informal methods @sailing-the-cylindrical-sea - 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.

centrally-unplanned

To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.

Since I was talking about the "cellphones & boredom" topic earlier, here is the kind of "actually making a case" that some people are doing. The plural of anecdote isn't data or anything, but as someone who works in this field the academics quoted are reflecting a pretty consensus opinion across universities in my experience. Students legitimately cannot do longer-form tasks that they could do in the past, even up to students from high-ranking schools. I lean towards this being a true phenomenon, though the scale is TBD.

Is it because schools are "teaching to the test", as the above article outlines? I don't personally think that is the biggest driver, but I see the causal pattern here. I am generally skeptic of "generalizing education" - people learn in school, it is real, but they don't learn that much, and most of the traits people think school is "teaching" come from a grab bag of sources. But schools definitely teach you how to succeed in school! Being a Student is a skill, people are generally motivated by grades and the like, and so you learn "what works", and schools have absolutely been shifting their expectations. I would push back against the "lowering" them understanding, at least naively; a lot of students in those "great books" classes would sparknotes those fuckers and bluff through it, and so modern assignments can be better targeted. But schools are also responding to students, and parents, and there is a lot of pressure to "meet students where they are at" and pass everyone in the class; I can imagine this dynamic playing a role as well.

Of course it could also be the cell phones, I think they play a role too. But I would posit another causal mechanism - why read the long books? I mean I like long books, but even I these days will skip text sometimes that I can tell is filler and stuff. The internet has taught me not to fear long books, but to be efficient in my consumption, I know what I want so to speak. And that does make me read less of them.

And let's be real, 90%+ of the students, after their Great Books intro college seminar, never read books like that again. These classes did inspire some people, but never made a nation of readers out of most who attended. And that failure is positioned alongside a general trend of the "liberal arts" educational value declining to be replaced by college-as-career-advancement. A transition that is occurring because, overwhelmingly, the latter side was correct about the priorities they should have. Reflected back in culture, of course, like now one's peers also don't value reading long books, right? They talk about podcasts instead or w/e. But still, I think that is what makes putting this genie back in the bottle hard - students are probably correct to understand "reading long, dense books" as something with a minimal payoff for them.

If there are society-wide consequences of that, you can make the case - though since so few were ever readers post-college, I am skeptical. Or at least they are going to be more complex than this narrative puts out. But I am open minded on this one still, definitely a development to follow.

#always skeptical of hot takes about 'kids these days' but this makes a lot of sense

ilikeit-art

A sony laptop 1986.

thevaultoftheatomicspaceage

I decided to quit using Twitter because it was constantly making me anxious. It has been 4 days so far and it is literally affecting me physically. I keep having to consciously stop myself from opening it. I find myself sitting with my phone in my hand, staring at it, wondering what I'm supposed to be doing.

Even posting here is kind of a compromise. For whatever reason, Tumblr doesn't give me the same kind of anxiety, so I think it's okay, but I'm opening Tumblr approximately 100x more than I usually do.

bayesic-bitch

I still can't get over the fact that the most interesting new functional programming language in the last 10 years is specifically for Fortnite modding

learning-is-underrated

What on earth? Please tell me more.

robotabc773

I'm sure OP can say more but I took a quick look through the Verse documentation and yeah this is pretty neat! It's got some really interesting systems for handling failure, things are setup to make it easy to do speculative evaluation with rollbacks, and there's good built-in concurrency control. It's not purely functional but data is immutable by default and there's ways of marking functions as pure or pure+always converging (though of course the compiler can't check for that). Also the boolean type is called "logic".

bayesic-bitch

@learning-is-underrated, @robotabc773 These are all true, but it doesn't touch on the core thing that makes Verse special. Its not just a functional language, it's a functional logic programming (FLP) language. FLP isn't new, it's been around since the 90s (although its definitely never been part of a mainstream language before), but Verse's big idea is a calculus for FLP that that's deterministic. This means you can do Prolog-style logic programming with predictable runtimes. For instance, you can do programs like

x : tuple(int, int);

x = (2, y:int);

x = (z:int, 3);

And the program will solve for a value of x that satisfies both constraints on x. In this case, that means y=3, z=2, and x = (2,3). Earlier languages could do this too, but they always involved running a unification algorithm behind the scenes that may or may not terminate, and you don't know how long it'll take if it does. Whereas with Verse, the behavior is supposed to be a lot more predictable. And they're committing to that idea too, you would never dream of using something like Prolog or Curry in a game engine. The talk, slides, and paper on the core calculus go into more detail on how this all works.

There's also several other weird things with the language. It has first class types, meaning you can assign types as values. I'm not 100% sure about their implementation, but normally this means you can have dependent types and use the language as a full theorem prover, like Lean. They also have an effect system, which I suspect is inspired by Kuka.

In other words, it's got a ton of extremely experimental and weird features from very mathematically dense academic languages, and it's designed by the guy who created Haskell. And it's being used primarily by 13 year old fortnite modders

ceausescue

i mean this is going to go crazy for functional language propaganda right? teaching the children to revile state

cuteycandycataclysm

Clint you've got to be fucking kidding me

I have consumed Too Much Cheese

dumbtective

Neurodivergent people be like "wow, this game changed my life, exquisite gameplay, groundbreaking" and then they show you the game and it looks like this

nylmoth-deactivated20240710

After some time flirting with the idea, finally got pulled into textmode and been loving it so far! Here's two of my first pieces, expect a few more in the near future^^

software: Playscii font: AtariAll