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"Choose Your Own Adventure" On Your iPhone
If you spent a good portion of your childhood reading the classic "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, you'll be glad to know that you can soon waste countless hours at work turning to random pages on your iPhone. Edward Packard, one of the original authors of the series, has helped create an app called U-Ventures which uses special effects to create a story in the traditional Choose Your Own Adventure format. From the article: "The first U-Venture is a sort of a sequel to a classic title, The Cave of Time. In 'Return to the Cave of Time,' the U-Venture, 'you go back in the cave — you don't have a choice on that,' Packard tells NPR's Neal Conan. But from that point on, the reader chooses her own course."
Is anything so simple and trivial that it can be done in basic HTML suddenly news when you can add the words "on the iPhone"? Still, after all these years? It's as if Slashdot has a spam filter that is automatically bypassed by the phrase.
I'm writing some text adventures for iPhone and Android at the moment. Beaten to market by a few months! Ah well, it's a pretty obvious update to the old books. I imagine we'll see a lot of these. They can be pretty fun.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The thing that made choose-your-own-adventure books interesting was essentially hacking a limited notion of interactivity into a non-interactive medium, by asking users to manually enact GOTOs. But on a computer, we have interaction sort of built in, so the hack is uninteresting. Sure, you can still do it, and people might still like reading them, but it's not really its own category of thing, and we've had it forever. You can do it with a set of HTML pages linked to each other, or before that, with hypercard pages, and people actually did so, a long time ago, and did it more interestingly.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Ten years ago who would have believed Slashdot would turn into an Apple PR/SPAM site?
Mr. PACKARD: Well, we have a bookmark feature. So, for instance, if you get to a choice and - you can bookmark that page. And then if you go on, you make your choice and you go on to various other adventures and you finally come to an ending, but you want to see what would have happened if you go and made the other choice, you can go back there. But otherwise, you know, you get to the end of the story. We don't want to make it - we didn't want to make it so you just could flip back and forth aimlessly like some kind of computer game. We wanted to make it where there's a real story, and it goes on and on surprisingly long and - or usually, unless you come to a bad ending.
Oh good. I was worried there wouldn't be a way to do this. I vaguely remembering keeping two to three fingers firmly inserted in various sections of the book to backtrack if I made bad choices. I wonder if my imaginary /. girlfriend appreciates what I learned by doing this in the 3rd grade >.>
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
"The first U-Venture is a sort of a sequel to a classic title, The Cave of Time. In 'Return to the Cave of Time,'..."
That's not "sort of," that is a direct sequel.
You're the PC monger here, go away with your "GENDER NEUTRAL" language and start recognizing the superiority of womyn.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
What about those of us that are gestalt entities, you insensitive clod.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
But from that point on, the reader chooses their own course.
What if it's a line? Or a plane? Or, is this absurd example of political correctness meant to suggest that only points can be the start of stories. What is wrong with "geometric concept"? Using "geometric concept" actually lets the sentence make sense rather than sound idiotic.
Change the phrase in the summary to: But from that geometric concept on, the reader chooses their own course. It's common sense, not fucking rocket science. It also keeps everyone happy because it's dimensionless.
Get Frotz for the iPhone or iPad, and play real interactive fiction instead. The interface could use some help in the way it gets stories in / out, but I've been (re)-enjoying my infocom collection from my old "lost treasures of infocom" CDs on my mobile devices just fine (hint : keep safari handy and bookmark the support docs).
Using "their" all the time can become boring and in a couple of cases, slightly misleading. A good approach is to use "his" sometimes, and "hers" others. Just don't mix them up in the same paragraph.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
One of my university english profs discouraged the use of 'their' when referring to either sex. Fuck that. I'm not writing 'his or her'. Invent a new pronoun or suck it up.
Of course, you could just get Fabled Lands, which is as sandbox'y as those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books can get. No idea if java runs on the iStuff though.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
'He' has always been considered gender neutral when referring to an arbitrary person. It's just the radical feminist propaganda than has made using the generic 'he' verboten. Look at modern English from 1970 as far back as you care to, and you'll see that this is the way the language works. It's much better than using a plural pronoun just because the generic 'he' may offend someone who will probably also be offended by something other triviality in your message.
