I loved MUDs as a kid, and really do miss the sense of immersion and depth that came from joining a long established server and just exploring.
A MUD got me into programming, just wanted to make one myself. I was too young then. Now that I’m “grown”, every five years I feel like the kids these days have so many tools to make it easier or at least more knowable.<p>Also, that ASCII art(or pixel art?) as the header looks serene. Any tips/rabbit holes on achieving that art style?
Wow, using legit computer lore in the first 95% of the article and then admitting LLM at the end.<p>Kiddo is not creating anything, that's a delusion.
Yikes, this is a bit too harsh.
What? The article even states there's only one use of AI. What are you talking about?<p>> Wish is the only AI feature in Canon, and it’s strictly limited to a single tutorial item per day. In a gameworld where everything else is explicitly written by humans for humans. And that alone was instantly polarizing.
I honestly think the child would be far better served with Scratch rather than some half-assed adventure writing language (having created several such languages myself).
I'd say Canon and Scratch are different tools with different purposes. Both are simple and interactive enough for children to love. The main difference I see is that Canon abstracts away a lot of the game state management logic and you get to focus on creating characters, items and having lots of fun. Scratch looks like it has a steeper learning curve and while it is a good introduction to programming, it gets pretty hard to navigate once project size increases. As someone who started programming with Scratch, I think that making a text adventure game like the ones Canon does in Scratch would be much more complicated and the end result wouldn't be half as nice.
I think the only thing that matters is whatever the kid finds appealing enough to do at all.