"I am a huge fan of Star Wars," opines an article from the gaming Aftermath. "As every Star Wars fan knows, being a Star Wars fan means you hate Star Wars as much as you love it."

But fortunately there's Going Rogue and Galactic — two tabletop games "inspired" by the Star Wars universe (which just successfully crowdfunded a printed illustrated hardcover edition). They're described as "war among the stars" role-playing games, where members of The Liberation dedicate their lives to the war against The Mandate — "rebels, soldiers, spies, and criminals, or perhaps someone who simply picked up and blaster and said 'enough is enough.'"

The article notes that Going Rogue was a way for the game's designer to work out their issues with Star Wars: "You can re-skin Going Rogue to be all the original stuff [from Star Wars]. I prefer, at this point, to play it not in canon Star Wars," Levine said. "And also, there are things I hate about canon Star Wars. I think it sucks that the Jedi are child kidnapping, sexless acetics!" In particular Going Rogue is a remix of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which depicts the lives of a group of rebel agents who give their lives for the rebellion before the original trilogy. "I love Rogue One and I hate Rogue One," Levine said...

But Going Rogue aims to do more than just allow players to "fix" Star Wars's narrative problems. It also allows players to explore this narrative of rebellion without having to interface with an evil entertainment empire: Disney... Going Rogue is an opportunity for Star Wars fans to make the story of Star Wars their own, including making it more in league with their own politics by taking Disney out of it. "Something I like about tabletop role playing and adaptational tabletop role playing is it says, 'Actually, fuck them. They don't get to own this thing,'" Levine said. "We can't fully divest from the connection to Star Wars. Obviously, we are downstream of it in certain ways. But we are also trying to say, fuck [Disney's] ownership of this thing that you love."
Aftermath adds that the game Going Rogue "intrigued me specifically because it was inspired by Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Andor — in particular, Going Rogue has a mechanic baked into the game where your character is more or less guaranteed to go out in a blaze of glory for the cause." [The game's designer says] "I wanted to design the game in a way that, as your character realized that they were willing to voluntarily sacrifice their life for this, you were narratively guaranteed by the mechanics that that sacrifice was worth it. You get to see, after they die, how it transforms the galaxy. I wanted you to get that feeling because you don't get that certainty in real life." They didn't make this game to convince anyone to become a socialist, but instead to create an emotional tool that serves as a mirror for the players' own feelings about what it means to devote your life to a political cause.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Wizards of the Coast has released the System Reference Document, the heart of the three core rule books that constitute Dungeons & Dragons' 2024 gameplay, under a Creative Commons license. This means the company cannot alter the deal further, like it almost did in early 2023, leading to considerable pushback and, eventually, a retreat. It was a long quest, but the lawful good party has earned some long-term rewards, including a new, similarly licensed reference book. [...] Version 5.2 of the SRD, all 360-plus pages of it, has now been released under the same Creative Commons license. The major change is that it includes more 2024 5th edition (i.e., D&D One) rules and content, while version 5.1 focused on 2014 rules. Legally, you can now design and publish campaigns under the 2024 5th edition rule set. More importantly, more aspects of the newest D&D rule books are available under a free license:

- "Rhythm of Play" and "Exploration" documentation
- More character origins and backgrounds, including criminal, sage, soldier, and the goliath and orc species.
- 16 feats, including archery, great weapon fighting, and seven boons
- Five bits of equipment, 20 spells, 15 magic items, and 17 monsters, including the hippopotamus

