THE WORLD'S FIRST FORM-PROGRAMMABLE ADVENTURE GAME (?)

Whimsy is a multiuser shared environment from the early-ish days of the web. It lets you create web rooms, programmed via HTML forms, that interact with people, responding to labels that other rooms and people stick on them. It's rather like a MUD game in a web wrapper, though I wrote it with the aim of enabling new kinds of Computer Supported Cooperative Learning. This is explained more inside the game.

The name Whimsy stands for Waterloo Hypertext Interactive Multiuser Shared Yodelfest. Actually I couldn't think of anything for the 'Y'. I wrote it in summer 1994, after learning about the web and NCSA Mosaic through a Software Design course I taught that spring. Whimsy ran on our research machine at the University of Waterloo, and was open to all comers, of whom there were several thousand. It used the technology of the day, so that by the time it finally crashed in 1996, it was already about two generations out of date. It did not, for example, use frames, cookies, or client pull, all of which would have made things cleaner.

Despite the proliferation of site-creation, interaction and gaming environments on the web today, I haven't seen anything like Whimsy's label paradigm for messages, recognition and manipulating users' states, nor any other production-rule programming environment via forms. I thought this made it worth reviving, at least for historical interest. So Whimsy is back --- but not updated: it is innumerable generations out of date. Click on the 1994-vintage logo below to try it.