April 2, 2010
Not too long ago I bought a documentary called Get Lamp on the history of text-based adventure games like Zork, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and (a favorite of mine due to its "adult mode") The Leather Goddesses of Phobos. It comes out in late April or early May.
That got me thinking about the games' dead-tree cousins, the choose-your-own-adventure books. I only had a few back when I was a kid; two that stick in my mind were one in which you are a time traveler trying to find and photograph an archeopteryx, and another in which one of the bad ends results in you being turned into a robot.
Thanks to the magic of Amazon.com, I have a new (to me) copy of Time Machine 2: Search for Dinosaurs. Between a couple decades of learning about dinosaurs for no other reason than dinosaurs are cool and remembering some of the situations from reading when I was a kid, it's a bit easier to complete this time around.
But it got me thinking about those text games and their multi-player descendants, MUDs (multi-user dungeons). In an effort to get people writing games instead of learning programming languages like C, there are several "langauges" like LPC that will let a non-programmer build a world map, create object and player classes, and determine the rules of how the game world operates. It gave me an idea.
It should be simple enough to write up a PHP engine to let a user upload a bunch of HTML files (one per page sequence, named for the page they began on) and a set of interactions that would let a web user traverse the book using web forms or AJAX. In other words, after ran initial outlay of effort, I'd have the ability to turn any existing book (or one I wrote myself if I had any talent to do so) into an interactive web page.
Of course, this would violate the living hell out of Bantam's copyright, and any residual rights held by the author and illustrators, but given that the book has been out of print for a couple decades and is thus not making any more money for anyone involved I don't foresee it being a big problem. The bigger problem is my utter inability to finish my non-work programming projects.
