Text-based adventures!

Have you ever wanted to create your own text-based adventure game? I recently wrote my own in Python. It's quite primitive. The player can't do much besides collect coins and then buy a useless text dragon, at which point they win the game. I highly recommend Python if you're just starting to learn programming - it's fun and easy! (At first. Then it gets very, very hard. And painful.)

If you want to experiment with a programming language that's dedicated to the creation of text adventures, try Inform. (It's completely free!) From their website: "Inform is a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language. It is a radical reinvention of the way interactive fiction is designed, guided by contemporary work in semantics." Inform's code is written in plain English. It actually parses sentences, so you could write: "The room is in the basement. The room is dark," and Inform will create an object called ' Basement room' with an attribute of being dark. There's a great tutorial on how to create your own game here: http://brasslantern.org/writers/howto/i7tutorial.html

The Language Construction Kit

"This set of webpages (what's a set of webpages? a webchapter?) is intended for anyone who wants to create artificial languages— for a fantasy or an alien world, as a hobby, as an interlanguage. It presents linguistically sound methods for creating naturalistic languages— which can be reversed to create non-naturalistic languages. It suggests further reading for those who want to know more, and shortcuts for those who want to know less.
—Mark Rosenfelder"

Explore the kit here: http://zompist.com/kit.html

Starting the year with a little philosophy...

Where does the meaning of a word come from? Plato believed all things derive their meaning from a metaphysical realm of perfect forms and ideas. Diogenes, a cynic who lived in a barrel, refutes him quite well:

"Plato was discoursing on his theory of ideas and, pointing to the cups on the table before him, said while there are many cups in the world, there is only one `idea' of a cup, and this cupness precedes the existence of all particular cups.
"I can see the cup on the table," interupted Diogenes, "but I can't see the `cupness'".
"That's because you have the eyes to see the cup," said Plato, "but", tapping his head with his forefinger, "you don't have the intellect with which to comprehend `cupness'."
Diogenes walked up to the table, examined a cup and, looking inside, asked, "Is it empty?"
Plato nodded.
"Where is the `emptiness' which precedes this empty cup?" asked Diogenes.
Plato allowed himself a few moments to collect his thoughts, but Diogenes reached over and, tapping Plato's head with his finger, said "I think you will find here is the `emptiness'."