Writing IF in things not meant for IF

What the world needs now is IF written entirely in the commit comments of a git repository.

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I was just about to suggest an ARG done entirely with word puzzles in YouTube comments.

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I’m a fan of Carter Sande’s Let’s Explore Geography! Canadian Commodities Trader Simulation Exercise which was made with a tool designed for maths quizzes.

I once played a game run entirely by a discord bot that had inventories & combat & stuff like that, but no narrative, and I’ve always thought it must be very doable (someone must have done it already) to tell an interactive story using a discord bot. Maybe even a cluster of them interacting with each other. The obvious thing would be to use the environment of a server to tell a super immersive social interaction story, but it could be anything. And depending on the commands available & how clear they were, it would probably feel like a parser game. :thinking:

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I just discovered that there have been some “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories written in the BuzzFeed quiz maker:

I would imagine anyone with a community account could create a quiz like this, unlike the branching story format they tried in 2015 that I was looking for originally, which wasn’t available to the public. (They didn’t make very many of those, but I remembered the Game of Thrones one and the Harry Potter one.)

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I saw someone on Tumblr make an interactive fiction in carrd of all things: https://wizard.uwu.ai/ (although I probably shouldn’t be surprised as carrd is just like, a website editor).

Looking at ifdb, I see another carrd game: YOU ARE A MACHINE CORPSE - Details

And I don’t know what systems these are in, but the clickhole clickventures were fun: ClickVentures Archives - ClickHole

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One time while idling at work I considered making a CYOA in Excel with hyperlinks. Basically, “If you choose the right door, go to [AC32]”

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What kind of “job” do you have, exactly? :wink:

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on CYOA, I toyed with the idea of (ab)using the various shell window dialog systems, lone problem, the risk of generating confusion between *dialog (the most used shell dialog interface and dialogc :wink:

but there’s also zenity, whose can’t cause confusion on tool used, albeit needs a *nix/gnome environment… :wink:

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Unknown

You put "job" in quotes like it's imaginary!

I’m a customer service agent who works at home answering emails and phone calls. I’ve hopped projects a couple of times within the company. I’ve monitored live phone queues, done both internal and customer-facing chat support and was the person who wrote process documentation that nobody else had time to do. At the time I was looking at Excel going “I could make a game in this…” I was still an agent but had been tagged to back up the guy whose job it was to manage Client Reporting - I assume because I could write in complete sentences and apparently displayed comprehension to learn other apps in Microsoft Office besides Word. They skilled me up just enough in Excel and Access and PowerPoint to allow the actual Client Services Manager to take an occasional day off. Mostly it was my job to run the reports daily and send emails to client lists and the manager made it as close to “import the data and press the button” whenever possible, but I had to troubleshoot minor issues and had a few of my own ad-hoc agent monitoring and reporting tasks they asked me to devise and handle.

We got very good at it, so I often had a lot of downtime where I was the person reserved in case some issue popped up needed research no one else had time to do. Usually stuff like “which agents tend to linger in the wrap-up queue longer than necessary so they can be coached not to do that” or “can you rip apart this Excel sheet that was designed for service level to divvy up specialized outbound calls fairly between the agents who are staffed today and fix it because it’s not working right”. We even had one weird excel sheet I managed to get working that was a map of workstations and we could copy and paste an obscure-to-read list of employee IDs and phone extensions into it and it would look up employee IDs by name and show who was currently logged in at what workstation so the service level could locate individuals physically wherever they happened to sit down in the building that day.

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This is my favorite instance of technologically perverse IF.

In 2010 there was TWIFcomp:

write a complete game in 140 characters (not including white space).

Adam Thornton’s entry was Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis. Adam’s the author of the cheesy Perl interface for Inform (before the Gnome IDE, it was the only option for Linux users).

Perl hackers find joy in the absurd. There’s a module to encode your script as ASCII Art. Acme::EyeDrops is similar, but without unsightly alphanumeric characters. Acme::Bleach even lets you encode your entire program as whitespace.

Note that the rules stated a limit of 140 characters, excluding whitespace.

Here’s the entry:

#!/usr/bin/perl
open(O,">t");while(<DATA>){s/\t/                /g;($c)=(/^(\ *)$/);print O chr(length($c))};close O;`gzip -dc t|tar xpf -`;system("./a");
__DATA__

And then just some whitespace. 324M of whitespace encoding the whole of a Inform 7 CLI package, an I7 project, and a script to compile and run said project.

To see it in action, you’d would need a VM running a Linux with a kernel < 4.11 (a necessary, but possibly insufficient condition).

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Woah, this is Lovecraftian. XD My brain hurts…

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