I try to support things from first principles. There's no good reason why "he" should always be used over "she" and a reasonable case for supporting both so long as you are consistent within paragraphs / examples. Therefore a shift to using both "he" and "she" makes sense to me.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
What is wrong with the word " their "?
It's a plural and indicates that there is more than one reader making the decision. 'Its' is just as valid.
What makes a good man go neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?!
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and Deathtrap Dungeon are out in the iPhone now. I believe Citadel of Chaos is too, not entirely sure.
I have the Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and the second Creature of Havoc comes out I'll be buying that one too.
Cheers,
Ian
It's a plural and indicates that there is more than one reader making the decision.
dictionary.com disagrees with you:
their /ðr; unstressed ðr/ Show Spelled[thair; unstressed ther] Show IPA
-pronoun
[...]
2 (used after an indefinite singular antecedent in place of the definite masculine form his or the definite feminine form her ): Someone left their book on the table.
I'll admit it's probably wrong, but my assumption was that the protagonist was female. The "Choose your own adventure" books always placed the reader in the role of the protagonist.
On the one hand, this seems to be a simple and trivial app that could easily have been done with HTML. On the other hand, Edward Packard is an absolute master of the format. I can't imagine Hyperspace will have held up over the decades, but I still have the urge to track down my copy.
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
Can't spell, and your creativity ends at having an amusing background on your lock screen? There's an app for that.
Someone tried it. It's hard to get people to use a new word you just invented though, because it makes you sound like a dick. Grok, for example. (There can be few things more funny than listening to someone trying to convince someone else to use 'grok' instead of 'understand'.)
It's not a plural and you're an idiot.
Please give an example of the singular they being more misleading than hopping between a definite he and she.
And all this assuming is why using either "he" or "she" is a bad idea. Singular they or neutral pronouns are the only available unambiguous options.
I liked the FMV ones like silent steel. But alot of the other ones sucked real bad.
Does any one have a iso of all 3 disks of Flash Traffic: City of Angels?
Choice? Oh man. Steve Jobs isn't going to like this.
I only ever made it through 2 of those books in my youth because that's all I could afford, but I loved the RPG aspect of the book over CYOA books (a favorite of mine when I was even younger).
xyzzy !!
I'm on my own "choose your adventure" story. It is sometimes called "real life." ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
There's no good reason why "he" should always be used over "she" and a reasonable case for supporting both so long as you are consistent within paragraphs / examples.
Except perhaps that “he” has always been used over “she” and the PC decision to start using both of them as gender-neutral pronouns is really just confusing?
Alternately, you could look at it from this perspective: it’s bad enough that I have to stop and think to figure out whether “he” means a male or a generic individual – now I’ll have to stop and think to figure out what “she” means too?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
When it’s plural, perhaps? /facepalm
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Well, that’s just their opinion.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
This is not really a first on the iphone, it has been done by others a long time ago. Check out a "choose your own adventure" manga called Foxfire: http://bit.ly/7GvnZU
Port the InfoCom stuff. And Colossal Cave. Render the glowing, green text to resemble the phosphor of a slump-back Tektronix terminal, like the computing labs had in 1979.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I understand it's popular in some cities like New York and San Francisco.
I hear it's called "Get a Decent Signal Adventure."
The problem is no matter how many times you go back, the story ends the same way. You're dead.
Rack me.
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
$3.99? Really, I just went to buy it out of nostalgia, i loved those books. But 3.99 for an iphone app? Thats of limited use? Not a chance.
Or, is this absurd example of political correctness
The only one offended here is you. You're demanded that they change their language, because it offends you. That's political correctness.
What is wrong with the word " their "?
Because there's only one reader? There's no right answer - using singular they to refer to a specific person isn't any better than saying "his" or "her".
The protagonist was always "you", not a specific gender.
But in this thread, the only person offended was someone who was offended over the use of "her".
