On Text Adventures and Rabbit Holes…

• tags: text-adventures, scripting •

Last week I made a post about how I’m contemplating the intersection of content and logic. Well, I really went down a rabbit hole on this one…

Below is an 14-minute video of a text adventure (shades of “Zork”) that I wrote in Optimizely’s upcoming SaaS CMS. It was a silly weekend project, but it helped me explore some ideas about how logic and content relate.

For instance –

  • When is logic inextricable from content, and how should we manage it?

  • How much logical processing can we expect our editors to understand?

  • How much value is there in building a UI rather than just using “raw” code?

  • How do we distill logic down to its absolute core operations for a specific situation?

I hope you find this interesting. There are no hard-and-fast answers here, just a lot of exploration and more questions. As with anything …it depends.

I find this subject endlessly fascinating. I’ll be posting more about this in the future.

(PS: this post goes out to my childhood friend Joe Markert, with whom I spent way too much time playing games just like this…)

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