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Coding is a Text Adventure
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Mar 15, 2006 03:16 PM
from the whole-new-levels-of-addiction dept.
from the whole-new-levels-of-addiction dept.
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.
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Restart? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Restart? (Score:5, Funny)
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I can just see it now... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I can just see it now... (Score:5, Funny)
"INSERT INTO Door (Keyhole) VALUES ('KEY') WHERE Door.Locked = 1"
"UPDATE Monster SET Monster.Dead = 1"
"INSERT INTO Inventory (SELECT Loots FROM Monster WHERE Monster.IsDead = 1)"
"UPDATE Princess SET Princess.Saved = 1"
I win! That means...
"SELECT Baby FROM Hero INNER JOIN Princess"
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Re:I can just see it now... (Score:5, Funny)
Am I the only one here that has never seen SQL porn before?
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Re:I can just see it now... (Score:5, Funny)
Just don't do a Cartesian Join, or else you better buy a diaper company.
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Re:I can just see it now... (Score:5, Funny)
(the following contains pornographic material, viewer discretion is advised)
SELECT Baby FROM Hero INNER JOIN Princess ON Hero.Sausage = Princess.Taco
I suppose that wouldn't quite be right, since we all know that sausages do not equal tacos. Well... I suppose some people might be confused.
Maybe it would be better written as
INSERT INTO Princess (Taco) SELECT Sausage FROM Hero WHERE Hero.id = 'me'
This also has the advantage of not producing a Baby result.
Additionally, for those of you who don't have a Princess, you can create one by using the SELECT...INTO statement. But this method suggests transvestite/transgender properties, as explained below.
SELECT Sausage INTO Princess FROM Hero WHERE Hero.id = 'me' (results in Princess having a Sausage, transvestite results)
or
SELECT Sausage AS Taco INTO Princess FROM Hero WHERE Hero.id = 'me' (results in Princess having a Taco, but you're calling your Sausage a Taco, transgender indications)
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Re:I can just see it now... (Score:5, Funny)
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The only game I play is "vi" ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The only game I play is "vi" ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Wonderful (Score:5, Funny)
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.
addictions? (Score:5, Funny)
Hate to break it to you, but heroin and hookers were combined a loooong time ago...
What fun! (Score:5, Funny)
I always knew my job would turn out like this (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I always knew my job would turn out like this (Score:5, Funny)
Code Maze
You are in a maze of twisty little subroutines, all alike.
> N
Conference Hall
You see a pointy haired manager here.
Your torch has been extinguished!
>look
It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a deadline.
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One Small Step (Score:5, Funny)
"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...)
Re:One Small Step (Score:5, Funny)
Well, it's not exactly programming, but there's always:
talk, date, cd, mv, unzip, strip, look, touch, touch, condom, fsck, fsck, more, yes, yes, fcsk, uncondom, condom, more, yes, yes, uptime, gasp, more, more, yes, unmount, make clean, shutdown now
Parent
Novel enhancement to an old idea (Score:5, Informative)
(Mud Shell [everything2.com], now defunct, was featured on Slashdot in 2001.
There's also the New Adventure Shell, based on Doug Gwyn's Advshell [ifarchive.org], and John Cocker's Advsh [ifarchive.org], 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.
Reminds me of an old story.. (Score:5, Funny)
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
Bad design... (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
A Cow Says "MOO!" (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Random rewards (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You are sitting at a desk... (Score:5, Funny)
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
Re:Sounds familiar (Score:5, Interesting)
From a practical standpoint, it makes a lot of coding intuitive and makes "plugins" nearly automatic. For example, objects can look at what is in their "environment" (i.e., what is holding them). If you have an object that calls "insert_foobar()" on every object sitting inside a message board object when someone tries to foobar the board, if you were to take it out of the message board and stick it in a player's inventory, it would try and foobar their inventory when someone foobars the player.
The fact that you can simply pick up and move objects around makes visualizing your tasks so simple. You can even have fun with how people interact with your objects; if you want an object that will perform some actions on someone's player object, for example, you could make it be a bread that they eat. You could have an object that displays information be a firework that you light and launch into the sky. The possibilities are endless.
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Re:How about a simple shell? (Score:4, Insightful)
*insert examples here*
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