Mastaba Snoopy: Choose-your-own-adventure based on a horrific alien intelligence that loves Peanuts

Mastaba Snoopy is surreal and wonderful dystopian science fiction choose-your-own adventure whose premise is that an all-powerful alien has mistaken a Peanuts book for a guide to human interaction, and enslaved humanity according to its principles. It's built on Twee and Tiddlywiki:

1. An Unknown Alien Being acquires a child's forgotten book and mistakenly beliefs that it depicts proper protocol for interaction with the human world.

2. It grows and converts all life into more of itself, like a living strangelet - emotionless spacial cancer. It can shapeshift or divide at will and learns quickly. Each mass it breaks off possesses its own intelligence.

3. The new being filters everything it perceives through the lens of Peanuts comics. It mimics characters, but with no understanding of how they fit together. A computer-generated collage. It doesn't understand human rules - but it does understands the laws of Peanuts.

4. After many years, the Milky Way and surrounding galaxies have been entirely overtaken by this single entity. Suddenly deprived of food, the organism begins to STAGNATE.

5. The organism transforms into a distorted parody of the former planet Earth, a foul, expansive hellworld - filtered, again, through Peanuts.

End result: There exists an infinite, nonsensical world with all locations, living things, and social interaction based on half-remembered dreams.

Thousands of years to fester and the memory is going bad, the original book having been long since lost in the constant churning reshaping. This new, living world has been dying for millenia.

You are here to watch an alien rot.

Mastaba Snoopy (via Waxy)

(Image: Snoopy's World in New Town Plaza, Sha Tin, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from edwin11's photostream)

• [voiceinthedistance]

  It’s a terrific (and frightening) premise, but they chose a truly annoying way of presenting it on their website.  Also, a little bit of my enthusiasm for it died when I read this sentence:  ”1. An Unknown Alien Being acquires a child’s forgotten book and mistakenly beliefs (sic) that it depicts proper protocol for interaction with the human world.”  
  Are my standards too high?

  • [Halloween_Jack]

     It’s a completely irrelevant and derivative set-up, previously done both as a Star Trek episode (“A Piece of the Action”) and a parody of Star Trek (Galaxy Quest). Presenting the thing as-is, without the exposition, would be much funnier.

• [Petzl]

  uh, every time you die you have to click-thru the same 30 introductory clicks?  you can’t restart without the intro?

  • [Ben Conley]

    Just hit back in your browser. #superchill

• [Felton / Moderator]

  Oh my god, what’s that horrible thing bursting out of Snoopy’s chest!?!?

• [DevinC]

  Wah waa, bwahh bah bah, baah buh banh buh.

• [bazzargh]

  The character encodings are a bit screwed up, dropbox is serving this as ascii when the doc says it wants to be UTF-8. Save it locally and open it, it’ll work. Once you do this, some of the streams of random characters make more sense – they’re mostly GOOD GRIEF rendered with random symbols, though the ACQUIRE NICKELS page has some vertical text which only renders correctly for me in Chrome.

  There’s one ending (you’ll know it if you see it) featuring a lot of red that looks like it’s supposed to be Ascii art, but it just looks like junk to me.

• [signsofrain]

  Are bad text adventures the next ‘cool’ thing? Found that unintelligible. If I wanted to play a game full of nonsense and ultimately meaningless choices I’d replay The Stanley Parable. At least there’s a pleasant narrator to listen to!

  • [FoolishOwl]

    There wasn’t much nonsense in The Stanley Parable, and the choices were meaningless, but in a different sense of meaningless. It was a commentary on computer game narratives.

• [FoolishOwl]

  I hate to say this, but it seems a lot like meaningless weirdness. I think I found a “victory” page — at least “THE END” is followed by something like an author’s signature.

• [jackbird]

  Want to be steered to the good IF (or at least read insightful reviews of IF both good and bad)?  Read Emily Short’s blog: http://emshort.wordpress.com/.  She also handles IF reviews for Play This Thing, although that’s more or less defunct now.

• [Justin Becker]

  I love this.

• [slida]

  This seemed pretty interesting, but it didn’t work right.