text-to-speech synthesis + voice recognition can revive text based adventures as lightweight audio only games.<p>the best immersion engine is human imagination. a world in which literary fiction becomes interactive content, and authors begin to write for their work to be performed - to be read out loud and be repeatable with hidden narrative structures - creates an interesting alternative to the current direction the video game industry is going (total artificial immersion).<p>imagine setting a game in a real city and having players play through a day, mixing real physical locations and objects with virtual audio characters and allowing for the relatively low-tech solution of only engaging the one sense artificially but all other senses in reality to create a type of spacial-temporal ambiguity, the inversion of immersion.<p>would also be great for guided tours, recommending people places to visit, as a teaching aid and a typical shift away from reading as the primary mechanism our civilization is geared around which is a specialized skill that requires years of training and teaches bad habits around attention, severely limiting memory retention and creating unrealistic freedom when it comes to conveying information, when in the world things only happen once one way, in the artificial world of permanent words time stops to flow and the authors intent can be masked and layered behind tricks and tactics difficult to discern, it is much harder to lie and distort things in person.