Last week we found that Twitter’s new card feature allowed you to post games from the Internet Archive and play them right in tweets. I had a pretty good time playing the old Maniac Mansion game while checking the rest of my social media.
Unfortunately, these posts violated the rules of their new Play Card system, which is specifically reserved for “linear audio and video consumption only.” Embedded versions of MS-DOS games are non-linear, as they require input from the player, thus they are against the rules. In fact, Twitter specifically asks people not to build “end-to-end interactive experiences inside the video or audio player unrelated to Player Card content, such as the following: purchasing, gaming, polling, messaging, and data entry.”
As a result, Twitter has shut down the aforementioned functionality. Now all your URLs leading you to the Internet Archive will simply result in a text link, and not a fully playable version of Maniac Mansion . What a shame.
We suppose that Twitter doesn’t want Player Cards to allow you to play games, because they don’t want a malicious player card to somehow hijack or record your computer inputs, simply because it auto loaded on your Twitter feed. What do you think? Should we be able to post games to Twitter, or is it too dangerous? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Source: Twitter