There are some aspects of D&D you still can't really touch without bumping up against copyrights. Certain monsters from the Monster Manual, like the Kraken, are in the public domain, but their specific stats in the D&D rulebook are copyrighted. Iconic creatures and species like the Beholder, Displacer Beast, Illithid, Githyanki, Yuan-Ti, and others remain the property of WotC (and thereby Hasbro). As a creator, you'll still need to do some History (or is it Arcana?) checks before you publish and sell.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: World of Warcraft Classic's Hardcore mode has set itself apart from the average MMO experience simply by making character death permanent across the entire in-game realm. For years, Blizzard has not allowed any appeals or rollbacks for these Hardcore mode character deaths, even when such deaths came as the direct result of a server disconnection or gameplay bug. Now, Blizzard says it's modifying that policy somewhat in response to a series of "unprecedented distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks" undertaken "with the singular goal of disrupting players' experiences." The World of Warcraft developer says it may now resurrect Classic Hardcore characters "at our sole discretion" when those deaths come "in a mass event which we deem inconsistent with the integrity of the game." WoW's Classic Hardcore made it a hotspot for streamers, especially members of the OnlyFangs Guild, who embraced the challenge that one mistake could end a character's run. However, as Ars Technica reports, a series of DDOS attacks timed with their major livestreamed raids led to character deaths and widespread frustration, prompting streamer sodapoppin to declare the guild's end.

Blizzard responded by updating its Hardcore policy to resurrect characters lost specifically to DDOS attacks. "Recently, we have experienced unprecedented distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks that impacted many Blizzard game services, including Hardcore realms, with the singular goal of disrupting players' experiences," WoW Classic Associate Production Director Clay Stone wrote in a public message. "As we continue our work to further strengthen the resilience of WoW realms and our rapid response time, we're taking steps to resurrect player-characters that were lost as a result of these attacks."

Valve removed the game PirateFi from Steam after discovering it was laced with the Vidar infostealer malware, designed to steal sensitive user data such as passwords, cookies, cryptocurrency wallets, and more. TechCrunch reports: Marius Genheimer, a researcher who analyzed the malware and works at SECUINFRA Falcon Team, told TechCrunch that judging by the command and control servers associated with the malware and its configuration, "we suspect that PirateFi was just one of multiple tactics used to distribute Vidar payloads en masse." "It is highly likely that it never was a legitimate, running game that was altered after first publication," said Genheimer. In other words, PirateFi was designed to spread malware.

Genheimer and colleagues also found that PirateFi was built by modifying an existing game template called Easy Survival RPG, which bills itself as a game-making app that "gives you everything you need to develop your own singleplayer or multiplayer" game. The game maker costs between $399 and $1,099 to license. This explains how the hackers were able to ship a functioning video game with their malware with little effort.

According to Genheimer, the Vidar infostealing malware is capable of stealing and exfiltrating several types of data from the computers it infects, including: passwords from the web browser autofill feature, session cookies that can be used to log in as someone without needing their password, web browser history, cryptocurrency wallet details, screenshots, and two-factor codes from certain token generators, as well as other files on the person's computer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Rolling Stone: Sun pours through the lush foliage of a jungle, bleaching the pale limestone as a rotting man stands in the center of an otherwise empty arena, his yellow eyes leering from beneath a fringe of limp, blonde hair. Positioned around the edge are a hundred bodies, Orcs and Trolls and bipedal oxen shouting, demanding, the death of the dishonorable. Their voices swell into a cacophony of noise before one rings out above the rest, howling, 'Kill the cheater and you'll get 20 gold!' There is silence, and then another frenzy. As I watch, eyes fixed on the dim glow of a laptop screen, I think of the colosseum in Rome -- sweat running down the muscled arms of battle-tested gladiators, the crowd cheering for blood.

This might sound like a moment pulled from a high fantasy drama made for prestige TV, but this is World of Warcraft, a now 20-year old online RPG. Instead of actors parading in front of green screens, this story's cast are streamers that occupy a virtual world. Tensions are high not because they're scripted, but because in World of Warcraft's Hardcore mode, death is permanent. Dejected, though acknowledging the transgression made, Sequisha -- the streamer who was promptly executed for cheating -- sighs, and goes back to the character select screen. He creates a new avatar; it's time to start the game all over again.

