliciting comments on each chapter/paragraph - letting anyone write in the margins, basically. Haven't tried reading the thing yet, have a sneaking suspicion the site design is the best part.

slow games
Ok Spore is awesome, of course, but what ...

oh, shit. I was going to write this long pretentious post about "slow games" and how Spore should accomodate different levels of engagement, but then I realized what I want is just Spore/Tamagotchi. So, you know, go for it, Will.

Life after the Video Game Crash, or, Why Nintendo Won't Seem So Crazy in 2005
From March 2004. Looking pretty damn prescient in February 2006.

Jay Is Games
An infinite number of links to cool Flash games, with reviews.

Play Oregon Trail!
And a bunch of other Apple ][ games. You have died of dysentery.

Facade - a one-act interactive story
"tip: don't keep kissing Trip and Grace, they throw you out."

dos games
download / play classics.

SynthAxis
Colors! Um. Manipulate them and ... stuff. Supposed to be useful to web designers.
Colors!

N
I am a ninja. Me and Tinchy Strider, man.

player of the century

HICCUP V
"The “O-boys” and 60-odd friends crowded into Eliot I-entry one recent Saturday night."

home of the underdogs
Download old computer games.

betfair
I'm in awe. It's like Kazaa, except instead of trading music you're trading money.

Hit or Stand
"teaches you blackjack strategy while you play"

You will live in Shack.
You will drive a red Ducati.
You will marry Jean and have 2 kids.
You will be a house-husband in Vienna.

playmash

Welcome to the Anonymous Message and URL Server
"Here's the idea: You leave a message, the next person who comes along gets to read it. Once you've entered your message, you'll see what the previous person has left for you. You can leave any message you want. Tell the world how you feel right now. Spew a little. Reveal your darkest secret. Or paste in a chunk of the report which you should be working on right now instead of surfing the web. Please leave behind something interesting, otherwise this site gets pretty lame."

Midway Games: Play
Guess how long that URL is going to last. No, don't bother, just go play Joust, Spy Hunter, Rampage...

I'm really convinced they're better at having fun over there.

Tranquility also can't possibly live up to its own hype. "The audio composer is named JukeBox. Is the task of JukeBox to create a pleasing song to go with a particular game. JukeBox is an AI that has a rudimentary understanding of musical rules." I mean, come on.

nethack
Fuck, there goes the rest of my work day. Delta pink is way negative today.
beginner's guide
r.g.r.n faq

This is Lukas Bergstrom's weblog. You can also find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Tech
Energy, PIM, WRX, Development, RSS, Mobile, Storage, Audio, AI, Hardware, barcamp, Wearables, Collaboration, Crowdsourcing, Javascript, Web, Visual, s60, Web analytics, Product Management, Social, a11y, Medical, Automobile, Security, MacOS, Android, Data, OS, Open, Business, Net, Shopping

Other
Life hacks, Clothes, Statistics, Personal care, Travel, Berlin, California, Activism, Feminism, CrowdFlower, Geography, Food & Drink, Boston, Bicycling, Politik, Surfing, History, Law, Toys, Sports, Podcasts, L.A., Housing, Agriculture, Quizzes, Friday, Games, NYC, San Francisco, Minnesota, Video, Transportation

Music
L.A., Making, History, Reviews, Mailing lists, Mixes, House, Business, Labels, Mp3s, Videos, Hip-hop, Good tracks, Events, Musicians, Lyrics, Shopping, Streams, Boston, Booking

People
Working with, Meditation, Life hacks, ADD, Family, Subcultures, Friends, Gossip, Languages, Vocations, Health, Buddhism, Heroes, Me, Exercise, Stories, Enemies, MOTAS, Weblogs

Commerce
Non-profit, IP Law, Macroeconomics, Shopping, International Development, Insurance, Microfinance, Taxes, Web, Personal finance, Personal services, Management consulting, Real Estate, Investing, Marketing and CRM

Arts
Humor, Sculpture, Literature, Outlets, Desktop wallpaper bait, Rhetoric, Animation, Events, Visual, Spoken Word, Poetry, Comix, Burning Man, iPad bait, Movies

Design
Cool, Type, Tools, Algorithmic, Architecture, Furniture, Process, Web, Data visualization, Presentations, User experience, IA

Science
Statistics and Data, Cognition, Networks, Environment, Zoology, Physics, Psychology

Travel
Uganda, Kingdom of Siam, Vagabond '08, Kenya

Photos
Moblog, Friends, Photos I Wish I'd Taken

Philosophy
Mind

One Acre Fund

Internet classic

Mathematics

Subscribe to this site's rss feed

I'm also on Mastodon