Alright, getting things ready for an interactive fiction club! If folks are interested, I think we can start December off with a classic infocom game, Planetfall. I've got a discord up & running, which folks can join, here https://discord.gg/cf69sWjEE5
It's not mandatory, but if you are interested, you can also just join the discussion here on Mastadon with the hashtag #ifclub The club will rotate each month between a classic text adventure snd a more modern interactive fiction
#infocom #infocomodon
If you follow the bot here @sandestin you will receive a welcome message.
Reply to the welcome message to play the game.
(See screenshot attached)
@nandalism @intficpics @sandestin
Can you branch off by replying for a second time to a previous response of the bot?
(I had a bot that allowed for that in the short time Wave was a thing and it IMO was much nicer than standard UNDO constructs.)
In fact I'd probably have to checkpoint every action since it could later be a branch point... at any time in the future.
That's way too much complexity for me, sorry.
You can save/restore tho (see /help).
The availability of undo depends on the actual game being played. I guess some of the newer ones have the feature but zork and planetfall don't?
This is intended for group play rather than having a separate game instance for each player.
It's more intended that people gather as a group to play a single game instance together.
@nandalism Huh, so you don't checkpoint at every post? That's surprising; I would expect it to be way easier to do so (otherwise the synchronisation of the current state of the game between what's published on fedi and the internal state is much harder).
> It's more intended that people gather as a group to play a single game instance together.
+1. Are you aware of Club Floyd? (They do that over a text MUD.)
Is the source for the bot available somewhere?
The source is not available for the moment. However, it is based heavily on Honk (for the activitypub part) and uses Dumb Frotz for the Z-machine part.
@nandalism Also, do you have any ideas on how to integrate the commentary track?
I must admit that how/when mastodon/honk decide to publish/show messages and where is a bit of a mystery to me. Though I am trying to learn more about it.
I really want to avoid spamming people who subscribe to sandestin but at the same time keep them up to date on the actions of other players.
I've tried various combinations of to/cc and /followers but want to avoid activitystreams#Public since that seems very noisy.
There should also be a way to communicate among players without hitting sandestin. I thought that would be possible by posting to the thread/conversation but now I'm no longer sure.
Do you have any suggestions?
Sadly, fedi doesn't have a concept of following a thread (the same issue that mailing lists have, because it's modelled after them). If it had, that would be an obvious fit for following a game. Given that it doesn't, it might be useful to have a bot farm instead of a bot and create a new bot every time a new game is started. (I expect that honk's half-support for multiple users might be enough for that.)
Regarding players messaging each other _but not the bot_: there are two issues with that. First is that unless you are one of the players you can't feasibly find those messages, so public commentary track is not a thing. Secondly, Mastodon's (not fedi's) semantics around who-a-reply-is-cc'd-to are weird and I still don't understand them well, so I expect that players will not do that correctly most of the time.
> I really want to avoid spamming people who subscribe to sandestin but at the same time keep them up to date on the actions of other players.
I'm somewhat confused: what do you want them to see/not see in their inboxes?
> I must admit that how/when mastodon/honk decide to publish/show messages and where is a bit of a mystery to me.
Mastodon is confusing. If you speak in APub terms, then (if the source server doesn't lie -- the source server is the only guardian of the relationship between to/cc/bcc and where the message is actually sent):
- messages go to inboxes of all users who are in to/cc/bcc and end up in their feeds,
- messages addressed to Public go to public instance-wide and wider timelines (Mastodon terminology: they are not unlisted),
- messages addressed at whatever-the-name-is-for-followers-outbox get the moral equivalent of being sent to all followers inboxes.
What you can see on the public timeline _of the user_ on their local instance is instance-specific, on their timeline on a remote instance I don't know.
