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Comment by TheRealPomax | Hacker News Reader

Nitpicking, several years after the fact, but: most of these are not "command line" video games. They're terminal (and terminal emulator) games. "Zork", or even "Quest for Glory" are command line games: you play them by typing on the command line. The ones shown here (save Frotz) are not that.

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More precisely, text-mode games.

I'd consider "command-line-only" to mean "can be played with a dumb terminal".

TUI

For a lot of people, “terminal”, “bash”, “putty”, “cli”, “ssh”, “shell” are all interchangeable and equivalent terms.

I do recall starting my comment with the explicit note that I'm nitpicking.

If, to you, "command line games" just means "something I can run while in a terminal" then cool, but that's not technically what that term means, and we're technical people here on HN. Especially those of us who use (any flavour of) the terminal day in day out.

> and we're technical people here on HN

and quite political it seems

It’s all I use but you can call it the “word window” for all I give a shit, nitpicking is just a synonym for argumentative+stubborn.

Inb4 you nitpick the definitions.

Jumping onto a thread which you see as argumentative+stubborn, to point that out... including "for all I give a shit"

Is a synonym for?

Potential growth / reflection opportunity.

I think the bigger concern is that distinguishing the terms here is more interesting.

There's nitpicking and then there is just making up technical definitions of words that aren't widely shared.

I think a lot of the time that's basically synecdoche and unobjectionable. Other times it's confusion and that matters when it matters, outside of which it can be nice to clarify... if it can be done respectfully.

In this case, though, it's writing in The Linux Journal, and it appears to be promising something it's failing to deliver.

Then the reasonable thing is to educate these people, since they are in no way[0] equivalent. Words are supposed to have meaning, so you know what the hell people talk about.

It's not hard to use the correct terms, and something that tries to be an authority on, say, Linux, such as Linux Journal, could simply do so instead of spreading confusion.

[0] OK, there's some equivalence between a few of the words.

Exactly. "Letting it slide" is how we end up being told that because for most people a "hacker" is a cyber-criminal, it is now the sole valid definition.

I think an example of a theoretical command line game would be one that a user would pipe a command though the shell in to the game and get the resulting output.

> ./game go_west_and_look | cat events.log

I think IF games are solidly "command line games" - it is a game that you interact with entirely through commands you type at a... line...

Games you play at "the command line" - or, as the article puts it, "expansive and impressive games that you can run entirely in your Linux shell," is an interesting notion. I'm generally a big fan of decomposing actions out of applications into individual commands run at the shell; I had not applied the same to games.

You could run the game itself in a long running process, talking through (unix?) sockets that the individual commands know how to find. Polling in PROMPT_COMMAND could make it sufficiently interactive for some measure of real-time.

I would have to begrudgingly agree that cli games would include all infocom games would be command lines games since it doesn't have to be constrained to the command line shell like /bin/sh

I forgot to mention after my comment "play by email" games which would broaden the scope to network games since the interface could be through a shell when using sendmail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Play-by-email_video_g...

Play By Email seems marginal. It's certainly true that you can do it from the command line (I'd heartily recommend nmh over using sendmail directly), but it's sort of incidental rather than by design. That said, I'd count it.

Email to me is a type of network transfer, slower than RESTful, but reliable nonetheless.

I agree. What I think makes PBEM marginal as an example of "command-line-only" is that it is designed with email in mind as the interface, and it is only because we have command line access to email that we have command line access to the game. As I noted, though, I still think it counts.

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