Mapping The Dark Room YouTube Edition

What-ing The What??

A text adventure videogame is like a grumpy Old Testament god who loves grammar and hates you, the player. You type in commands, read a description of the results and solve puzzles, usually while navigating a maze of rooms.

The Dark Room is an adventure game on YouTube made by a comedian named John Robertson.

It is played by clicking hyperlinks that appear as text annotations overlayed on top of videos. The introduction became a catchphrase “You awake to find yourself in a Dark Room! Do you go N, S, E or W?”

Youtube had a feature called “annotations” which allowed video creators to overlay text boxes on top of the video box. Hyperlinks could be added to the text for the intended purpose of directing viewers to previous videos on the channel. So the comedian used this feature to link to the next video, producing a maze of videos.

The Hack

Since these annotations appeared embedded in the code of the page, it can be grabbed programmatically. Technically, “scraping” is collecting data from a webpage; “crawling” is when a script finds and follows links to webpages without human intervention. Fun fact: Early Google Search depended on web crawler bots.