happily geeking out @perchedinthegeekery - Tumblr Blog

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

technofeudalism

since this post blew up, i've been wanting to do an addition with all of the recommendations from the comments and tags. but there's a lot of them. some people might be crazy enough to sit down and seriously put them all in one post with descriptions. those people are honestly sick in the head.

anyway, here's all of the recommendations from the reblogs. not all of them are text-based, but it's a great mixture of styles. also don't forget the links in the second paragraph of the OP which will take you to FMHY where there are a bunch more games listed.

Games

A Dark Room - text-based science fiction role-playing game.

corru.observer - science fiction adventure web game.

Improbable Island - old-school text adventure game.

Candy Box 2 - incremental clicker game that evolves into RPG.

Arcanum - open source wizard clicker game.

sandspiel, Powder Game, Powder Game 2, The Powder Toy - more sand physics games.

Orb.Farm - fishtank simulator.

Façade - experimental game with a real-time interactive narrative where you try to fix a failing marriage.

The Catacombs of Solaris - trippy art game.

Yume Nikki Online - online version of the surreal classic plus fangames.

The Barncle Goose Experiment - combine element/alchemy game based on antique theories of abiogenesis.

Fallen London - free-to-play text-based open world RPG.

Nested - very unique text-based universe expanding game. described as possibly @orteil42's favorite thing he's ever made.

The Process of Elimination - interactive web novel (by @hypertextdog)

Discworld MUD - multiplayer, text-based, online game (a MUD, or text MMORPG) based on the Discworld books.

Horse Master - surreal text game about training a horse.

EYEZMAZE - flash (RIP) or HTML5-based puzzle games.

You Are Jeff Bezos - text game. spend Jeff Bezos' fortune.

The Password Game - challenging puzzle game where you have to meet password requirements (by neal)

Universal Paperclips - incremental paperclip making game.

Half-Earth - planetary disaster planning game where you try to save the world using socialism.

ChooseYourStory - community-driven website centered on CYOA style story games.

PhD Simulator - random event based text game. make your choice each month and see if you can graduate on time.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - open source roguelike.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - turn-based survival roguelike set in the modern day.

Nethack - open source roguelike originally released in 1987.

FarmRPG - simple, mobile-friendly, text-based farming RPG.

Kingdom of Loathing - browser-based community MMORPG.

PokeRogue - browser-based Pokemon roguelike

Tools

Text Game Builder - works in your browser, with just a little bit of Python (by @grumpygandalf)

Twine - great (free!) tool for making text-based games quickly.

Ink - scripting language for interactive fiction (also free)

Flashpoint Archive - a community effort to preserve games and animations from the web.

PICO-8 - fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.

Non-Games

Library of Babel - interactive illustration which attempts to simulate what it might be like to browse The Library of Babel.

Superbad - technically not a game, sprawling website full of secrets.

17776 - serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative about football in the far-future. beautiful, creative, legendary. created by Jon Bois, a legend and one of my favorite writers of all time.

Choice of Games - text-based, choose-your-own-adventure games (interactive fiction). some free-to-play, others can be bought like an ebook.

The Deep Sea - scroll to the bottom of the ocean. encounter the humble squid and his friends (by neal)

Space Elevator - like The Deep Sea, but up instead of down. you can equip your avatar with a scarf (by neal)

Internet Artifacts - an interactive history of the early internet (by neal)

If The Moon Were Only One Pixel - scroll through an accurately scaled model of the universe.

r/incremental_games - reddit community for incremental games.

r/WebGames - reddit community for web games in general.

thank you to everyone who contributed and the creators. please be sure to show them some love where possible.

fuckingfuckersfucked-deactivate

Well, it’s finally finished. It was a genuinely satisfying project. I present you Ankh Morpork in the guise of Google Maps.

pasiphile

discworld-heritage-posts

Discworld Heritage Post

darkaviarymc

Tragedy alignment chart. Feel free to use, but please reblog if you do.

mikkeneko

And of course the second part of the tragedy, which is: which quadrant did you think you were in vs. which one you were really in

mynameisrocks

charlesoberonn

socialistexan

French-Iranian author and illustrator Marjane Satrapi, best known for the book and film “Persopolis”, has died of "sadness", members of her

This one hurt, her work had such a profound effect on my life, thoughts, and politics.

