That’s the best idea I’ve seen here in quite a while!
here’s a nice little thought:
the thought of a text game already shuns many people away. The thought of interfacing with a game by typing is laughable. And now we’re ready to tell people that along with brushing up their reading and writing skills they should also learn Esperanto to play text games.
I don’t know, but I have a feeling button mashing will not go away by our elitist efforts
SirNigel: I love how passionate you are about Esperanto! It’s awesome when you can have a passion and share that passion with others. Unfortunately my knowledge of the language is nil, but I wish you the best of luck making a game!
Every title does not have to appeal to everybody; works potentially gain a stronger voice when they don’t have mass appeal. Where titles are targeted is a call for individual authors.
Who wants button mashing to go away? Big enough world for everybody.
Text-games themselves are not inherently valuable. Don’t prioritise the medium above the works.
Aaaahhhh… hmmmm… er… I kinda think they are, but if that’s just me, that’s ok. Text games are about manipulating objects in a fictional (or not) representation of real world, unhindered by a specific command set and encouraging you to experiment.
And then there are the text games that are about stories, and the ones that are not about manipulating objects, and the ones that are not about the real world, etc etc etc, I know all that - but the text game as we know it and as we’re discussing, archetipally, fits the description.
I do think that a medium like this is inherently very valuable indeed, as it’s a very, very fertile ground for tons of stuff, allowing for bland simplicity or multi-layered complexity. Just as I think a written story, be it short story, novella or novel, or even non-fiction, is inherently a very valuable meduim. Just as I think, for very different reasons, that cinema is a very valuable medium.
Do I think text games are more inherently valuable than other mediums? Nah, that depends on the games. But, ah, I do see the medium as inherently valuable.
I think our thinking is probably closer that it appears - maybe I’m splitting hairs but I think it an important distinction to make.
Saying the medium is valuable I see as a convenience term for the summation of value of the works enabled by that medium.
I notice you justified the value of text-games by using the categories of games (within which are examples of works) That’s my point; without reference to works (actual or potential) the media itself is nothing.
A thought exercise; if I create one thousand new mediums but none of them have, or will have any works (including demos), are any of those mediums inherently valuable? No. Never realised creative potential allowed in those mediums is not valuable.
Why do I split this hair? Because we’re here on a forum themed around a medium and it’d like to avoid misplacing value in the medium as opposed to seeing the medium as a means to achieving valuable works.
The esperanto looks like spanish to me, so the Spanish template may suit better.
Thanks for the replies!
I’ve been away for some time and hadn’t read the updates.
Here are my thoughts on what has been said.
No one is telling people of the world to learn Esperanto to play text games. Text games are and will continue to be written in English and other people’s native languages as well. What I suggested is using Esperanto as tool for effective and deep creative writing for those who want their game to reach the world and not be confined to their own community and without needing to use English and risk creating a poorly-written text by native standards.
Furthermore, we would be including the Esperanto community which lacks good games and since most Esperantists love to read and write, it could turn out to be quite a nice niche. It’s not like any IF writer is making fortunes, and if you write something in English, it is cast in a sea with all the rest (good, genius and complete garbage all mixed up). However in Esperanto you would be reaching people from all over the world who will be intrigued to play a text adventure in the language they love, while also discovering the delicious freedom the languages gives you.
Maybe, if someday in a near or far future Esperanto big as it was supposed to be, it will be even more awesome, but SOMEONE needs to start, right? I’ll do it anyway, I just wanted to tell what a great idea it could be to others. Many people don’t feel really free to write in their native language (like myself), and don’t want to turn to English, as good as their English might be, just to reach others. We need a more “equal” environment, and Esperanto is perfect for that.
I’ve always defended that Esperanto will only truly “catch on” when smaller communities and countries start to use it for more serious stuff, then other countries and communities will see its value. If IF in Esperanto is successful, more people will want to write it and more people will learn the language, and other games will like the idea.
Thanks, I appreciate it!
You should try it though! Learn it through Kurso.com.br or Lernu.net 
esperanto has similarities with all romance languages (Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, French, Romanian) as well as Germanic and Slavic. Nevertheless, the structure is quite unique and Spanish lacks cases and other things that I mentioned that need a special parser.
I’ve received a personal message telling about this engine:
They claim to support Esperanto, but I’ll download it and see if the characters are fully supported. As I mentioned, if it requires the text to be written with X’s or H’s for the special characters, it is not good enough for a decent game.
I will surely look into it though!
So, I took a look at the Aetheria game engine!
It is in Java, so it works on my mac and it appears to accept full Esperanto text. It has Esperanto translations of all buttons and menus (though some of the translation is incorrect). It has a nice “designer program” where you can create the maps and items and magic and so on, though I haven’t learned the ropes yet.
The issue is with the documentation. The manual is completely in Spanish and the English translation is barely done. There is no Esperanto translation that I found.
I am a native speaker of Portuguese, which is really close to Spanish, but that doesn’t mean I can follow all of it, so it can take quite a while until I learn how this works, but it’s worth a shot.
I don’t have time to fully try it now, but as soon as I have something I will share it.
