[Command Line Fun] Hangman as you may have never seen it...

secretGeek - Mind-boggling Demo of New Gaming Genre, aka Folder-Based Hangman, aka Fun with Recursion

"I had a crazy idea recently for a new game - a game that defines an entire new *genre* of computer game, and a new style of programming computer games. Whether or not this idea will go on to change the way all computer games are written, I will let history decide.

It's such a simple idea that I don't know how it couldn't have possibly existed earlier. It doesn't require massive graphic capabilities, no CUDA NUMA GPGPGPU and the like -- it's an idea so profoundly simple that you'll be scraping your jaw off the floor with a spoon before you finish reading this blog post.

You run the 'game' and it sets up a directory structure to represent every possible state of the game. To play the game, you inspect the current folder, look at the currently available sub folders, and choose which one to navigate into. Each sub folder you see represents the next possible state of the game.

There is no executable program running when you are playing. The game is just your act of navigating the folder structure. It's a clever form of madness!

Here's some screenshots that show me playing the game, in a command prompt.

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Folder-Based Hangman

Caution -- clicking 'GO!' puts text in the textarea which is a 32 megabyte DOS batch script. Running it creates several thousand files and folders. Knock yourself out.

(View-source may be more fun than actually running it. Though I recommend both.)

Yeah, a 32MB BATCH file! This is so old school it's new school...