I ran into this:
The idea seems to be a tablet that plays choice-based games. “Ink” as in “e-ink”, not Ink the language.
Very prototype so far. The web site is mostly concept snapshots, not anything you can play.
I could level a lot of criticisms, but the project is in such an early state that it feels mean. They mostly boil down to “The creator doesn’t seem to have much awareness of the current state of the field”.
Anyway, I figured I’d mention it.
He’s got “Zork V” apparently.
I will say that as a migraine sufferer, I love e-ink and the idea of choice-based games that are optimized for that kind of display is very appealing. I’d much prefer to be able to play them on the e-ink tablet I already have, though.
This seems broadly possible… I wonder if there’s any proof of concept out there?
Ink (the language) already has ebook output (or at least it used to?), though anything with state ends up resulting in a massive file.
Yeah, I’ve hand-coded ebook footnotes/indices myself, so I’m pretty familiar with how internal links work in an epub; a traditional CYOA with no state-tracking in that format is absolutely doable. I don’t know if it’s been done, although it seems like someone ought to have tried it by now.
But when I mentioned wanting to be able to play things on my existing device, I wasn’t thinking of wanting things in epub format; like most third-party e-ink devices, mine runs Android, so theoretically, I can play anything on it that you could play on an Android phone. The issue is that most choice-based IF has formatting that wouldn’t play nicely with an e-ink display. So if this guy’s line of gamebooks were (planned to be) playable on other devices, I might check them out, but buying a whole additional device is something else again.
Yeah I like the idea of IF on eink, but buying a whole new device that can (presumably) only play proprietary games is a hard sell.
I played Sorcery! 2 on my Android ereader as an experiment, it mostly worked well (as in, the text and UI was clear to read, everything worked without lag) except that it drained the battery in 4 hours. For reference I can usually get 20ish hours of screen-on time with normal reading.
I believe it’s possible to create a hypertext e-book and publish as EPUB which I think can be viewed on any reading device, including those with e-ink. You couldn’t create a very complicated story, but at minimum something on par with Choose Your Own Adventure™.
So he managed to press Microsoft for a contract to develop Zork V. Well, if MS believes in that guy, why shouldn’t I?
(Oh, it’s the internet. Almost forgot the irony tags. Here they are: <irony></irony>.)
I’m sure he didn’t.
According to your blog, zork isn’t trademarked so if still true, unless the game infringes copyright, he’d be ok.
Like the game could be about spanners on mars. Or something. 
There’s something very attractive about those electronic ink displays for IF. It might be the superior way to present typical interactive fiction.
I’ve got to agree. New hardware, new story format, new development tools, and new content that doesn’t take advantage of the 3413 parser and 3359 choice games already out there—that’s a sisyphean endeavor. I wish him luck.
I do like the screen design though. Mimics something I came up with back in 2022 for mobile parser interactive fiction.
+1 to that. With how much easier (relatively of course) it is now to prototype and release hardware I wonder if a lot more of these bespoke devices will be coming down the pike. You already see it with electronic music instruments and all the PDA-y kinds of things on Crowd Supply.
I wonder if this is more the direction to think about. not just epubs, but formatting specifically for low refresh, e-ink displays, interaction methods, and possibly common aspect ratios.
(are there guides already out there for this for normal webpages and book formats? 
a twine template for it would be interesting…)
Amazon e-Ink Kindles briefly had an app store (for “Kindle Active Content”) and Choice of Games made games for it. It was pretty great! But then they shut down their app store, and apparently there are no plans to continue it.
(Now, they have an Amazon Appstore for Android that only works with their color backlit Amazon Fire tablets. We make apps for that, too, but they’re no better or worse than any other Android tablet.)
If you want something that can play IF today, I’ve heard decent things about Onyx Boox. It’s an eInk Android tablet; you can install Android apps on it. Supposedly Choice of Games works pretty well on it out-of-the-box.
I can vouch for the general decentness of the Onyx Boox; that’s what I have. I’m not a big Choice of Games player, though, so I haven’t tried any of those games on it.
I’ve also read about a Z-Machine interpreter called Folly that runs on Remarkable 2 Linux tablets and allows handwritten input of parser commands (I believe it also requires installation of the Toltec package manager, but don’t quote me).
The Remarkable 2 tablet is a nice piece of hardware and I’ve always wanted to try Folly out but haven’t made the time to do so yet.
I never heard of Onxy Boox but I love the Boox Palma 2’s form factor (sometimes a tablet is just too much). I wish Remarkable came out with a design like that.
Parchment used to run on the e-ink Kindle’s browser, not well, but it would technically work. But Parchment now requires a browser that is much more modern than what those Kindles supported.
