The Quixotic Engineer

Since I released @HoroscopeBot earlier this summer, I haven’t stopped thinking about Twitter bots as a creative medium. Corny “I could make a bot for that” ideas kept popping into my thoughts. After reading this appreciation of museum bots, I decided to try my hand at making something similar for a different catalogue.

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Last weekend, as a side project, I decided to create an oracle. Like most oracles he spouts nonsense, occasionally happening upon a cogent statement by random chance and serendipity. His name is @HoroscopeBot, and he takes the auspices of Twitter to post a semi-coherent prophecy every twenty minutes.

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This weekend I committed to finishing a small Twine game I’ve been dabbling with intermittently for the last year. It may seem a little esoteric (and rather silly) if you’re unfamiliar with the game genre being parodied, but hopefully it’ll still convey the general idea.

You can play it directly in your browser by clicking the title below:

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Photograph by Daniel Schwen, License CC BY-SA 4.0

The interactive fiction platform Twine has been around for many years, but recently it’s been at the centre of the DIY game creating movement. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters heralds it as an accessible development tool for those without programming experience. New voices are joining the game-making world, and the variety of Twine games is truly remarkable: personal games, satirical games, Kafkaesque games, sexual games, and many more.

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SpaceChem is a remarkable puzzle game about fake chemistry. The game challenges you to build a factory in order to transmute the given input molecules into the given output molecules. While chemistry is the theme, on a mechanical level it has more in common with programming. The methods used to tackle challenges in SpaceChem are akin to real techniques used by computer programmers. I’d like to elaborate on these manifold similarities, as well as explore how games like SpaceChem could be used to promote procedural literacy.

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