You can now travel the world via Wikipedia articles!
This has been made possible by developer Kevan Davis, who programmed a text-based RPG-like adventure game through Wikipedia’s API.
You simply start on a location and read a short description of that place. Then, you can move to another location by typing the direction you want to go (North, South, Northwest, etc). You can virtually start from any location in the world, as long as there’s an Wikipedia article about it.
The game is still under development, so a few locations may not be available, but there are more than enough to mess around with. Simply type "go to" followed by the place you want to go and starting exploring from there, or pick one of the suggested locations on the home page to start playing.
For example, from the London Stone, you can go northwest to the Museum of London, then go southwest to Postman’s Park, and so on.
You can also talk to certain people. To see a really cool example of this, try going to Sherwood Forest and talking to Robin Hood… it's fun to try talking to any person you find in your travels.
Here are some useful commands:
- focus = shows non-pixelated image of your location
- examine, ex, or x = examine something you found interesting
- look = repeats the description of your location
- go to = jumps to a specific article (e.g. “go to Boston”)
- take = allows you to grab and keep an item in your inventory
- i = opens your inventory
- share = shares the current article on social media
- talk to = allows you to talk to certain people
- wiki = opens the full Wikipedia article of your location on a new tab
- help = shows all commands
More on text-based adventures
Text-based adventure games become very popular in the 80s. 3D and even 2D games still struggled to create complex and immersive adventures, instead focusing more on gameplay elements to make it fun to play.
These text-adventures, while not as interesting to look at, offered more varied immersive options, such as branching paths, more freedom of choice, and immersive story-telling - which is why they were commonly associated with fantasy and sci-fim. They were sometimes refered to as interactive fiction.
Nowadays, while less common, text-adventure gamesa are still beloved by gaming afficionados and programmers - for the latter, programming a short interactive fiction story is a great way to test programming skills in a short period of time.
One of the most influentional examples of a virtual world is the text-based MUD1 - often referred to as the first MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game).
Other text-based adventure games you can play on your browser or download right now:
Have fun!
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