Xah Lee, 2008-09-22
“Phrase Invaders”, a arcade game in Second Life virtual world, build by Seven Shikami.
… in the past year i've had thought of writing a game in elisp. You know how you have typing games, where letters or words falls from sky and you have to type them fast before they hit the ground. In a similar way, my Emacs Operation game, a window might be split into 2 panes (emacs speak: frames in 2 windows), where one is user area and the other is the example area, where the example area contains a example text with instruction on what final result should be like, and the user types in his pane to create identical text in the example area, using all emacs commands to carry out the task. This game will be timed and keep score, based on correctness and speed, and can have levels, from tasks requiring basic operation such as cut, copy, paste, paste previous (yank-pop), kill-line, undo, kill-word, kill-word-backward, isearch, to more advanced that are done with say using keyboard macros, using narrow-to-region, regex replace, rectangle, registers, switching modes, switching or listing buffers, deleting buffers, using dired, navigate info, view a man page, run a shell command, etc, and perhaps at the boss level will require to write simple elisp command on the spot for the best score.
In the above, the game is a real time based game. That is, the clock is ticking and your score depends on speed. In another twist, the game can be made into a flash-card quiz or knowledge testing based, where each question asks you to do something and you have to carried it out in order to pass, without a time limit. You might be able to ask hint.
See also: Typing of the Dead.