Improbable Island, one of the largest and longest-running online text adventures

https://www.improbableisland.com

by alentred • 2 years ago

231 69 2 years ago

gnabgib• 2 years ago

Was this maybe meant to be a link to the "What even is this website, please help me" in the bottom right? (Which it doesn't seem to be possible to hyperlink to).. as it is this just throws you into.. that mess.

pimlottc• 2 years ago

Throwing you directly into the mess is completely intentional

camel-cdr• 2 years ago

Does anybody know what the total word count is?

blep_• 2 years ago

No.

rykar9• 2 years ago

Hundreds of thousands of words, and that's not counting the fantastic roleplay community and the places that they've built.

Some of which have programming.

Some of THOSE have created miniature games inside of those places, complete with events, character statistics, and a character creator. I've been on this site for ten years and never come close to that level of creative madness, and I will always deeply respect those loveable maniacs.

JohnMakin• 2 years ago

This is cool. I really enjoyed choose-your-own-adventure books when I was a kid a long time ago, part of the fun being that as you were flipping to the page you were supposed to go to, you'd come across wild sections of text you hadn't quite visited, and it became a game to see if you could navigate all possible paths of the book. The really clever ones would have tantalizing pages that were unreachable paths just to frustrate you, or would trap you in infinite loops.

smusamashah2• 2 years ago

It talks about building your own shrine as a player owned place using some drag drop interface but I can not find any more info on that. Not in the wiki or image search on Google.

drewzero12• 2 years ago

From what I can tell 'shrine' is being used metaphorically to describe a player 'Place', and the drag-drop part might be a Place Program? There's not a lot of documentation without jumping in.

I haven't played but I've read way too much about it since following Dan on Masto/Fediverse. Someday if I ever have time and bandwidth again I've really got to get on there.

rykar9• 2 years ago

The wiki is very, very out of date and it's something that's undergoing an overhaul (when Dan can get time to do so).

Player-owned places are fairly straightforward to learn once you're in there, but the drag-and-drop is a reference to the programming aspects of a place. They're mostly conditional things, like being able to display different descriptions for different times of day... but they go all the way up to being able to set up logic chains sufficient to set variables based on past events, displaying different things depending on what room a player came into a given room from... there's a lot of depth to it that I've never mucked with.

howenterprisey4• 2 years ago

I'm sure the game is good, but (not to say it's bad, just haven't had the time yet) the only part I've browsed for a significant period of time so far is the code of conduct, which I think is absolutely amazing and helped form a lot of my thinking around online communities: https://www.improbableisland.com/coc.php

Edit: HN user drewzero1 also linked a long Mastodon thread written by the admin, https://mstdn.social/@ifixcoinops/109354147264054179, which is equally critical reading. I cannot recommend both highly enough.

drewzero12• 2 years ago

A few years ago the admin Dan ("Caveman Joe") wrote a massive thread [1] about what he's learned about online communities, moderation, and dealing with users in general (both good-faith and bad-faith varieties). I thought it was worth a read for anyone thinking about creating or moderating any online community. It felt kind of like a peek behind the scenes of that code of conduct.

There were some hard-earned pearls of wisdom there, and I'll have to read through it again when I have some time.

1: https://mstdn.social/@ifixcoinops/109354147264054179

howenterprisey4• 2 years ago

Yes!! What an amazing thread. That and the CoC above should honestly be read together. I've added a link with credit.

serf• 2 years ago

I'd rather my CoC not try to replace a mental health advocate or psychologist.

'Appendix A' is particularly egregious.

I understand the dark patterns of psychology that an administrator should be on the look-out for; it's another thing to task the player-base with the witch hunt through explanation.

P.S. I think it's noble that you read the CoC before product usage, and I wish more people -- including myself at time -- would do that.

nonethewiser• 2 years ago

Id go further and say the CoC has 0 impact. The first rule by itself is absurdly long. No one is reading that. Its not shaping anything. It’s for the writer.

howenterprisey4• 2 years ago

The CoC explicitly tells you to go see a mental health advocate or psychologist instead of taking it out on the game.

That aside, the general population absolutely must be educated on these behaviors. The admins can't be everywhere at once, and the amount of surveillance to replace players' eyes and ears would have to be enormous and the very definition of a nanny state.

slily• 2 years ago

Support of Gamergate, racial supremacist groups, the redpill/incel movement, or any other hate group - including, and especially, hate groups that have gained political power such as the Donald Trump administration - is a direct challenge to the lives and well-being of other players and will result in a permanent ban.

I don't know man, I don't care about your TDS, this is just eyeroll-worthy. Pure political soapboxing.

hoten2• 2 years ago

Setting boundaries or requirements for a community they manage is different from lecturing unwantedly on politics.

FeepingCreature2• 2 years ago

I mean, it's not particularly surprising that it's a lot easier to manage a community if you just find every political split point, pick a side and then remove the people on the other side.

I think we used to call that sort of thing "gatekeeping"?

jstarfish• 2 years ago

That's a shame. I thought this much was progressive:

Do not roleplay racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise bigoted characters in public-facing or semi-public areas (emphasis mine)

Too good to be true?

hate groups that have gained political power such as the Donald Trump administration

That's not a hate group, that's the other half of the entire country that doesn't toe your party's line.

And it'll probably happen again because this sort of sophistry has made life an insufferable pain in the ass.