If all I can do is follow the links, how I will get to the good ending of Inside UFO 54-40?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
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How about... because you need to pick one?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
o-Zay!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Remember the movie Big? His huge, genius idea at the end of the movie that blows everyone away is a computerized comic book that lets kids choose their own adventure. He and the woman he slept with (in spite of the fact that he was actually 14... Somehow I don't think that would have flown in "13 Going On 30") claimed it would cost about 18 dollars. I don't know if they meant "per cartridge", and that the actual game system would cost about 1000 dollars, but I've always been pretty offended by the film's implication that this was a successful plan in 1988.
I just watched Big for the first time in like a decade or two, and they totally had this idea in there. Funny to see this coming out in the 21st century instead of hoverboards... I'd love to see that iPad app. Strap one iPad to each foot and go!
That's my point - I don't always have to pick the same one. I am magnanimous. All genders get their chance to be an impersonal pronoun. I don't think it confuses anyone and it removes some lingering gender-bias from the language.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Haven't they had one of these available for a long time. An adventure that only a small percentage can ever make it through to the end. I think they call it "customer service".
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
[citation needed]
Sure, it's "just" wikipedia, and everyone can edit it, but it says that "they" and its derivatives have been used singularly since the 1500s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hir#Singular_.they
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Here is Mario in Choose Your Own Adventure Format:
Choose Your Own Adventure World 1-1
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Well, that's just their opinion.
And that of every other dictionary I have access to here. The only reference I have that even suggests this usage is incorrect is Fowler's The King's English, which comments that it is disputable, but suggests that "his" is preferable in this case. That book was published in 1908. The language we speak now is noticeably different from what was spoken then; singular they and their are now much more common than they were at the time and are now almost universally accepted. I have never met anyone who genuinely disapproves of their usage in this form; it appears to almost always be an affectation.
I agree. And here in the UK, even the public funded BBC will be happy to give national coverage for your Iphone App, even if it's as trivial as just displaying an image. Next time I write an application, I'll be sure to submit a press release to them.
So much for the lie that the BBC don't advertise.
Whoosh. (I’m reasonably certain that “their” opinion at dictionary.com is based on more than one person’s input.)
Anyway, it means both: “their” is semantically plural, but in usage it is used to refer to an indefinite singular individual because no other English word serves the purpose.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/they
usage They, their, them, themselves: English lacks a common-gender third person singular pronoun that can be used to refer to indefinite pronouns (as everyone, anyone, someone). Writers and speakers have supplied this lack by using the plural pronouns. The plural pronouns have also been put to use as pronouns of indefinite number to refer to singular nouns that stand for many persons. The use of they, their, them, and themselves as pronouns of indefinite gender and indefinite number is well established in speech and writing, even in literary and formal contexts. This gives you the option of using the plural pronouns where you think they sound best, and of using the singular pronouns (as he, she, he or she, and their inflected forms) where you think they sound best.
It is ambiguous in some contexts and the complaint raised by deniable is a valid complaint. In most cases where it is ambiguous whether you mean a singular or plural form, I would say that it is more appropriate to use the pronoun “his” instead (as the last bit of that quotation suggests).
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Example, motherfucker, DO YOU SPEAK IT?
After gaining audience with their leader, ask them if they will lend their support.
Is “them” singular, referring to the gender-indefinite leader, or is it plural, referring to the entire group? So which is it, motherfucker? If I meant for you to ask the group and go behind the leader’s back, and you thought I meant to ask the leader, you get your head lopped off for your impudence. If I meant for you to ask the leader and you think I meant to ask the group, the leader finds out and has your head lopped off for your subversion. If you get it right in either case, we’ll assume that our plan was well enough thought out that the results will be fairly certain, at least fairly certain to not result in you losing your head.
Hell, at least referring to the leader as “her” and “she” still makes it pretty obvious that you’re talking about the leader, even if you’re a douchebag who wants to for some reason assume the leader is a woman instead of using the gender-inclusive “him”/“he”/“his”.
I consider myself a non-person and I am offended by your exclusivity. Your discriminatory behaviour is despicable. I demand that “it” be given its rightful place as an impersonal pronoun along with “him”, “her”, and “they”.
I though "you" was plural. Isn't "thou" singular?
I drank what? -- Socrates
I hope you are either joking or not a native English speaker. Sometimes the humor is so dry on Slashdot that I just can't tell.
Ah, apparently it was French TV that screwed things up.
I drank what? -- Socrates