Sequisha's execution and subsequent reincarnation is just one of hundreds of stories playing out everyday in World of Warcraft as streamers have flocked to the massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) to play together. Through their strife, and a commitment to staying in-character via roleplay, groups like the guild OnlyFangs have turned World of Warcraft into an RPG within an RPG, playing out improvisational personal drama where the stakes are high. In Hardcore mode, World of Warcraft has become the best soap opera on the internet, all playing out across over dozens of OnlyFangs creator streams every day. The new "Classic" and "Hardcore" servers were launched in celebration of World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary, helping to reignite interest in the game and increase viewership on platforms like Twitch and YouTube. The Hardcore server, where character death is permanent, attracted top streamers, leading to the formation of guilds like OnlyFangs.

After a successful first season, OnlyFangs reshuffled its roster, embracing a more immersive roleplaying approach in its second season. "What they didn't know was their experiment in World of Warcraft roleplay would inadvertently create one of the best emergent dramas on the internet," reports Rolling Stone.

Witcher 4's first trailer debuted at the 2024 Game Awards — a six-minute cinema-quality thriller. It's a teaser for a game that "aims to be the most immersive and ambitious open-world Witcher game to date," according to an announcement from CD Projekt Red. The trailer is pre-rendered in a custom build of Unreal Engine 5 on an unannounced NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU. Powered by the same tech that The Witcher IV is built on, using assets and models from the game itself, it aims to provide players with a cinematic look at the kind of experience the game is aspiring to provide.
The trailer shows "a remote village that has been terrorized for generations by a fearsome monster demanding human sacrifices..." their announcement notes. ("At the heart of the trailer is Ciri's perspective as an outsider to the village.") "Geralt will appear in the game, but we don't want to spoil his role precisely," CD Projekt Red told IGN.

Kotaku reminds fans there's also Netflix's animated movie The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep in February 2025 — plus the first new Witcher novel in over a decade (with an English translation) expected sometime next year as well...

Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the news.

Astro Bot has been crowned winner of Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2024 tonight. The category also included Balatro, Black Myth Wukong, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. IGN reports: Astro Bot was one of the biggest winners of the night, taking home a total of four awards in categories including Best Family Game and Best Game Direction. Other notable winners included Metaphor: ReFantazio, which won Best Narrative, Best Art Direction, and Best RPG, and Balatro, which one Best Indie and Best Debut Indie. A full list of the nominees and winners can be viewed here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The classic PC games market is "in a sorry state," according to DRM-free and classic-minded storefront GOG. Small games that aren't currently selling get abandoned, and compatibility issues arise as technology moves forward or as one-off development ideas age like milk. Classic games are only 20 percent of GOG's catalog, and the firm hasn't actually called itself "Good Old Games" in 12 years. And yet, today, GOG announces that it is making "a significant commitment of resources" toward a new GOG Preservation Program. It starts with 100 games for which GOG's own developers are working to create current and future compatibility, keeping them DRM-free and giving them ongoing tech support, along with granting them a "Good Old Game: Preserved by GOG" stamp.

GOG is not shifting its mission of providing a DRM-free alternative to Steam, Epic, and other PC storefronts, at least not entirely. But it is demonstrably excited about a new focus that ties back to its original name, inspired in some part by its work on Alpha Protocol. "We think we can significantly impact the classics industry by focusing our resources on it and creating superior products," writes Arthur Dejardin, head of sales and marketing at GOG. "If we wanted to spread the DRM-free gospel by focusing on getting new AAA games on GOG instead, we would make little progress with the same amount of effort and money (we've been trying various versions of that for the last 5 years)."

