
The Unix Game - MilnerRoute
https://www.unixgame.io/
======
reificator
Not a fan of scratch-like UIs but I figured I'd play around a bit. "Solved"
the first problem and went to continue, but was met with a signup wall.

Immediately left with no intention to come back. Things like this absolutely
destroy your funnel. Prompt me to sign up after I've made some progress, not
before I've even gotten a feel for what you're offering.

~~~
kmill
This is a game made by a research lab for fun, celebrating the 50th
anniversary of Unix. I'm not sure they're too interested in funnels, beyond
letting people have a little fun (and some advertising that something like the
Bell Labs of old might still exist).

The signup annoyed me, too, but it just wants a username and password for the
leaderboard. It's not collecting your e-mail address. (There was some kind of
bug with the user creation step where it would keep prompting for your
country. Reloading the page is a workaround.)

~~~
reificator
> _I 'm not sure they're too interested in funnels, beyond letting people have
> a little fun (and some advertising that something like the Bell Labs of old
> might still exist)._

I picked the word funnel because I'm on HN and that's the quickest way to
convey that showing me a signup screen before I've done anything of value is
going to lose me. Unless I clicked a button to sign up or went to do something
that I have an intuition would result in a signup page, I usually click
control-w before I'm conscious of why.

Most users don't care about leaderboards and global leaderboards have been
shown to have a demotivating effect. There's a reason why most games that show
leaderboards now default to a friends leaderboard, with the global one tucked
away behind it.

Forcing a signup to enable something I don't care about doesn't seem like a
great bargain to me. Prompt me to sign up in order to save my progress and I
might do it. Prompt me as soon as I interact with the page and I'm out.

~~~
Vaslo
Next to no one cares about the free signup. Get a second email account for
free and sign up and have fun. If you don’t like it, it’s your choice, but
seems like it isn’t a big deal to me.

~~~
seankimdesign
Forced account creation prompts are, in fact, a huge source of traffic bounce
on most web apps despite most of them being free of charge. So your statement
is plain false. Many people do find them to be a significant source of
annoyance.

~~~
ddingus
And it is self selecting. Filter for peeps who just don't care, and the ones
who are really interested.

The hard cases are out of the funnel.

Maybe that has merit?

Not that I'm advocating forced signups. Hate em. But, I can see the logic in
play here.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
The point is: if you do it too early, you eliminate also those who could care,
if you didn't break the delicate bonding proces with a brutal sign-up form.

~~~
ddingus
Maybe. They could just as easily be hard cases too.

It is not always seen as delicate.

------
tomvc
Speaking up here as the person that designed the game at Bell Labs: we'll get
rid of the signup wall - it really was meant only to get a unique nickname so
we can put your score up on the leaderboard. We like the suggestion of
generating a unique bookmarkable url instead.

As for why we don't allow you to type commands into a terminal: the game is as
much about solving a puzzle with the basic blocks you're given as it is about
shell programming. For newcomers the scratch interface a nice way to explore
the kinds of things one can do with the unix utilities (in case it wasn't
clear: the game is meant to be approachable to people unfamiliar with unix)

And besides, if we'd give you hackers a full-blown shell, you'd solve most of
the challenges in no-time - where's the fun in that? :)

cheers, Tom

~~~
baud147258
As someone very unfamiliar with a Unix, it's an interesting learning
experience. But I would have prefer to know earlier the existence of the on-
hover command documentation: perhaps add a button next to each commands that
would show the same documentation; that would help people unfamiliar with Unix
to know what they can do.

Also perhaps a canonical/best practice answer for each question could be
educational, perhaps with comments explaining why, again to help the
newcomers: there's a bunch of valid answers, but I feel like there should be a
better (or at least more elegant) solution.

------
mythz
I hope their analytics show how many user engagements their losing by trying
to force Sign Up before anyone can evaluate it.

~~~
btheeten
It did show, so we took action. You can now play anonymous.

