• It requires the same unofficial hack used to install screensavers and fonts.
• It’s still under development so it may be buggy.
• As with all Kindle hacks, use at your own risk.
• Download it at Andrew de Quincey’s livejournal page

Anyone who thinks text based adventures games are a retired genre, as I did earlier this year, should meet the kid I tutored over the summer. He’s not yet fifteen and is obsessed with them, both as a gamer and a writer. Through him I rediscovered the world of interactive fiction (IF) in 2010, and I realized that just like every other subculture in the world today, there’s a thriving online community of IF fans and developers, with lots of new content being produced all the time.

Sadly for that kid and lots of other people, there’s been no authorised Z-machine for the Kindle, which is too bad because portable EInk screens are a perfect display medium for this content. (A “Z-machine” is an emulator that can read and play back many IF titles–sort of a virtual game console.)

Amazon or a developer might still release one through the Active Content channel before the end of 2011, but I’m not holding my breath–at least one attempt to fund such a project never took off. It’s just as easy, and probably financially simpler, to release self-contained apps like Dusk World (which Amazon was directly involved in) and the two titles from Choice of Games.

It’s a content/software gap that someone needs to fill, and fortunately someone has. Over the past two months, Andrew de Quincey has developed and released a free Z-machine for the Kindle that plays a wide range of titles.

Because it’s not official, it falls in the same category as the screensaver and font hacks for the Kindle, meaning you’ll have to run the same “jailbreak” installer app that they use, then run another program that tells your Kindle to authorize the Z-machine. It’s actually just an unofficial Active Content app, but because it’s not for sale through the Kindle Store it won’t play on your Kindle without the developer’s authorization code.

It’s also still a work in progress. A Booksprung reader told me that Hitchhiker’s Guide, Planetfall, Beyond Zork, and Zork 1, 2 and 3 all worked in his tests, but All Roads (a .z5 game I chose randomly) wouldn’t open for me. The gamer who tested Zork also noted a couple of other issues, like you can’t scroll through a list of games that’s longer than the Kindle screen, and the app shows up as “kif” on your Kindle instead of under something more descriptive. Also, on my Kindle the app first appeared several pages into my list of books, instead of at the top. But these are all small issues; the important thing is that it works. Hooray!

If you’re not ready to install it but you’re intrigued by the Interactive Fiction genre, the IFWiki is a great jumping off point for the subject. Also, if you’d rather play an online version that doesn’t require any hacking, try portablequest.

“Andrew de Quincey’s livejournal” (Thanks to Shane for the tip!)
(Photo: Karen Roe)

Raargh! Blaaarrrh! Slurp! And then whatever sound a pumpkin monster makes–something squishy, I imagine. Here are several spoooky screensaver images for your enjoyment. In general, I tried to use darker shades to better suit the theme, but that means they may lack detail on older screens. They look pretty great on the Kindle 3 “Pearl” screen, however (especially on a graphite-colored model).

Download them from the Free Screens section of the site.

Extra spooky bonus: if you’re a fan of Wordle and/or the famous vampire story “Carmilla,” note that there’s a Carmilla screen under the “Text” section of Free Screens.

You can make your own text-based screensavers at Wordle.net.

There is a very neat website that allows you to create a “word cloud’ from pasted text passages. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

You can make a VERY cool screen saver image by using words from favorite/famous passages.

It has a gallery section where people saved their wordles such as

• Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
• Macbeth
• Star Wars Episode IV script

Obviously you can make your own from your favorite passage or book. I copied text from the Project Gutenberg book “Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”. I copied and pasted my favorite chapter (Tulipomaina) and came out with a really cool screen saver image (after a little work with the settings of course).

I checked out the site and was amazed by the service. It’s FREE, you can paste any text you want, and you can customize the output in a variety of ways, including font, portrait or landscape layout, the number of words you want in your cloud, and so on.

If you love the written word and want some cool original screensavers, check out Wordle!