Kithe #14

Kithe was an e-mag (electronic magazine) series that ran, on and off, for three years, primarily documenting the comings and goings of members of the computer art collective Mistigris through text captures of postings to echomail networks, reformatted as articles. Oftentimes the conversational style was a poor fit for conventional publication, or a biting quip was just too short to publish on its own, and so these items were sat on until a suitable form of presentation could be devised. This form was, it turns out, the text adventure game -- where themes and topics of articles could inform the environment in which they were presented, and where polemics could be presented as emerging from the virtual mouths of the very personages who put them in writing... and most importantly, where people are going to be expecting to be reading lots of text anyhow.

Hundreds of articles are collected and thematically organized in different rooms, their specific display triggered (some more straightforwardly than others) by appropriate use of objects to which they are linked. Text adventure tropes (such as darkness) interfere with access to some areas, which become "unlocked" after the right object is found -- in return for reading, the player will be rewarded with... more to read!

A vague game lurks in the background of this surreal library-cum-adventure; some articles and some areas convey keywords necessary, as in Beyond the Tesseract, for the nominal "completion" of the game -- but as in any good cave crawl, the reward here is really in thorough exploration.