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.

Comments

Novel enhancement to an old idea

[rubberpaw]

This is not a new idea...

(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,

It treats the web and APIs as just more objects and places, and is a platform for writing and sharing your own code to manipulate those objects and places

Now, that's pretty cool.