Interactive Fiction Games
These books sold over 250 Million copies between 1979-1998
This quarter at UC San Diego, three electrical engineering students are working on Playpower for their senior design project. They come into the Social Movement Laboratory at Calit2 every Tuesday and Thursday from 10am-1pm, so if you want to stop by and see some serious hardware hacking, please do!
They are working on producing a new game cartridge that will feature interactive fiction games, in the style of choose-your-own-adventure stories or (eventually) Zork. We love interactive fiction (Jeremy actually did his PhD on the subject), and believe that it is a great way to encourage kids to read. We are creating a “framework” for these text-based games that will enable contributions from around the world to be manufactured into new cartridges, in any language!
By the way, the $10 computer currently supports Mandarin, but we’re looking for someone to try to create a tile-set to support Hindi/Marati/etc.