HTML2RPG — Hyperlinked map editor for a playable internet

A look into alternative ways at navigating web content
Date
16 Mar 2016

We take web browsers, web­pages, and con­ven­tion­al lay­outs of text + images for grant­ed. Even with WebGL, Flash, and oth­er means of exper­i­ment­ing with what we see online, con­ven­tions have remained con­ven­tion­al when it comes down to HTTP. We read hyper­text as text (well, and images), and browsers are designed towards min­i­mal alter­ation of that data, main­tain­ing an over­all skeuo­mor­phic out­look on the web as lit­er­al pages that haven't strayed that far away from the print­ing press. Enter alter­na­tive inter­pre­ta­tions of HTML. How about treat­ing the many hyper­linked nodes we see as ‘pages’ dif­fer­ent­ly? Where <a> is a gate, <div> a house, <img> a tree, <b> a cloud, char­ac­ter count gives you vol­ume… This is all very fig­u­ra­tive of course, but. Well. You get the idea. 

This is a first attempt at doing just that — our HTML2RPG brows­er is more of an exper­i­men­tal and prim­i­tive game engine were dif­fer­ent lev­els are gen­er­at­ed by "surf­ing the inter­net." You start from a home­page, trans­lat­ed into a lev­el where every hyper­link becomes a gate to oth­er maps gen­er­at­ed the same way, and so on, and so on. Basi­cal­ly, we’re now dream­ing of build­ing an RPG game/​web brows­er whose lev­els would feed on html con­tent of which you nev­er see the real con­tent and urls. More soon!