Parsely and MS Paint Adventures replaced the game engine with a human parser

WIRED's Andy Baio profiled an inversion spreading through games: instead of making software more human, make humans more like software. At PAX East, a young man opened a Penny Arcade Q&A by narrating Action Castle — 'You are in a small cottage. There is a fishing pole here. Exits are out.' — and the audience instantly began playing. It was the first of Jared Sorensen's Parsely series, live-action versions of late-1970s text adventures in which the computer is replaced entirely by a person with a map and a loose outline.

The substitution solves the problems that have plagued game designers for decades: understanding player intent, making characters act human instead of 'like idiot robots', and handling every edge case without a decade of development. Baio compares it to Amazon Mechanical Turk's 'artificial artificial intelligence' — layering an interface over anonymous humans to solve problems best tackled by people.

The largest implementation is Andrew Hussie's MS Paint Adventures, started in 2006 with Jailbreak: readers suggested commands, Hussie drew the results. Problem Sleuth, his second adventure, spanned over 1,600 pages in a year; Homestuck reached 4,100 pages in 2.5 years — the longest webcomic ever — while the site averaged 600,000 unique visitors daily.

As suggestions multiplied into the thousands, Hussie noted the paradox that total reader input makes a story harder to keep 'truly reader-driven'. He shifted to cherry-picking commands while involving fans in other ways — including eight fan-made soundtrack albums.

Replace the computer with a human: a gamesmaster with a map and a loose outline parses any input, so the game's only limit is what people can imagine.

Combinatorial explosion: every added object multiplies the interactions a coded engine must handle.

A human parser understands intent no text parser can match.

The audience supplies the computation — readers' commands are the edge-case generator.

The format scales: one narrator or artist can serve hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players.

When software cannot flex as fast as users, route the ambiguous part through a human — and abstract the interface so the substitution feels like a machine.

By late 2011 Homestuck was the longest webcomic ever recorded, with act five of seven wrapping as the article published, and Parsely games kept spreading as a party format where one player pretends to be the videogame.