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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

For years I've wanted a video game that lets you play the part of a wizard in the D&D sense: painstakingly decoding the threads of arcane reality, looking for ways they can be utilized. This always sort of felt adjacent to code, but of course code isn't very hard to figure out and being able to freely command the game world via anything like normal code would quickly become overpowered and uninteresting

But now I'm imagining some sort of Malbolge-based magic system (ascii characters mapped to runic symbols for flavor, of course), where getting it to do the simplest of tasks really is an accomplishment

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There are multiple text adventure games where you have to figure out the game's mechanics before you can do anything, and of course you can't just wave the mouse around and click on some targets.

E.g. (I myself haven't gotten around to any of them):

For a Change https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=t61i5akczyblx2zd

Bad Machine https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=3a9rb059miw9fc9h

Counterfeit Monkey https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl

This is somewhat similar to the game 0x10c, where apparently a virtual computer was to be one of the central features, and you would use it to do advanced stuff. But, echoing your sentiment, the author said that it's not fun and dropped the project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c

Counterfeit Monkey is downright incredible.

Emily Short's games tend to elicit positive responses.

Isn't Starbase [0] basically 0x10c?

[0] https://wiki.starbasegame.com/index.php/YOLOL

If you are into this you might want to check out the Wizardry book series by Rick Cook:

"It all began when the wizards of the White League were under attack by their opponents of the Black League and one of their most powerful members cast a spell to bring forth a mighty wizard to aid their cause. What the spell delivered was master hacker Walter "Wiz" Zumwalt. The wizard who cast the spell was dead and nobody— not the elves, not the dwarves, not even the dragons—could figure out what the shanghaied computer nerd was good for.

But spells are a lot like computer programs, and, in spite of the Wiz's unprepossessing appearance, he was going to defeat the all-powerful Black League, win the love of a beautiful red-haired witch, and prove that when it comes to spells and sorcery, nobody but nobody can beat a Silicon Valley computer geek!"

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