May her memory be a blessing

higgsbison

happy glorious 25th of may

sweetly-impious

i read my first discworld novel around 25 years ago. i was 10 or 11 maybe. and when i say that discworld raised me.

it snuck in through the cracks and seeded better philosophies into a young mind that was being brought up in a cult, and as i grew, those things took root in me, crumbled the cult rhetoric like so much shitty concrete and let something a bit more alive have a chance to blossom.

discworld met me where i was at--in my youthful impotent rage, in my cleverness, in my fears.

discworld said that monsters were real but i was allowed to carry a frying pan and some string. discworld said it was okay to care an irrational amount about pedantic things but it wasn't okay to be an elitist asshole about it because everyone else is people, too, and if you're so clever maybe you have a duty to use it rather than a right to lord it over everyone. discworld made me think about my thoughts.

discworld gave me socks to shove down my pants when i was 14 and didn't know how to have words for not being a girl and it laid out a framework for understanding my autism almost 20 years before i knew what it was. it told me i was allowed to have agency and if i didn't then i was allowed to take it from whoever was trying to keep it from me.

discworld said there are words for that feeling of always watching myself, that it doesn't make me evil for needing to be my own built-in leash. and that it's okay to think the world is full of idiots and bastards as long as i understand at the end of the day they're just as human as everyone else and that has to matter or everything breaks down.

discworld, in particular, drove home just what that humanity meant. what it meant to be part of it, when i had grown up too isolated to understand in any organic way.

discworld was there for me as a kid and it was there for me as an adult revisiting my favourites with eyes ever made fresh by adult worry and grief and exhaustion and hope, understanding me every step of the way. it reminded me again and again through the difficult years that i had to care because caring is all we've got and if we don't care, what's the point?

and it did all of that while making me laugh so hard i couldn't breathe. helped me consistently value joy and humour against a painful world, even at my lowest.

i wouldn't be this me without discworld; i would be some much worse version of me, and that would really suck.

i don't have anything terribly poetic or moving to say today. i'm just full of gratitude and gladness and melancholy and assorted other soft feelings.

it's the 25th of may. i've been wearing lilac in my hair since before i was even old enough to know why.

i guess all that's left to do is track down a hard-boiled egg.

powersimon

The carrier of carriers. A tribute to Terry Pratchett

shower-thoughts-last-responder

"Every year he forgot. Well, no. He never forgot. He just put the memories away, like old silverware that you didn’t want to tarnish. And every year they came back, sharp and sparkling, and stabbed him in the heart."

GNU Sir Terry, I wouldn't be the man I am today without your influence; from you I learned that evil begins when you treat people like things; that sure it's important that you speak from them as have no voice but that there's also room in there for grasp for them as can't bend, reach for them as can't stretch, wipe for them as can't twist; that saying somone should do something isn't much good unless you follow it up with and that somone will be me; that there aren't really good guys and bad guys, that the enemy wasn't men, or women, or the old, or even the dead. It was just bleedin' stupid people, who came in all varieties. And no one had the right to be stupid; that all things strive, and that every moment of every day we can choose to be the place where the falling angle meets the rising ape

chimaerakitten

I’ve been kicking around a thought lately that when it comes to SFF we could probably bypass some of the perennial political vs. apolitical vs. everything-is-political-apolitical-storytelling-doesn’t-exist by instead formulating a spectrum from politically coherent to politically incoherent

Essentially, politically coherent works are works where the political message of the story is supported by all (or at least most) of the major story elements, and a politically incoherent work is a story where the political messages of different elements are seemingly all shooting off on different vectors.

The nice thing about this is it can bypass authorial intent (and the discussion of whether intent matters). This is about the text.

Like, politically incoherent works that had no authorial thought behind them are a dime a dozen of course, and politically coherent works that clearly had a lot of authorial thought are if not equally common than at least easy to spot. But there are also plenty of works that are politically coherent without the author intending them that way—like, whatever faults there are with Project Hail Mary, the overall opinion the book has about the nature of humanity & of science is consistent throughout. Likewise there are stories where the authors clearly meant a coherent political point and totally wiffed it. (The works @specialagentartemis has collectively termed “cozy colonialism” come to mind)

So there’s a utility in replacing the question “is this story political?” (Yes, always, but if the answer is always yes the question becomes kinda useless) with “Is this story politically coherent?” Because a yes or no there will tell a prospective reader something about what to expect.

soulren

“Ghosts are real” I can see how you could believe that

“Ghosts aren’t real” it’s very fair and rational that you believe that

“Ghosts aren’t real anymore” I’m about to hear a poem or very sad story

“Ghosts aren’t real yet” the fuck are you going to do

the-haiku-bot

“Ghosts aren’t real” it’s

very fair and rational

that you believe that

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

peterfromtexas-deactivated20250

Reenactor throws a spear at a drone

supapoopa

What a time to be alive.

tenthcorner

“The medieval warrior, realizing the consequences of his impulsive act, immediately approached the owner of the drone and offered to pay for the damage.

The owner of the drone was so impressed by the brilliant attack that he suggested organizing a competition for bringing down “dragons” with short spears next year.

Drone owners have another year to develop a unique “dragon-like” design for their flying machines.” (x)

kineticpenguin

I am 100% cooler with this knowing that the spear-thrower realized “oops maybe I shouldn’t have done that” and tried to make it right, and that the guy who the drone belonged to was cool with it