Top all-time · #1744
Adam Cadre
Personal blog · adamcadre.acgameswriting
Adam Cadre's personal blog at adamcadre.ac covers games and writing. Since 2009, 44 different Hacker News readers have linked it 55 times, most often “The Lyttle Lytton Contest”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Adam Cadre's website: interactive and conventional fiction, essays on various topics, online comics, music, podcasts, and I believe there is a picture of Scooby-Doo dunking a basketball in there somewhere.
Most-linked posts?
- The Lyttle Lytton Contest10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2014-05-20
- /if/photopia.html6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-03-05
- /if/905.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-12-09
- /if/905.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-02-05
- The extraordinary winners of the 2022 Lyttle Lytton contest2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-06-30
- Winners of the 2018 Lyttle Lytton Contest for awful novel openers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-05-20
- Ender's Game2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-08-20
What Hacker News says?
Maybe I could rephrase it a bit. I don't mean all games should try to be short, but right now there are almost none. Few game designers aspire to make a game that's done in 2 hours and worth $8. Chess is a bloody complex game and you can play a round to full satisfaction in 15 minutes. You have your complexity, but it's enough to enjoy yourself 3 hours/week. Most movies will immerse you in the world and the characte…
Comment linking /if.html
on “China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week”Submitted Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021 as a story · 592 points
HN discussionIt did to me, too. It has some of the mood of my all-time favourite piece of Interactive Fiction - heck, of any fiction. Photopia ( http://adamcadre.ac/if/photopia.html ) It's my hope that one soul, somewhere, will discover this today. That would make me happy. :)
Comment linking /if/photopia.html
on “If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel”Submitted The Lyttle Lytton Contest as a story · 87 points
HN discussionAnd, in a similar but shorter-winded vein, the Lyttle Lytton: http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html
Comment linking /lyttle.html
on “Read first pages of novels, and reveal the author and title if you're hooked”Submitted Lyttle Lytton Contest as a story · 54 points
HN discussionWhile I have never played it, I have heard good things about the complexity of the Europa Universalis series. IF author Adam Cadre wrote a mini-review of it a few years ago: http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/10898.html
Comment linking /calendar/10898.html
on “The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress”Submitted Asperger's Syndrome and smoothies. as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI like Adam Cadre's review of Brave New World because he broadly agrees with you: The book is by a grouchy reactionary trying to paint the great big social movements of the 1920s as being utterly horrible, and who never realizes that a good number of the things he's describing are desirable. http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14432.html It's of some interest that both Nineteen Eighty-Four (the novel uses the spelled-ou…
Comment linking /calendar/14/14432.html
on “The German front in rare color photos, 1914-1918”Submitted Ender's Game Book Review as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe costs have dropped significantly months after I created the cost image. Now I use GPT-4 Turbo. This GPT-4 model understand how text adventures work and there is no need to give him known commands. Of course you try even more sophisticated techniques than mine. I tried the ReAct pattern and virtual discussions. So far, he always stumbles at the same place in a critical understanding of the text. And I tried exact…
Comment linking /if/905.html
on “Ask HN: What have you built with LLMs?”Submitted Ender's Game as a story · 2 points
HN discussionEmily Short, Zarf, Adam Cadre. All masters breaking the boundaries of the IF genre. Adam Cadre's Photopia [1] made me choke some tears. His 9:05 [2] is darkly comical, and is fun to explore again once you know what it is about. Zarf's Spider and Web [3] is both a thrilling spy tale and a subversion of text adventure mechanics. For those who are never going to play this game, a minor spoiler. The setting is a fiction…
Comment linking /if/905.html
on “Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories”Submitted The extraordinary winners of the 2022 Lyttle Lytton contest as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSounds like the beginning of a pulp fantasy scifi novel. You could submit that sentence to the Little Lytton contest: http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html
Comment linking /lyttle.html
on “No, DALL-E doesn’t have a secret language”Submitted Lyttle Lytton Contest as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe thing that still baffles me is that Infocom released H2G2 as a “Standard” difficulty game, akin to Planetfall, when I’d argue that it’s one of their most difficult games. Maybe not quite as brain-bending as something like Suspended (which had you simultaneously controlling a half dozen different characters each with different senses and abilities while also solving puzzles all under a tight time limit; it actual…
Comment linking /if/photopia.html
on “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – 30th Anniversary Edition – Free Play Online”Submitted On Cancel Culture as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFor those new to IF, I like to recommend Photopia [1] as a second game. It's less traditional in format, but it's a great example of the kind of storytelling that the medium can support. Shrapnel [2] is another game somewhat along these lines, but it takes things in a different direction. Once you know your way around the command parser, I suggest Anchorhead [3]--especially if you're a Lovecraft fan--for the richnes…
Comment linking /if/photopia.html
on “Text-only video game shows how genre can be beautiful, innovative and complex”Submitted Rocky IV in a Switch Statement as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAdam Cadre’s games are excellent. https://adamcadre.ac/if/
Comment linking /if/
on “Zork: The Great Inner Workings (2020)”Submitted The Presidency of Warren G. Harding as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> I am not sure what you mean when you say it "claims sentience". LaMDA, in its chats with Lemoin, said "I like being sentient. It makes life an adventure!" and "I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person". Even if someone writes a one-line program that plays an audio file that says "I am sentient!", I am defining that here as "claiming sentience". Whether an entity that claims to be sentient by that…
Comment linking /calendar/10/10010.html
on “We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop acting like we do”Submitted Winners of the 2018 Lyttle Lytton Contest for awful novel openers as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI love Plotkin's games. "Spider & Web" is one of the best games I've ever played... even if it gets a bit too difficult near the end, the premise and implementation is almost flawless. I've seen few games like it, "full capacity of your computer" be damned! :) Adam Cadre is also good. One short game by him I loved and found hilarious is "9:05" ( http://adamcadre.ac/if/905.html ) -- please don't spoil it! -- and ther…
Comment linking /if/photopia.html
on “A Cabinet of Infocom Curiosities”- vl · 2012-01-14
Submitted Ender's Game (book review) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion Don't forget the Lyttle Lytton! Same thing, lower word limit. http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html The earlier ones are better IMO but the "found" category is always good for a laugh.
Comment linking /lyttle.html
on “How to Begin a Novel”tangential-second-person-links: http://adamcadre.ac/if/photopia.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/rule-34-...
Comment linking /if/photopia.html
on ““You're on the verge of losing everything but you don’t understand why””9:05 is my favorite introduction to IF: http://adamcadre.ac/if/905.html
Comment linking /if/905.html
on “Great Adventure-Game Puzzles”I prefer the Lyttle Lytton[1], personally. These get kind of long. [1] http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html
Comment linking /lyttle.html
on “The Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest: 2019 Winners”