As a busy futurist, I have not much time to wax nostalgic, but inspired by a conversation about text-based online occult activities and communities, earlier today at the Seattle Chaos Magic meetup, tonight I am watching Hackers and remembering some of the things that steered me to this place…
- Aquarius and TRS-80 home computers
- Micro Adventure and Arcade Adventures books series
- text adventure games
- Shadowrun
- Telnet and computerized bulletin board systems
- Wired magazine 2.05
- Burn:Cycle
- 2600: The Hacker Quarterly (to which I maintain a lifetime subscription)
The Micro Adventure books, e.g., informed my ideas about writing grimoires that include source code for programs that augment the grimoires’ texts.
I’ve been thinking about text adventure games lately too. I played a lot of the Zork games in my high school years, and after that have done a /lot/ of role-playing in text environments on MUCKs.
Been lately looking back into a language called Inform 7, which is a natural parser for creating text adventures. Makes me wonder about creating a text environment like that for a ritual space. :-}
Routledge published a book titled Cyberhenge that academically covers text-based rituals popular in the 80s and 90s. I am hoping that gestural interfaces such as Wiimote and Kinect will involve more of the body in online/telepresent ritual activities, but I do keep a fondness for text interaction, and I suppose it remains especially well suited to Lovecraftian or other themes that are difficult or impossible to communicate visually — colors out of space and such.
I remember playing text games like Bedlam on the computer, and of course a plethora of choose-you-own adventure books, some with hacking themes.
I never got so much into Shadowrun as a kiind of knock off of that game, Dark Conspiracy.