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Mansion Escape – a Text Adventure App for Android

January 22, 2019

Literature, Programming

Android, app, computer, programming, text adventure

Note: If you’re interested in Mansion Escape, check its brand new iteration, available for PC, Mac, or Linux, on desktop or mobile.

Please note that none of my Android apps is any longer maintained – and they’re not even available on Google Play anymore – for reasons you can read about here. If you still have any of the Home for Fiction Android apps installed on your phone, you’re advised to uninstall them. The post below should be seen purely as a snapshot of history.

Mansion Escape is a text adventure app I’ve developed for Android phones and tablets. Mansion Escape pays homage to the text adventure genre of the early computer era, as well as to the “dark mansion” genre of films, board games, and narrative in general.

After all, a text adventure app is first and foremost a narrative! That is, a text adventure app is a piece of interactive fiction, where the player/reader follows a story actually participating in it, deciding which path to take.

Mansion Escape: a Text Adventure App where Clue meets the Cold War

I’ve talked in the past about the devolution of video games, and how today’s games can sometimes be a bit too easy. Text adventures were a kind of adventure games in the early computer era, where the player had to actually read (the horror, the horror) the descriptions, as there were no graphics.

text adventure app

Of course I realized that this is not 1985, and an entirely text-based Android app would not be well received. So, instead of (old-school) typing commands, we use buttons. But make no mistake! This is still a text adventure game.

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Post Hoc Fallacy Examples

January 20, 2019

Philosophy

fallacy, ignorance, logic, post hoc, reason

The post hoc fallacy is a widespread logical fallacy. Post hoc fallacy examples abound everywhere around us, and especially on the internet – where all fallacies are exposed sooner or later!

The full name of this fallacy is post hoc ergo propter hoc, which means “after this, therefore because of this” in Latin. In simple terms, a post hoc fallacy is one where when two events happen soon after each other, the occurrence of the second is attributed to the first.

post hoc fallacy examples
“Me? The cause of bad luck?”

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Digital Dehumanization: the Dark Side of the Internet

January 15, 2019

Society

control, dehumanization, internet, psychology, responsibility, social media

The term digital dehumanization might sound obscure. It surely sounds bad, and referring to the dark side of the internet makes it worse. But what do we mean by digital dehumanization, and what does the internet have to do with it?

The term dehumanization refers to the process of depriving a person or a group of persons the qualities of being human. Take a look at my article on zombies and dehumanization. I wrote back then:

The thoroughly disturbing aspect in all this is the concept of Dehumanization. If you’re interested, read Jonathan Glover’s Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century to see how it works. Basically, you convince a group of people – normal, everyday people like you and me – that another group of people are not really humans. Then, it becomes far easier to convince the first group to turn on the second. This is how the Holocaust happened, this is how Hiroshima happened, this is how My Lai, Bosnia, and Rwanda happened.

Let’s begin to unpack the process of digital dehumanization – a dehumanization process occurring digitally, on the internet – with a little hypothetical scenario. It will perhaps set up the tone for today’s article.

digital dehumanization
Digital dehumanization is about not seeing the person behind the mask of the internet
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