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Coding is a Text Adventure
Wired News is running a story about a new approach to crossover working and gaming turning your coding into a MUD-style adventure. Playsh is a "narrative-driven 'object navigation' client, operating primarily on the semantic level, casting your hacking environment as a high-level, shell-based, social prototyping laboratory, a playground for recombinant network toys." Great, now they are combining two of the most horrible addictions in my life.
Usability and Games: 17 Excellent References -- "If you're interested in video games and computer games, as well as usability and user experience (UX), this is exactly the list of references for you."
How to Download YouTube Videos
I've already been eaten by a grue.
"PUT KEY ON HASH TABLE" Segmentation Fault: Wumpus Detected
I had always wondered if somebody would attempt to make a mud out of programming. Everytime I start stepping through my debugger, it feels like I am on an adventure.
Colonel Cranium this is Rectal Reconnaissance, we are on a collision course sir, Abort Abort!
... that's what I usually tell people when they ask me if I'm into games. Most people don't know what this is, so I add "it's a text adventure" :)
So the "Person" class is the main adventurer. While he is running through the tunnel to the mainframe lands, he hear's a request from someone calling themselves "User" that states he must first solve a puzzle for reformatting these characters to the one expected by the mainframe giants. 10/14/1999
Later, our hero Person signs up for a banking account and pays his credit card bills using the AutoBillPay spell. Person is then kiilled by the surcharge monster.
I guess it was just too difficult to look at your code in a nice editor with color coding and intellisense.
I'd much rather navigate to my function with:
North
North
East
North
Look
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Great, now they are combining two of the most horrible addictions in my life.
Hate to break it to you, but heroin and hookers were combined a loooong time ago...
This guy's the limit!
Unhandled Exception: You have been eaten by a grue.
You are in a maze of twisty subroutines, all alike. You may be eaten by a deadline.
I hope Gibson was forward thinking enough to take out a patent on this!
1. Write futuristic novel
2. Patent every concept in the book
3. Wait for people to make it happen
4. Blind-side them with your 1337 patent!
5. Profit!!!!
I...I'm attacking the darkness!
"Great, now they are combining two of the most horrible addictions in my life."
Now imagine how the productivity numbers would skyrocket if they managed to mix programming and pr0n.
(Granted, I've already written plenty of obscene code in the past...)
I always thought it would be interesting to attach a Infocom/Inform like parser to a File Explorer / DOS shell type thing, so you could type stuff like .jpg to c:\backup\, preserving the directory structure
> move all files from c:\wherever\ and below that end with
That shouldn't be too hard, actually, we have systems that can speak Turing-able English so long as you restrict the subject domain...and once you had that, it should be trivial-ish to get the right speech recongnition component in place, if you wanted to go that route...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
Please see http://groups.google.com/group/net.unix/browse_thr ead/thread/8a55fc5a43194ad/ca28c53d1020e06c?lnk=st &q=net.cog-eng+spaf%40gatech.uucp+proposal+adventu re&rnum=1&hl=en#ca28c53d1020e06c
which discusses a precursor to this idea from 20+ years
ago.
Wired News is running a story about a new approach to crossover working and gaming turning your coding into a MUD-style adventure.
Go North
Find Door
Open Door
Leave Work
Find Home
Go Home
Find Bed
Go to Sleep
END
Did I win?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
(Mud Shell, now defunct, was featured on Slashdot in 2001.
There's also the New Adventure Shell, based on Doug Gwyn's Advshell, and John Cocker's Advsh, both written in 1984.
The basic concept also shows up in the adventure game found in Emacs.
But, playsh looks like it includes a special enhancement which I think is pretty cool. According to the article,
Now, that's pretty cool.
About someone who wrote a Zork styled system for configuring linux, here on slashdot many years ago. One of the comments that came back was this:
>Take SCSI
Cannot do that
>Take SCSI
SCSI did not budge
>Take SCSI
You got SCSI
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
I had a being in a castle with a vampire text adventure for the Commodore Vic-20 when I was a kid. It was so frustrating because I would get to a special door, I would type BREAK DOOR, and the computer would respond WITH YOUR HANDS? Since the instruction manual said that my commands must be a verb and a action word, typing YES never occured to me.
In fact, I would read years later in "Hackers" by Steven Levy that the original Adventure text game would put the player in the similar position and that typing YES was the answer. I was kicking myself for not doing the obvious. Was this bad game design or was I being too literal in following the instruction manual?
now i can buy my code some much needed int and con.
