Collaborative playing

Playing
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Aside from broadcasting on Twitch as a public kind of event, do people use platforms like Discord, or even Zoom etc, to screen-share and collaborate while playing IF live together?

I think that could be fun, and helpful even as an exercise for initiating people into parser style thinking. (I’m not a great IF player. I’ve lost some of my ability over the years, even as I’ve gotten better at programming, which is frustrating.) But I’ve talked to people in different fandom Discord communities who know something about Zork or point-and-click adventure games and are parser-IF curious. And I’m brainstorming ways to organize a little digital gathering to help people who are probably even less skilled with parser playing than I am get right down into the magic of really immersing in the parser world.

I want to combine screensharing the interpreter UI with reading aloud and… maybe somebody else making AI pictures with MidJourney or something, just for fun, and to increase engagement from people who might not yet be so good at focusing on text for so long.

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Sounds like a cool idea.

ClubFloyd used to play games collaboratively in a MUD:

Not exactly the same thing, since it’s played together with the author, but Clash of the Type-Ins also comes to mind:

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During pandemic lockdowns a university club I was in organised game nights where we played browser games together over Zoom. When screen sharing there’s an option to allow other people to interact and type things (albeit with some lag), so multiple people could all control the game instead of a single person driving. I imagine it could also work for an interpreter

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I’ve thought about putting together a Discord bot similar to Floyd. Most of the parts exist already.

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I’ve used a Floyd-style bot on Discord and Facebook Messenger to collaborate on games over text. Worked great overall!

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…They still do, unless they stopped in 2025 and nobody told me. I missed some recent sessions because of life problems.

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In case it’s relevant–a while back, someone made a bot to play IF on Slack:

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Jacq’s ClubFloyd transcripts stop after 2023, but of course they could have kept playing and stopped archiving the transcripts there.

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Jacq is always a number of months behind in posting transcripts.

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Yeah they had a transcript backlog that hadn’t been uploaded yet when I was attending. 99.99% sure they’re still active.

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I love this idea and would love to see it come to fruition.

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What was the bot? I know xyzzy bot existed and I used that before, but they seemed to have stopped maintaining it once discord switched to slash commands. Maybe that’s changed since I checked last tho

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It was a custom one I wrote called Hyaline. I forget if I open-sourced it or not; if not, I should toss it on Bitbucket sometime.

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I also wrote a Discord bot at one point, but it hasn’t been updated in a long time and doesn’t work any more.

Last time I checked (i.e. years ago), the terms of use of Discord technically disallowed (at least from my understanding) this kind of bot because it’s sending text that doesn’t belong to you, so technically you would only be allowed to play games whose licence allows it (like Creative Commons).

Anyway, I guess most authors wouldn’t care, but still.

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I seem to recall someone (possibly @Pinkunz) once mentioning a site for collaborative IF play being in development. This was some time ago, but does anyone know anything about this and its project status?

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A Discord bot (thread) is available. I still haven’t decided whether or how to keep it running permanently, though.

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Not sure it was on Discord, but great work! Can’t be any help with the how, but if you need motivation both this thread and my own query do show there’s interest in and appreciation for these projects.

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