What kind of games? Scanning the list of Good Old Games, most of them are, by all accounts, both good and old. Personally, I'm glad to see the Jagged Alliance games, System Shock 2, Warcraft I & II, Dungeon Keeper Gold and Theme Park, SimCity 3000 Unlimited, and the Wing Commander series (particularly, personally, Privateer). Most of them are, understandably, Windows-only, though Mac support extends to 34 titles so far, and Linux may pick up many more through Proton compatibility, beyond the 19 native titles to date. [...] [I]f you see the shiny foil-ish GOG badge on a game, it's an assurance that GOG has done all it can to bring forward a classic title. It's important work, too. "Preserving" games doesn't just mean locking a stable media in a vault, but keeping games accessible, and playable.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After 20 years, it's now possible for solo players to finish storylines in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft that previously required a group to do an intensive raid. That's thanks to "Story Mode," a new raid difficulty that was added for the final wing of the first raid of the recently released The War Within expansion. Over the years, developer Blizzard has expanded the difficulty options for raids to meet various players and communities where they are in terms of play styles. The top difficulty is Mythic, where the semi-pro hardcore guilds compete. Below that is Heroic, where serious, capital-G gamers coordinate with friends in weekly raid schedules to progress. Then there's Normal, which still requires some coordination but isn't nearly as challenging and can typically be completed within a few tries by a pick-up group. The most accessible difficulty is Raid Finder, where you're matched with random players automatically to complete a vastly easier version of a raid. Now Story Mode has been added to the mix, and it's even easier than Raid Finder.

In Story Mode, you fight only the raid's final boss, which has been scaled back in stats and complexity so that it's beatable for a single player or a very small group of friends. Challenging encounter mechanics have been removed, and the whole fight has been retooled to focus exclusively on the narrative aspects. There are some rewards, but they're not the same as those on more difficult raids; the goal was to avoid cheapening the experience for those who do want to go all the way. So far, Story Mode is available exclusively for the newest raid, which is called Nerub-ar Palace. It hasn't been made available for other encounters yet, but Blizzard has hinted that this could be the long-term goal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IGN: Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida has asked fans to please not make "offensive or inappropriate" mods upon the game's PC release tomorrow, September 17. Yoshida wouldn't comment on any specific mods he wants to see in Final Fantasy 16 in an interview with PC Gamer, though made clear what he doesn't want to see. "If we said, 'it'd be great if someone made X, Y, Z,' it might come across as a request, so I'll avoid mentioning any specifics here," Yoshida said. "The only thing I will say is that we definitely don't want to see anything offensive or inappropriate, so please don't make or install anything like that."

Mods allow players to create custom content for games, often resulting in incredibly useful gameplay changes such as the ability to play Elden Ring with friends seamlessly, or major additions such as an entire new expansion for Fallout 4 or the ability to play as custom characters in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Due to the nature of the internet, however, many mods are also, as Yoshida put it, "offensive or inappropriate." While cheating is one thing, fellow publisher Capcom expressed concern in November 2023 that "there are a number of mods that are offensive to public order and morals" which cause damage to the property itself.

Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks revealed at a Goldman Sachs conference that the company has been using AI in game development, including for "Dungeons & Dragons" and "Magic: The Gathering," and plans to integrate AI further into gameplay, despite previously banning AI-generated content. "Inside of development, we've already been using AI," Cocks said. "It's mostly machine-learning-based AI or proprietary AI as opposed to a ChatGPT approach. We will deploy it significantly and liberally internally as both a knowledge worker aid and as a development aid." Futurism reports: While the logistical aspects of the technology seem fairly par for the course in the world of out-of-touch CEOs over-relying on it, Cocks then suggested that it will become a part of D&D gameplay. "I'm probably more excited though about the playful elements of AI," he said. "I play with probably 30 or 40 people regularly. There's not a single person who doesn't use AI somehow for either campaign development or character development or story ideas. That's a clear signal that we need to be embracing it."