------
Pete_D
This looks like fun. It'd be really nice if there was an option to just type
the commands in instead of using the GUI, though I guess that would defeat the
purpose a bit.

~~~
dugo
this

------
acd
Ken Thompson and David Richie, Joe Osanna, Bob Morris, Dough McIlroy listed in
the first game created UNIX. Ken was motivated by wanting to play games on the
Bell Labs PDP.

"As a part of porting the game to the PDP-7, Thompson developed his own
operating system, which later formed the core of the Unix operating system. "
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_\(video_game\))

Now the web runs on Linux which is similar but is not UNIX. I think its a good
honor by Bell Labs creating a game that we can play.

[http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.html](http://www.bell-
labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.html) "The summer of 69"

Three great things coming out of 1969, UNIX, the Apollo 11 mission walk on the
moon and Woodstock festival!

------
lukifer
I'd be interested in a non-gamified CLI-builder GUI in this style; it'd be
especially cool to surface flags from man pages. Many CLIs follow conventions
or are easy to remember for basic use cases, but as soon as one is juggling a
dozen flags and multiple pipes (ffmpeg comes to mind), it can be a tedious
workflow to do it all from a terminal.

~~~
seldomI
There's a block based editor for CLI programs in development:
[https://app.code-it-studio.de/project/303](https://app.code-it-
studio.de/project/303)

We made it for educational purposes though, you can only run the programs
inside the browser (yet).

------
geolgau
Let's make a unix game where you can't type commands in a terminal emulator...
OK! Plus, facebook login? fuck off!

------
cat199
cool idea. but..

1)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Unix)#Useless_use_of_cat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_\(Unix\)#Useless_use_of_cat)

2) speaking of #1, wheres < > &| etc?

3) Question #2:

    
    
        Extract only Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie's last names. Hint: look at Thompson and Ritchie's names in the list. What's special about the position of these lines in the file? Can you find a command that lets you get just those lines?
    
       um:
    
         egrep '(Thompson|Ritchie)' file
    
    
        there is more than one way to skin a cat, and some of these don't require static/fixed field numbers. and even then: `sed -ne 3,4p`. wheres that?

------
dugo
I can type the solutions in blind, the GUI fucks me up.

~~~
falcor84
That send to be fully intentional - it's more challenging to solve the
problems with a limited subset of commands and inputs (e.g. you're only
allowed to grep for specific patterns)

------
ncmncm
When I run it:

1\. The "c", " belle", and "poems" categories do not turn green when solved.
Furthermore, none of them are counted solved on the leaderboard. This is
probably why the leaderboard scores are bimodal.

2\. Poem 4 is fundamentally misleading. It doesn't want the letters arranged
in any sort of cross shape, it just wants a word like the others; producing
the cross shape is impossible with the commands available, because the cut
command does not accept ranges.

~~~
btheeten
On 1.: you need to solve all questions in the challenge for the challenge to
turn green. Try re-submitting your solutions. It should have remembered them.
On 2.: the results should not be arranged as a cross; the source is.

~~~
ncmncm
I have systematically re-submitted all the solutions several times. All are
judged solved.

Look at your leaderboard. Is that a plausible distribution of scores?

~~~
btheeten
Yes it is. We have 3847 registered players out of which 131 have top scores...
We don't show the full leaderboard; only the top 30, and then you, you +3, you
-3 so you know where you are approximately. Granted, this could be made
clearer...

~~~
btheeten
And now we do make it clearer. Hope you like it. Thanks for the feedback!

~~~
ncmncm
None of this addresses the problem that it is failing to record successful
solutions.

It's great that it works ok for some players, but if this degree of dismissal
is typical, I see no reason to communicate further.

------
mjcohen
From the initial screen, I would use gawk (or awk if I had to).

------
bcaa7f3a8bbc
The webpage has too much JavaScript and doesn't completely load under my slow
network, so I'm not sure what are allowed to use in the game. But to an first
impression, I think the game should encourage the participate to solve the
problems in different approaches, although Unix pipe is powerful, sometimes a
5-line awk program or a "for loop" in bash is more effective.

------
kentbrew
Lost me at "please log in or register."

------
baud147258
What's the valid output for question 2 on Unix Evolution?

I tried Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, 07974 & Murray Hill Computer
Center, but both weren't accepted

~~~
btheeten
Murray Hill

~~~
baud147258
Thank you.

------
baud147258
I've had some fun, (re)learned a little about Unix commands, since I'm only
using Windows.

------
btheeten
We took a brick out the wall. You can now play anonymously. Thanks for the
feedback!

------
ben174
If you enjoy this, you might also enjoy www.vimgolf.com

------
jedimastert
Not a fan of the idea that I can't move forward until I log into _something_.

I'm fine with my games not being saved, I just wanted to mess around.

~~~
kmill
Click the third option, choose a random username and password, then have fun.

~~~
rambojazz
This is one of the worst anti-patterns that I've seen in a while.

------
redka
These would be really easy if I could use my little tool [1]

[1] [https://github.com/thisredone/rb](https://github.com/thisredone/rb)