He whom you called four-eyes yesterday, you call Sir tomorrow.
Well, atleast it's more productive than killing the same monsters for eight hours so that you can level up and learn a new spell which will help you kill some more monsters to get to the next level...
For example, you might instantiate a class, and the object created then becomes an in-game object that you can manipulate like any other. It inherits its data and behaviors from its parent. But, that object is also a class that you can extend, and others can be instantiated from it.
In MOO, when you type a command, the game engine matches your command against "verbs" (methods ) found on the object representing you in the game world. The first word of the line you typed becomes the command to match, with the rest of the words being parameters. (You can also specify that verbs not be matchable, only allowing them to be called from within code). It's possible to have verbs that work either as commands or are callable from within other verbs.
If you want to add a new command to yourself, you just add the verb and program it. If it's something to be shared, you copy it to an appropriate ancestor, then delete your own copy; you and everyone else inheriting from that ancestor gains the command. (There's security in place; if you're an administrator you can do anything but if not then you need the cooperation of the owner of that ancestor object or an administrator.)
Ultimately, a MOO is just a scripting language and virtual machine, with a network interface and some security features to allow collaboration without granting all programmers full read or write access to each others' code and data. Implementation of the player / room / carryable object paradigm is done in the scripting language, not the engine itself. It's flexible enough to write Web servers in, and pretty damn fast for a language where everything is late-bound and weakly typed.
Interestingly, while most MOOs used internal mail and public forums, and would send email for various purposes (coded right in the scripting language), and many of them listened for HTTP connections and translated part (or all) of the game world into HTML, none of the efforts to create large MOO networks (a la IRC) ever got very far.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
It's dark. You light a lamp and you see a slashdot poster doing something with his hand. It's moving back and forth rapidly. Suddenly you are blinded by a white sticky substance. You drop the lamp and the light goes out.
Colossal Cave Adventure
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/18/ 2245204
Does anyone have screenshots?
Talking about text adventures, coding GWing.net has been an extraordinary text adventure... then again, that's the whole point. (We're making an animation out of the users' forum-based text adventures... =D)
$signature_views++;
http://david.weekly.org/writings/be-adventure.php3 /
The thing people need to understand is that the reason games are fun is because of the random reward structure in them. You don't get random rewards when you code...only random problems with sometimes unlikely solutions.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I saw Matt Webb and Ben Cerveny demo Playsh at O'Reilly's ETech conference. The demo was pretty neat. I wrote up the talk and took some photos of the slides. You can see more here on my blog.
- shell.html
http://ptufts.blogspot.com/2006/03/playsh-playful
Matt coded 90% of the Playsh environment in-game. Pretty cool.
--Pat
Your monitor glows brightly in front of you. (You also have a small headache, which you've attributed to being stuck with a CRT. However, accounting always tells you to "man up" when you request a flat panel.)
A coworker, Jeff, comes by and mentions that there's a bug in the program you wrote for the company. Seeing as how it's been six months since the last bug report, you eye him cautiously and ask him what he does before the bug appears. "Click a button, or something" is his resposne. You're suddenly reminded that you have a doctor's appointment to check your blood pressure on Monday.
You have:
-a headache
-pencils
-potential high blood pressure
-a nagging coworker
-a deadline
Action:> Attack co-worker
Jeff, who moves around the office as opposed to sitting in a chair for eight hours like yourself, nimbly dodges as you attempt to fling a pencil into his eye. "Uh, sorry," you say. Jeff shrugs.
Action:> Look at Jeff's computer
You follow Jeff over to his computer, where he sits down and violently moves the mouse to wake it up. "Why didn't you leave the screen as is when you came to get me?" you ask. "Oh, this problem is from last Tuesday," he answers. You wonder if you can move the Doctor's appointment up. "Okay," he says, as he opens Acrobat Reader. He presses some buttons, not caring if you're able to see what he's doing, and suddenly gets a blue screen of death. "See?" You realize that all he did was somehow hard crash Acrobat Reader- a program completely unrelated to your work.
Action:> Ponder homicide
There's not a jury in the world.
Jeff is looking at you expectantly.