After paying lip service to using AI "responsibly" and "paying creators for their work," Cocks then doubled down on his point. "The themes around using AI to enable user-generated content, using AI to streamline new player introduction, using AI for emergent storytelling -- I think you're going to see that not just our hardcore brands like D&D but also multiple of our brands," the Hasbro CEO said. Further reading: Magic: The Gathering Community Fears Generative AI Will Replace Talented Artists

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since its introduction in the 1970s, Dungeons & Dragons has become one of the most influential tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) in popular culture, featuring heavily in Stranger Things, for example, and spawning a blockbuster movie released last year. Over the last decade or so, researchers have turned their focus more heavily to the ways in which D&D and other TRPGs can help people with autism form healthy social connections, in part because the gaming environment offers clear rules around social interactions. According to the authors of a new paper published in the journal Autism, D&D helped boost players' confidence with autism, giving them a strong sense of kinship or belonging, among other benefits.

"There are many myths and misconceptions about autism, with some of the biggest suggesting that those with it aren't socially motivated, or don't have any imagination," said co-author Gray Atherton, a psychologist at the University of Plymouth. "Dungeons & Dragons goes against all that, centering around working together in a team, all of which takes place in a completely imaginary environment. Those taking part in our study saw the game as a breath of fresh air, a chance to take on a different persona and share experiences outside of an often challenging reality. That sense of escapism made them feel incredibly comfortable, and many of them said they were now trying to apply aspects of it in their daily lives." [...] For this latest study. Atherton et al. wanted to specifically investigate how autistic players experience D&D when playing in groups with other autistic players. It's essentially a case study with a small sample size -- just eight participants -- and qualitative in nature, since the post-play analysis focused on semistructured interviews with each player after the conclusion of the online campaign, the better to highlight their individual voices.

The players were recruited through social media advertisements within the D&D, Reddit and Discord online communities; all had received an autism diagnosis by a medical professional. They were split into two groups of four players, with one of the researchers (who's been playing D&D for years) acting as the dungeon master. The online sessions featured in the study was the Waterdeep: Dragonheist campaign. The campaign ran for six weeks, with sessions lasting between two and four hours (including breaks). Participants spoke repeatedly about the positive benefits they received from playing D&D, providing a friendly environment that helped them relax about social pressures. "When you're interacting with people over D&D, you're more likely to understand what's going on," one participant said in their study interview. "That's because the method you'll use to interact is written out. You can see what you're meant to do. There's an actual sort of reference sheet for some social interactions." That, in turn, helped foster a sense of belonging and kinship with their fellow players.

Participants also reported feeling emotionally invested and close to their characters, with some preferring to separate themselves from their character in order to explore other aspects of their personality or even an entirely new persona, thus broadening their perspectives. "I can make a character quite different from how I interact with people in real-life interactions," one participant said. "It helps you put yourself in the other person's perspective because you are technically entering a persona that is your character. You can then try to see how it feels to be in that interaction or in that scenario through another lens." And some participants said they were able to "rewrite" their own personal stories outside the game by adopting some of their characters' traits -- a psychological phenomenon known as "bleed."

Kotaku reviews Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft's latest AAA title: I was staring at a wall. It was an early mission in Ubisoft's latest behemothic RPG, Star Wars Outlaws, in which I was charged with infiltrating an Empire base to recover some information from a computer, and this wall really caught my attention.

It was a perfect wall. It absolutely captured that late-70s sci-fi aesthetic of dark gray cladding broken up by utilitarian-gray panels covered in dull blinking lights, and I stopped to think about how much work must have gone into that wall. Looking elsewhere on the screen, I was then overwhelmed. This wall was the most bland thing in a vast hanger, where TIE Fighters hung from the ceiling, Stormtroopers wandered in groups below, and even the little white sign with the yellow arrow looked like it was a decade old, meticulously crafted to fit into this universe. I felt sheer astonishment at the achievement of this. Ubisoft, via multiple studios across the whole world, and the work of thousands of deeply talented people, had built this impossibly perfect area for one momentary scene that I was intended to run straight past.

