A few more “text-based virtual realities” (maybe?), for Matt (👋):
- Orteil’s Nested (aka No Man’s Outliner)
- idle games in general, and A Dark Room in particular
- Stephanie Strickland et al’s Vniverse (whose standalone Shockwave version from twelve years ago still – shockingly! – runs on my mid–2015 MacBook Pro running 10.14.6)
- Twine again, but Porpentine’s HIGH END CUSTOMIZABLE SAUNA EXPERIENCE is a whole world from a handful of neon pink and white (which I’ve written about before)
- student-teacher-fiction-wiki-thing Axel and Alice (links to archived version), which I first saw (in HyperCard stack form?) around 1999 and which lodged something somewhere deep in my brain
Further afield…
- I wonder whether lore-heavy ASCII-art roguelikes count? (No)
- Fallen London?
- Josh Allen’s Chokeville in its earlier days – it’s been promising to be a book for a while now, but earlier (2007, 2011) it was weirder link-y wiki-ish storyblog thing (or was it? Revisiting it now it seems more straightforwardly stories than I remember…)
- There’s… something in Tracery’s little self-contained grammarworlds – for each corpus a particular written sensibility filtered through the random number generator, infusing the output with a certain flavour?
Maybe serious (“serious”) readers just wanna play videogames but don’t know how? 😜
Hm.
