boris's blog

I work in K- 12 school (ages 6 to 18). I am thinking about designing an after-school course on text-based games.

I think I can sell it to parents "A game your kids have to read..." and I'm pretty sure I can generate enough excitement with the kids to get 5 or 6 students. The class would last an entire school year (September to June), meeting once a week. So we would be looking at about 30 class meeting times (probably more like 20 with interruptions and field trips).

I have thought about this a bit, and here's my basic outline:

Text based games

The classics:

I'm creating an IC coded assistant for my players. Each player will have their own assistant. The purpose of these assistants are to help new players with common tasks, and act as an intermediary between coded and the IC game space.

Almost of all of the commands on my mush follow a syntax like: +cgsk/pol, or +priority/pol 1=12

Cryptic and unintuitive.

Behold! our heritage!!! This is the original Fortran code which ran colossal caves, which then mutated into adventure, which then turned into zork, and inspired Bartle et. al. to write MUD 1, etc etc etc!!!!

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=460192

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/08/15/interactive-fiction-on-the-iphone/

neat! I know iPhones have an SSH client now, so I'm sure mushing could happen!

Hi everyone !

I added a new page to our wiki today, and I'm inviting you to to add your .2 cents!

http://community.pennmush.org/node/488

In the nebulous-ness that is our community, I'm wondering "what exactly constitutes the text-based gaming community?" Please add any sites or RSS feeds you regularly parse.

Boris

Thank to everyone who participated in part one of this conversation.

This issue is, as I suspected, rather nuanced. And I got our discussion off to a bad start by being vague. So let's consider this rather lengthy definition from the Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory © 1998 Penguin Books, London.

--- begin definition ---

I am curious...do you consider text-based gaming literature? I'm planning on exploring this theme over the next 2 months, and hopeful arrive at an educated and informed answer.

I suspect the answer is "it depends" but what do you think? I'll share my thoughts on the matter later...

I've been working on a new MUSH for a few years now - it's a side-project, and I've been busy with IRL stuff, so it's moving along slowly but surely. I think there are many unique, neat features and I'm hoping the game will be successful.

However, I'm deliberately keeping this project on "silent running" until I'm ready to go live. I have a website and the game is available to explore - but I haven't added the game to any of standard community advertising sites. I have 3 or 4 players who pop in and out, and help with testing. My connect.txt clearly shows the game is in alpha status.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5.

We have finished, and here is the after action report:

The Good Stuff

Three of the five boys demonstrated working knowledge of the Z axis. They were involved in engaging an opponent in three-dimensional space. This opponent was moving, and they were moving as well. They coordinated helm and science information to effectively position themselves in 3D space. They demonstrated an understanding of yaw and pitch.

I just added part 5 to getting to Z series!

This entry has some videos to help non-mush users visualize the general idea. I think for those users unfamiliar with text-based gaming this entire project might be diffficult to grasp.