Except I ran past it three times, because the AI kept fucking up and I was restarted at a checkpoint right before that gray wall over and over. I'm struggling to capture the dissonance of this moment. This sense of absolute awe, almost unbelieving admiration that it's even possible to build games at this scale and at this detail, slapped hard around the face by the bewilderingly bad decisions that take place within it all. Brokerage firm UBS said in a note to clients: Based on the 621 ratings thus far the game has received a score of 4.8 (out of 10). This tracks behind previous blockbuster releases by Ubisoft in Assassin's Creed and Far Cry, behind competing open world games released in 2024 and behind other major recent Star Wars Games released by EA in 2019 and 2023. The user ratings, which are generally unfavourable lag its generally favourable critic reviews (game received a score of 76 by critics).

Early user ratings suggest downside risk to our 10m units forecast for the game: While we previously felt the largely positive critic reviews made our 10m units sold look achievable (a component upon which we forecast +4% FY25 net bookings growth), the user ratings now suggest downside risk to our estimates. Previous Ubisoft games in Assassin's Creed and Far Cry which sold 10m+ units in their first fiscal year all received higher user ratings and were instalments of well entrenched franchises.

The Verge's Ash Parrish reports: Last week, as a part of the updates to Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition -- collectively known as the 2024 revision -- the publisher announced that it would update D&D Beyond, the tabletop RPG's official digital toolkit that players use to reference content and create characters using a host of official and third-party sources. The update would add the new 2024 rulebooks to the toolkit, mark outdated content with a "legacy" badge, and change players' character sheets to reflect all the new rules and features.

That last part is critical to understanding why some D&D players (including my own dungeon master) spent the last 72 hours in a state of panic. Though some of the 2024 revisions are essentially cosmetic in nature -- for example, "races" will be updated to "species" -- other updates like the ones to weapons, spells, and magic items fundamentally alter the game. Wizards of the Coast would have essentially overwritten every user's character sheet with the new information whether they wanted it or not. "All entries for mundane and magical items, weapons, armor, and spells will also be updated to their 2024 version," Wizards said in its initial announcement. The publisher did say that players would have the option to continue to use the 2014 version of spells and magic items. But doing so requires using the game's homebrew rules. which aren't known for being user-friendly.

Thankfully, Wizards of the Coast isn't in the car business, and after a weekend of backlash on social media, the company will no longer force the new changes on players. "We misjudged the impact of this change, and we agree that you should be free to choose your own way to play," Wizard's said in its latest announcement. Current character sheets will only be updated with new terminology while the older versions of spells, magic items, and weapons will be preserved. Also, players who have access to both the 2014 and 2024 digital versions will have the option to use both when creating new characters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Dropout's Dungeons & Dragons actual play show, Dimension 20, is getting pretty close to selling out a 19,000-seat venue just hours after ticket sales opened to the general public. To the uninitiated, it may seem absurd to go to a massive sports arena and watch people play D&D. As one Redditor commented, "This boggles my mind. When I was playing D&D in the early eighties, I would have never believed that there was a future where people would watch live D&D at Madison Square Garden. It's incomprehensible to me." It is indeed bizarre, albeit fun. But in this monumental moment for the actual play genre, the triumph is eclipsed by the biggest frustration that links sports, music and now D&D fans: Ticketmaster. As Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan said amid the Taylor Swift-Ticketmaster scandal, the company's failures "ended up converting more Gen Zers into anti-monopolists overnight than anything [she] could have done."

In the case of Taylor Swift's Eras tour, fans were upset because demand was so high that Ticketmaster's system couldn't handle the traffic. For Dimension 20, the culprit is Ticketmaster's dynamic pricing. As more people try to buy tickets, the price of the tickets increase. About an hour after the Madison Square Garden tickets went on sale, the few dozen upper bowl tickets left were $800. Three hours after, these tickets are around $330, which is still very inflated. "Went onto the presale, tickets were $500+ for the worst ones, we assumed they were scalpers and that the actual sale today would have normal priced tickets $2000 for the lower bowl!? I know it's not dropout setting the price but wow is that a LOT of cash," a Redditor posted. And as a commenter astutely pointed out, thanks to dynamic pricing, Ticketmaster itself is actually the scalper. Of course, Dimension 20 fans are frustrated, especially since the show's content is overtly anti-capitalist. Despite the pricing debacle, the demand for the show is a great sign for both actual play shows and the creator economy at large.

