Unofficial AIM Bot Gives Infocom Classics IM Twist

Fluidic Binary writes "Now instant messenging can waste our time in exciting 'new' ways, according to Wired News, who reveal that an improved unofficial AIM bot has been created to play Infocom games via AOL's messenging client. According to the article: 'The bot, designed by 26-year-old Web programmer Andy Baio, is a Perl script that acts as an intermediary between the games, which are hosted on his server, and AOL's network.'"

Comments

dang

[moof1138]

I used Perl with Net::AIM, Expect, and frotz to make a zork bot a few years back as an amusement. I used it as a simple project before I wrote a bot to do various work related things. It is really handy to be able to check the status of certain things from AIM. The frotz bot was almost all just glue code except for the session handling bit which I added after a while to allow concurrent users - that was more complicated. To think that if I had told someone about it besides my coworkers I might have been featured in Wired...