Action:> give up
As Jeff stares at you expectantly, you suddenly burst into tears. Leaning against the wall of his cubicle, it cracks and sags backwards as you slow sink to the floor and assume the fetal position. The men in white suits arrive a half hour later.
Total score: -2
Play Again? y/n: n
>r
What do you want to read? [ijk or ?*]
>?
Variables
i - tmp
j - tmp2
k - tmp3
(to self): "Wait, what were the variable types for each? hmmm... how about "
>j
As you read the variable, they ALL disappear. Your fun weekend plans crumble into tiny threads and fall apart! Debug this five-year-old garbage you wrote instead - oh look, you didn't use comments or naming conventions!
(to screen): "ARRGGHH!! I KNEW I should have dropped everything on the Simulated Altar when I passed it!"
This is not my sig.
That was the one!
:o)
laughed my socks of at it first time round
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Your problem is that you read the manual.
Nobody ever reads the manual.
(And I'm a tech writer... *sigh!*)
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
> turning your coding into a MUD-style adventure...
> Great, now they are combining two of the most horrible addictions in my life.
And if, by coding, you gain access to an object room and open the chest, and there's pr0n goldpieces in there, you'll really be in for it!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Now all I need to write is xyzzy!
After reading this, it has become apparent to me why I always feel like I'm fighting dragons and monsters at work all day.
how about running an application like it's a MUD? that would be fun.
...
multiply two matrices?
LOOK:
- you're on the row 12, column 32, the diagonal is under.
GO LEFT:
- you're on the row 12, column 33... aaa, sorry, 31.
ADD PREV:
- prev who?
I had another sig before, but this one is better
..playing Enchanter. I'd got past the 3D maze, past the stone dragon, past the mine and the temporal puzzle and I'd worked out that I had to swim out into the bay and dive down to the seaweed but I couldn't do it. I tried SWIM DOWN, DIVE DOWN, GO DOWN, SINK DOWN and so on for h o u r s. My flatmate came in and asked how it was going and I explained. "Oh" he said and typed D. >Underwater >you are underwater. There are weeds here gaaa!stupidassgame!
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
A coding MMORPG! You first have to spend hours leveling up your project by grinding with specification issues, then you can finally class change to Alpha and start implementing stuff (and if you're really good a high-level issue might even drop a unique solution!) - and if development takes too long you have to go gold farming in PHB territory. Once you have reached the Final class there's not much more to be done but PvP, though.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I did business process automation workflow development after graduating university. I spent a fair amount of time at university playing on and creating content for MUDs. The approach I took to creating business process maps was the same as creating quests and areas for MUDs. I just had to be careful with my code comments. The director of finance probably wouldn't appreciate being referred to as the huge ugly troll guarding a pile treasure.
Speak truth to power.
*singing* your COODing is a wonderland....
All the jokes are funny, etc, but, come on guys, you do realize that this is complete nonsense, right ? RIGHT ????
Programming is hard enough without adding absurd layers of abstraction and indirection. This reminds me of the ridiculous 3D "programming environments" in movies like Swordfish (which I though was a very enjoyable movie, btw).
Try this: http://www.the-sisters-of-mercy.com/clock.html
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
I believe OpenCroquet is a 3D OOP world, which does what the other mentioned 3D can't do, dynamically changing the implementation. Although it's still Beta...
www.opencroquet.org
Run time Error! Exception! Would you like to have your exceptions identified? (ynq)
Now combine that with coding/testing Zope 3 from a command line... and you've got some serious grue.
Ever wonder what makes Lisp so powerful?
Now you can find out for yourself-
And you don't even have to install anything on your computer to do it!
Tells you how to create an adventure-type game in Lisp:
http://www.lisperati.com/casting.html
Once upon a time there was Adventure http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/canon/Adventure.htm/ which was really an analogy of the development of systems and the code required for that activity. So coding has been a game since at least 1975....about time you guys caught up.
Someone already mentioned it, but OpenCroquet is probably the next MOO, plus a whole lot more. I recommend watching this fairly recent video (October of last year) to see what it's all about.
this could be fun, we just have to make everything an adventure game. Shopping, working, fighting, oh christ.. it's ender's game. if you could hook it up so you controlled a robot through your text adventures actions, you could even turn cleaning a room or cooking into an experience gaining activity and have a clean room and dinner. muds are amazing! ;)
I've used the nethack mode in screen for as long as I can remember using screen. :)
echo "nethack on" >> ~/.screenrc