R is a game engine, fight me

tl;dr

R is ‘a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics’. Ahahaha, no it’s not, it’s a game engine. I’ve created a ‘splendid’ list of games you can play—written in R—to prove it. Help expand it.

Stats only!

R is not a general, multi-purpose programming language. It was written to do statistical analysis and make charts. You are literally not allowed to do anything else with it. You should use <LANGUAGE> instead, which is much more suited to your specific use case. R is a joke language for nerds.

You should not read beyond this point if you think, quite rightly, that mirth and frivolity are unsuited to an R session.

Stats only?

Unity. Unreal. GameMaker. Godot. All of these videogame engines are now obsolete.

It is R—humble R!—that represents the future of gaming.

To prove it, I’ve created a list of ‘splendid R games’ in a GitHub repo¹ that you are welcome to contribute to.²

Yes, R can be used for fun. Do not tell R Core.

Wait, he’s serious?

I think there’s three kinds of ‘platform’ for games written in R:

1. For the console
2. In Shiny
3. Ported

Games played in the console are pretty straightforward and probably most common. You can run some code, or a function from a package, to launch some code in the R console that you can interact with. A simple option for this might involve use of readline() to receive user input, for example, like Giora Simchoni’s excellent text-based puzzler, Castle of R.

Giora’s Castle of R running in the terminal.

Shiny can give you a little more flexibility when it comes to graphics and user input, at the expense of needing to host the app and maybe some extra JavaScript skills. A great example of this is Pedro Silva’s winning entry (app, source) to the Posit Shiny contest in 2020.

A still from Pedro’s Shiny Decisions app.

The third category is a little more boundary-pushing. Imagine if R was powerful enough to let you port existing games. Well, surprise, ya boi Mike Cheng (aka coolbutuseless) has pushed hard on expanding the capabilities of R to run fast enough and with realtime user input,³ porting the classic Another World (1991) to R, which was showcased at 2022’s Posit conference (source, video, blog).

A still from Mike’s rstudio::conf(2022) presentation, featuring Another World.

Of course, within these ‘platforms’ are genres like word games, arcade games, puzzle games, etc. Will you be the first to create an MMORPG (a massively-multiplayer online R-powered game)?

I am an indie game dev now

I’ve always been interested in how videogames are coded,⁴ wishing that I could do the same myself. Of course I could simply learn ‘real’ programming languages.

Except that’s blasphemy. Of course I’d rather break my own mind and spirit in an attempt to make R achieve 0.1% of what might be possible in P*thon.

Case in point, I’ve made a few R packages containing some little toys (in order of gooddest to baddest):

• {r.oguelike} (source, blogs) for a procedural-dungeon explorer with enemy pathfinding and inventory
• {tamRgo} (source, blog) for a cyber pet in your R console that persists between sessions
• {safar6} (source, blog) for a text-based re-make of the Safari Zone from the first generation of Pokémon games
• {ActionSquirrel} (source, blog) for a tile-based, turn-based minigame in the R console
• {hokey} (source, blog) for minigames that use direct keypress inputs with {keypress}

Hint when playing {tamRgo}: do not forget about your pet for 138 days. RIP Kevin XVIII.

I’ve got something in the pipeline that involves extremely rudimentary physics in the R console. Wow! For release in 2023 (because game launches never go wrong).

Ready Player 2

The splendid list must be missing a bunch of games. Please leave an issue or pull request in the splendid-r-games repo to add more examples.

Next stop: letting people run R games in the browser without an installed copy of R. This is already possible with a service like Binder, which can spin up an instance of RStudio with packages pre-installed I did this for {r.oguelike}).

Just like the Nokia N-Gage, amirite?

But soon you might be able to use WebR to play games in the browser without even spinning up RStudio, ooh. So look out for an R version of itch.io in future, lol.

Environment

Session info

Last rendered: 2023-10-11 12:51:08 CEST

R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16)
Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Ventura 13.2.1

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.3-arm64/Resources/lib/libRblas.0.dylib 
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.3-arm64/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib;  LAPACK version 3.11.0

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

time zone: Europe/Rome
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] htmlwidgets_1.6.2 compiler_4.3.1    fastmap_1.1.1     cli_3.6.1        
 [5] tools_4.3.1       htmltools_0.5.6.1 rstudioapi_0.15.0 yaml_2.3.7       
 [9] rmarkdown_2.25    knitr_1.44        jsonlite_1.8.7    xfun_0.40        
[13] digest_0.6.33     rlang_1.1.1       evaluate_0.22    

Footnotes

1. I originally labelled the GitHub repo as an ‘awesome’ repo, which I later learned has a very specific meaning. You might have seen awesome lists before, like the awesome-quarto repo by Mickaël, or the new awesome-webr list by Nan Xiao. ‘Splendid’ is much more of a Bri’ish word than ‘awesome’, so it feels more natural anyway.

2. Note that I have carefully released this post just after April fool’s day, which means I am super, super serious. As usual.

3. See the {nara} and {eventloop} packages in particular.

4. I like YouTube devlogs by folks like Seb Lague, ThinMatrix, SquidGod, Jonas, TanTan and others. R can never achieve what they’re up to, but I like listening through the logic of what they’re doing.

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