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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
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"
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).
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.
'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.
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.
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
Choice? Oh man. Steve Jobs isn't going to like this.
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.