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Categories: Commentary, Interview
Tags: amazon, howard sherman, if, interactive fiction, kindle, malinche
Over ToshokanComix I recently wrote about comics on the Kindle. After that I wondered about games on the Kindle. I’m always impressed when people bring games over to non-gaming devices. To me it’s an indicator of a device’s potential — like when people figured out how to get DOOM to run on the XO.
If there’s any genre of gaming which would be at home on the Kindle it’s interactive fiction (text adventures) and if there’s anyone who can get IF onto a device, it’s Howard Sherman. Sherman runs Malinche, an IF company which produces content that works across platforms and put games on the iPod before iTunes did.
Sure enough, Amazon has Malinche’s library of titles (all authored by Sherman) for the Kindle, but the descriptions say nothing about the titles being playable. I decided to check in with Howard to see what was going on.
Game Couch: Are these titles games, novels or transcripts?
Howard Sherman: Our Kindle titles are actual transcripts and not re-writes. From beginning to end our transcripts read like novels so it’s a perfect fit.
GC: So what’s the issue with putting actual interactive fiction on the Kindle?
HS: The issue boils down to the Kindle being locked up tighter than the technical design plans to the NEXT iPhone Apple is working on. There’s no easy way in there. Even though Kindle runs in a Linux environment it’s far from an open plane to deliver outside titles on. The platform itself is inaccessible from the outside no matter what and the severely controlled access to the Sprint network make any Internet approach to loading IF impossible.
GC: So the Kindle’s security makes it restrictive?
HS: That’s before we even get to the issue of actually deploying an interpreter that could load a Malinche story file. Would Frotz Linux work on a Kindle? Maybe but I suspect not for a number of reasons. Chief among them, the Kindle is pretty closely tied to a read-only file system so game saves would probably fail without serious coding changes. Sure, the Kindle can save your place in a standard ebook, but the methodology is probably very different.
GC: Do you think you’ll be able to crack this?
HS: Nobody has any hard numbers on actual unit sales of Kindle making it impractical to devote a respectable chunk of resources to develop for a platform with an unknown audience size. So we went with Plan B — load a full transcript of each Malinche title onto the Kindle and sell it as a conventional Kindle title through Amazon.