The New Yorker looks at 41-year-old Amabel Holland, an autistic board-game designer who "thinks about the world in terms of systems," and realized you could make a board game about almost anything, "and, when you did, its rules could both mirror and analyze the subject on which it was based."

They've since designed more than 60 games, and the article notes that Holland's work, "which is part of a larger turn toward complexity in the industry, often tackles historical and social subjects — death, religion, misinformation — using surprising 'mechanics,' or building blocks of game play, to immerse players in an experience." "With every game, you build a certain model of the world," Reiner Knizia, a former mathematician who's designed more than eight hundred games, told me. Several of his games illustrate market forces: in Modern Art, for instance, you play as auctioneers and buyers, hoping to buy low and sell high. Knizia is a traditional game designer inasmuch as he aims to "bring enjoyment to the people." But Amabel sometimes aims for the opposite of enjoyment... This Guilty Land, from 2018, is about the struggle to end slavery."
Holland says their games are "meant to evoke frustration" — specifically to communicate how difficult it can be to actually achieve political progress.

Thanks to Slashdot reader silverjacket for sharing the article.

Today saw the end of IFComp.org's 29th annual text adventure competition (now administered by the charitable non-profit IF Technology Foundation). 74 new and original text adventures competed for a share of the $7,523 prize pool, with the winners announced in a special online ceremony on Twitch this afternoon.

After all the votes were tabulated, the winning game was Dr Ludwig and the Devil, a 90-minute epic in which an esteemed mad scientist tries to double-cross Beelzebub himself — along with "the world's least effective torch and pitchfork-wielding mob!" Coming in second was LAKE Adventure. (Its premise? That it's a 13-year-old's 1993 game being revisited by its author 28 years later — complete with some gloriously retro artwork.) And finishing third was The Little Match Girl 4 (described as "a touching epic time travel fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.")

But also this week, the owner of the web site 80sNostalgia.com has created a text adventure using nothing but inter-linked posts on Threads.

"Think you can get under The Bridge?" its first post challenges. "Test your gaming skills with this Threads exclusive text-based game!

"And then try to get your head around got much work it took to make it..."

Slashdot reader Mononymous writes: Back in 2019, digital archivist Jason Scott released the source code to Infocom's classic text adventures. Now the other piece of the puzzle is available: the source code (mostly in assembly, with some C and Pascal) to their microcomputer interpreters.

Infocom, publisher of the best-selling Zork series, ported their text adventures to most of the diverse microcomputer platforms of the 1980s by using an early virtual machine, known as the Z-machine or ZIP. This enabled them to sell games simultaneously for everything from the TI-99/4A to the Commodore 128. Hobbyists reverse-engineered the technology in the 1990s to create modern implementations, but now the original source code can be studied directly.

Amazon has revealed that Fallout -- a live-action adaptation of Bethesda's popular RPG video game franchise -- will premiere on April 12th, 2024, exclusively via Prime Video. The Verge reports: The announcement was made on October 23rd, otherwise known to Fallout fans as "Fallout Day" -- the in-game date that marks the beginning of the Great War that turns the world into an irradiated nuclear wasteland. Bethesda's executive producer and game director Todd Howard is an executive producer on the series, which stars Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets), Walton Goggins (The Hateful Eight), Aaron Moten (Emancipation), Moises Arias (The King of Staten Island), Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks), and Sarita Choudhury (Homeland).

Alongside the premiere announcement itself (which was amusingly presented as an interactive Pip-Boy interface graphic), Amazon said in a press release that the show will be an original story set in a future, post-apocalyptic version of Los Angeles and will be considered a canonical addition to the existing game franchise. We do not currently know how many episodes will be in the series or what the release schedule will look like following the premiere.