Aaron A. Reed

"Lurking inside this generative horror novel is a deeply felt and strangely moving coming-of-age story."--Isaac Schankler "...manages to shatter all skepticism... pulse pounding, mind bending horror."--HorrorNews Insecure college senior Orion loves music, books, and his best friend Niko. When the two of them find a secret basement in their rambling old off-campus house, at first Orion's thrilled. It's another secret to share, an adventure to maybe, at last, bring them closer together. But something's wrong: the basement doesn't end. Blandly decorated halls stretch on for miles past peeling wallpaper, empty bedrooms, and countless stairwells always leading down. Soon they realize Downstairs is a snarled tangle of possibilities. Something down there multiplies everything: architecture, emotions, even people.Together they must navigate an increasingly dangerous labyrinth filled with two-faceddoppelgangers, treacherous architecture, and long-buried secrets. Most dangerous of all is Orion's consuming obsession: somewhere down there, is there a Niko who loves him back?Subcutanean is a permutational novel: the text can be rendered in millions of different ways. This is version 30287, one of several available on traditional platforms. Your book contains instructions to unlock your own wholly unique digital version, with different words, sentences, or even entire scenes.

Subcutanean 30287

"Since a winter morning in 1971 when a teacher wheeled a teletype into his classroom to debut a game about the Oregon Trail, people have been telling interactive stories on digital platforms. From text adventures to VR poetry, MUDS to mobile romance sims, and chatbots to roguelikes, these games without graphics have pioneered new techniques for interactive storytelling, engaged imaginations with clever engines and beautiful prose, and explored the new terrain of fiction you can play. "50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon" picks one text-based game from each year between 1971 and 2020 and studies how it works, what it's about, why it's special, and its lasting legacy. From famous classics to overlooked gems, from personal stories to million-word epics, and from games printed by teletypes to games downloaded on smart watches, this is the fascinating story of interactive fiction's first half-century"-- Provided by publisher.

From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon

50 Years of Text Games

From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon [collector's Edition]

Anastasia Salter

John Murray

The genre of adventure games is frequently overlooked. Lacking the constantly-evolving graphics and graphic violence of their counterparts in first-person and third-person shooters or role-playing games, they are often marketed to and beloved by players outside of mainstream game communities. While often forgotten by both the industry and academia, adventure games have had (and continue to have) a surprisingly wide influence on contemporary games, in categories including walking simulators, hidden object games, visual novels, and bestselling titles from companies like Telltale and Campo Santo. In this examination of heirs to the genre's legacy, the authors examine the genre from multiple perspectives, connecting technical analysis with critical commentary and social context. This will be the first book to consider this important genre from a comprehensive and transdisciplinary perspective. Drawing upon methods from platform studies, software studies, media studies, and literary studies, they reveal the genre's ludic and narrative origins and patterns, where character (and the player's embodiment of a character) is essential to the experience of play and the choices within a game. A deep structural analysis of adventure games also uncovers an unsteady balance between sometimes contradictory elements of story, exploration, and puzzles: with different games and creators employing a multitude of different solutions to resolving this tension.

Aaron A. Reed

Books

Your next favorite book is out there