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

@intficpics I've just made a bot which allows multiplayer on z-machine games on mastodon (and honk).
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.)

@robryk Hi! It's a nice idea but it seems technically very difficult. I'd need to keep multiple game instances running, one per conversation/thread.

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?

@robryk Yes. This concept is entirely inspired by Club Floyd.

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?

@robryk I'm not sure I really understood that.

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?

@nandalism @robryk I don't know how honk works but mastodon has post visibility options like public, unlisted, friends only and mentioned users only. I think one of those last two would be appropriate for this bot.

@objectinspace @nandalism

That would work for non-public games only. There'd be no way to link anyone else to a post from such a game.

@robryk @nandalism If it @s everyone who posts to a game it would work in mentions-only, but then you'd have to be able to tell it when you're no longer interested. So probably friends only makes the most sense. Maybe a hashtag at the end with the current game so people can mute posts from games they aren't playing?

@objectinspace @nandalism

Mastodon has a feature of muting a thread (for some obscure reason only a thread that you've already participated in).

Note that @ing is a Mastodonism. It's only (mostly?) Mastodon that decides on whom to cc on a post nearly solely based on mentions in the post. It's perfectly fine to cc someone on an ActivityPub object they are not mentioned in at all.

Having a separate Actor (IOW user) for each game would probably solve most of the issues you think of.

@robryk @objectinspace I have since added a tag [hashtag] sandestin to each game message. Maybe that helps?

I tried to follow that hashtag from mastodon but didn't see any messages. Maybe it only works for posts originating in the same mastodon instance?

Can you make use of the new hashtag? For muting or filtering?

@objectinspace if you want to try sending some replies here with those "friends only and mentioned users only" settings? I can examine the underlying activitypub message and try to learn from it. I don't even see those options on my mastodon client.

I have the problem of mapping "mastodon client terminology" to the actual, underlying activitypub message format which I need to send.

Sandestin's pretty spammy on your home feed at the moment. The only advice I've seen to filtering Home is to create a hashtag and follow it, but that doesn't work for me.