Like or hate Bush/Clinton/Obama, nobody was kicking you out of a community because of your political affiliation. I miss the inclusiveness of the 90s.

jl6• 2 years ago

If a community intends to exclude certain political affiliations or classes of people, I’d want to know about it up front.

adamrezich• 2 years ago

they really listed "Gamergate" before "racial supremacist groups" lmao

Cthulhu_4• 2 years ago

No tolerance for intolerance seems like a good rule to have. Eyerolling at it is an immature dismissal of their clearly cut-out boundaries.

klyrs• 2 years ago

Wow, I'm the opposite. I probably sunk triple-digit hours into this game, and never bothered to interact with another soul on it. The code of conduct is great now that I'm reading it.

smusamashah2• 2 years ago

As you have played it, does it have player owned places/shrines which can be built via some drag drop interface? I couldn't find any more info on it except what's there on the About page.

rykar9• 2 years ago

Poke your head into Banter sometime! I'm almost the exact opposite, having barely touched the mechanical side of the game in ages, and I always like to say hi to other players. Especially if they've been around and love the setting!

ddingus• 2 years ago

You are not kidding! I just sent a quick note to CMJ in recognition of what I must call a sustained, exemplary act of community management.

Reading that was gratifying.

That team should feel really good about their work.

DoItToMe81• 2 years ago

The code of conduct immediately made me realize that this place will be cliquey and run by rules lawyers who take delight in making a billion subcategories for the sake of empowering themselves to ban. I've never seen an instance where this was not the case.

Anything that needs to write paragraph after paragraph for what could be summarized in 4 to 8 rules, especially with weird, no doubt completely irrelevant to the game itself "DRUMPF GAMERGATE VACCINE" clauses on top of that, is not something anybody who values their time should involve themselves in.

rtkwe• 2 years ago

Or it's a community that's successfully kept itself alive for a very long time and "simple" rules get interpreted wildly differently so over time you're naturally going to build up at lot of explicit rules around edge cases.

kazinator• 2 years ago

The best post in that thread is the (currently) last one: https://mstdn.social/@GregStolze@mastodon.social/10937670143...

martin82• 2 years ago

A dissertation as CoC. Great. Impossible to read and then keep in your head. In their desperate attempt to be as inclusive as possible, they actually created a framework under which everyone will eventually become guilty of something.

TehCorwiz• 2 years ago

I've never seen this before but I instantly love it! It has real Kingdom of Loathing vibes for me.

hoten2• 2 years ago

KoL really scratched an itch for me for many years. It's too much of a time sink for me these days (I've replaced it with other time sinks...), but the studios newer single player games are quite fun with the same charm!

harimau777• 2 years ago

The game's wiki is amazing! It cleverly manages to avoid excessive spoilers while staying (mostly) useful by mandating that 20% of all content must be lies!

RugnirViking• 2 years ago

thats.... actually incredible? I think more game wikis should strive to something like that. Whole genres of games have been irrevocably changed by omniscience.

its-summertime• 2 years ago

A while back, I had multiple people respond to my support request, with impeccable results, no back and fourth responding to automated messages. Which easily puts the game well above the bar set by many others.

chrisweekly• 2 years ago

amazing.

fermentation• 2 years ago

Some basic searching says this is based on an even older game called Legend of the Green Dragon. Looks kinda cool honestly. Anyone know if the writing is okay?

0xEF• 2 years ago

You can try the game without logging in.

The writing reads like tolerable fanfiction, so it's not stellar, but cringe moments and needless cussing are still present to some degree.

As someone who used to write room descriptions on MUDs, I can say I I remarkably difficult to strike a balance between immersive writing and functional prose that English speaking persons of different comprehension levels can engage with. We also had to be mindful of screen readers for sight-impared players, the idea being keep your descriptions informative and short without being boring.

I'm not a big fan of Impossible Islands writing, but they have my respect for it because it is quite the task to please an audience like that.

rykar9• 2 years ago

I'm heavily biased, having been an avid player of the game for ages. It's got a very distinct style, and I can definitely see how it's changed over the years, but I quite like it. The world that's been built in it is a delightfully quirky and fun one, but the writing also delves into some interesting territory both in darkness and in philosophy.

I'm also somewhat biased because one of the most well-fleshed out stories hits a nerve for me in how it confronts the horror of the loss of one's identity, enough that I can't comfortably read it. I say that in an absolutely positive way, much like a horror movie might be so unnerving that I can't bear to watch the whole thing.

It's generally light-hearted, with some dark humor, odd humor and silly humor, and I highly recommend giving it a go. Meet the community! Discover the setting,! Fight your own tongue, an ambulatory pair of pants, your past self, and a Panthzer (50% jungle panther, 50% Panzer tank, don't ask questions)!

savolai• 2 years ago

Anyone hook this up with a GAN yet to keep it peaceful yet make it visual?

Plus translations.

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

Tried it, didn't like the feel of it.

Text adventures are wildly different from one to another and personal taste. This one didn't grab me.

wly_cdgr• 2 years ago

I really just deeply do not care about the code of conduct but the game seems cool. I mean, the writing is very bad, but the thing's got spirit

nextaccountic2• 2 years ago

Is this a MUD? Can it be accessed through telnet or a MUD client?

gustavorg• 2 years ago

No, it's a text adventure, an RPG, online, in a browser.

rykar9• 2 years ago

It's kind of got MUD energy to it from my understanding, but it's purely browser-based. There's a whole game to it, but the draw for me is the roleplay and the player-built places.

nextaccountic2• 2 years ago

Does it have a map? Like with rooms connected to each other.

I tried a little but didn't find any part where I would go "north", "south" etc

Or there are rooms, but without directions?

NooneAtAll3• 2 years ago

My main complaint - choice buttons extend faaar too far to the right

I'm clicking the website to be sure it's in focus, but keep choosing an action

Improbable Island, one of the largest and longest-running online text adventures

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