I just hope someone else in this forum knows or learns Esperanto to playtest it! hahaahah
Your Portuguese too?
Blimey. There’s steadily getting to be more of us than I thought.
sounds like contradiction
you do have a point there
still, the way I’m seeing this is like this: niche language nut turns to niche game genre nuts for mutual help with benefits. And my gut feeling is that only one niche will remain.
Btw, do you happen to ever have used povray?
I think he’s from Esperando 
Creator of the Aetheria Game Engine here. Thanks for looking at it!
Yes, the system is written to handle all the texts in Unicode, so it should handle all Esperanto characters without problems.
The Esperanto translation of the system was made by a person who had been studying Esperanto for like one year (although I think he did get expert advice when he had doubts) so it’s normal that there are some mistakes. They can be fixed though, both in a per-game basis (you can always define your own messages that override the default messags, individually or collectively) or in general in the official distribution. In caad.es/aetheria/doc/doku.ph … u_lenguaje there is a localization guide (one of the few things in the documentation that are in English!) describing where each language file (containing UI elements, default messages, etc.) resides. If you want to fix the mistakes in any of the files and send it back to me, I will put it in the official distribution.
The documentation being Spanish-only is the major roadblock for adoption of AGE by non-Spanish-speaking users, I’m aware of that… unfortunately, there’s a lot of documentation and I don’t have the time and will to translate it all into English. If anyone wants to collaborate by translating even a small piece of it here and there, just ask me for an account in the documentation wiki. Any step towards the goal is better than nothing (and also, if there were people collaborating, I’d personally be more motivated to translate too - the thing is, right now, I see it as a daunting task for one person alone).
If you have a try at building games with the system even with the Spanish documentation hurdle, know that you can always drop by the IRC channels #aetheria or caad at irc.chathispano.com and ask if you have any doubts - I know several of us speak English, one of us speaks Esperanto, and as a Galician I can read Portuguese 
- and if there’s no one there, you can also ask at the AGE forum ( foro.caad.es/viewforum.php?f=31 ) and if I’m not unusually busy, I should answer in no more than 24 hours.
Hey Al-Khwarizmi!
Thanks for replying!
Sorry for the extra late reply! I’ve been swamped in translation jobs and didn’t manage to even access the forum!
It’s such a great privilege to be able to talk directly to the engine’s creator!
I see, and I’m willing to take a shot at working out the problems and making this work, even though I cannot guarantee a specific date for that, for I am swamped in my conservatory studies now as well (compensating for the time I almost didn’t study because of the translations…)
And to know that all Esperanto characters would be usable is VERY good news. What about grammar? Does the engine recognize and expects the user to input sentences with the accusative ending for direct objects? If you found an apple “pomo”, you would have to write “manĝi pomon” (eat apple), with the extra “N” at the end due to the word being a direct object. If the engine can’t understand that, it would be very hard to be properly playable. It would also be nice if it could understand special Esperanto structures, such as Adverb+Accusative to indicate direction: Hejmo (home), Hejme (‘homely’ = at home), Hejmen (to home) so one should be able to write “reveni hejmen” (return home), since it is a very common form, etc.
If not, is there an easy way for adding that sort of thing (I’m not programming-savvy, though I’d like to learn more in the future).
I really hope you will read this, even though it’s been so long! If not, I’ll send you a private message.
No problem, real life comes first I’m glad that you are still interested in the Aetheria Game Engine.
I think there should be no problems with the grammatical issues you mention. AGE takes a robust approach to parsing (as opposed to a strict definition of grammar) which makes it quite flexible.
In the case of nouns, for each entity (item, character, etc.) in a game, the programmer separately defines “display names” and “reference names”. A display name is the name which is shown to the player, and a reference name is a name by which the player can refer to the entity. Both sets of names can coincide or not.
In the example of an apple, you can define its display name as “pomo” (so that for example when you “look”, the game will print the Esperanto equivalent of “A pomo is here”); and define “pomon” as reference name so that the players can type “manĝi pomon”. In addition, you would need to take care of default messages so that the correct case is shown in each default message, but since the Esperanto accusative is always regular and formed by adding “n”, this is doable by just adding the letter “n” to messages where it’s needed. For other languages where declensions are less regular, an extra bit of programming will be needed (and I’ll be willing to do it when someone wants to translate to such a language) but for Esperanto it’s not necessary.
Regarding the “reveni hejmen” example, you would just define “hejmen” as the command name associated to the path that returns home in your game. Similarly to the previous case, AGE does not need to know explicitly that that word is an accusative - it just needs to know that if you type a movement verb followed by “hejmen”, it refers to home, and that is enough for it to work. It would be perfectly possible (and easy) to code a preprocessing routine -either in a per-game basis or in the engine- to add or remove the “n”, but it wouldn’t be necessary.
There actually is an IF in Esparanto.
ifwiki.org/index.php/Squeaky_on_the_Moon
it was translated as “Fajfeta sur la Luno”.
The Inform 6 libraries got translated into Lojban, but the only game that got translated was Adventure.