Playing Zork On... A Messageboard?
Over at Idle Thumbs, they've just set up a 'Text Adventure' subforum, and indeed, they've set up a really neat concept - people can collaboratively play classic Z-machine text adventures on a normal messageboard, thanks to some neat coding.
As the FAQ post explains: "Our resident super computer Ziggy serves up the current move, and all you have to do is reply to the thread with the next move, such as “Go north”. Ziggy will then respond. It's basically an MMO text adventure."
Here's the current post, for Zork, and it's pretty cool how the various participants are using # comments among themselves to discuss their tactics: "Ack, no! We needed the lunch for the cyclops... Oh didn't know that. isn't there an other way past him? like telling a long story so he'll fall asleep?... We can use the sack to put on the cyclops's head." [Via Andy Baio.]









Comments
Hey, cool idea! Although Zork's well known enough that people can probably just blaze through it... they should use sore more recent interactive fiction for this, with Inform 7 around they could possibly even make some themselves....
Posted by: John H. | June 16, 2007 5:22 PM
MUDs are petty much like that. I don't really get the point.
Posted by: Corey Holcomb-Hockin | June 17, 2007 2:25 PM
Hey guys, nice to see this made the news! We started with Zork for this beta version, it seemed fitting that it would be the starting point, we will move on to other games as we go along!
It's not quite the same as a MUD because this is multiple people solving a single player narrative, which can get hilariously chaotic.
Posted by: Spaff | June 19, 2007 3:58 AM
I really wanted to write "Get life" in there, but I didn't want to be bothered registering.
Posted by: CaRteR | June 20, 2007 8:00 PM