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Revisiting 'Zork': What We Lost in the Transition to Visual Games
- roc 15y agoLet's also not forget the mechanics of these games tended to be maddening at times. Knowing what you wanted to do and having to guess at the nouns and verbs the designer expected was beyond frustrating. I'm all for fond remembrance. But the problems of text-based games weren't limited to comparing poorly to graphics. Some of them were inherent; implicit companions of the desirable parts of such "written" games.
- dlo 15y agoAre there any NLP guys here? Can we improve this situation with modern technology?
- davidst 15y agoYes, depending on your expectations. With a LOT of effort it would be entirely possible to build something like SHRDLU that could handle a specific game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU Caution: Don't be misled by the impressive-looking conversation transcript. With no disrespect meant to Terry Winograd and the ground-breaking work he did it was- like every natural language demonstration since the dawn of computing- fragile, prone to odd mistakes and the transcripts were usually generated by someone already acclimated to the idiosyncrasies the system to make it look its best. You could build something that recognized a richer grammar and even engaged in limited conversational discourse. It would be good enough that a person might briefly forget they were dealing with a system of limited capabilities until, inevitably, it would break down and remind them they are not conversing with a human. The risk is those failures could be sufficiently frequent and severe as to make it worthless. The user might be better off with something less ambitious, more predictable and less frustrating. Then again, that wouldn't do anything to push the state of the art, so it should be worth the risk to try it.
- jonhendry 15y agoSimply having modern RAM capacity helps, because authors can add many more synonyms in their code to handle various player inputs. The early parsers were constrained by having to run in tiny RAM spaces (64k, 128k, 256k); expanding vocabulary was difficult to do without removing space for description text and other important game data. In Inform 7, when targeting the glulx VM the memory limits are much larger (i.e., the sizes we expect today) and you can define synonyms to your heart's content.
- jonhendry 15y agoDepends on the parser. Infocom was pretty good, especially toward the end with the larger VMs.
- hugh3 15y agoZork really isn't the best example, just the first (and even then it was just an adaptation of Adventure). The Infocom adventures got far more sophisticated in every way over the following few years, in terms of prose, setting, gameplay and atmosphere. I credit adventure games with teaching me to touch type. To this day I can still type "inventory" far faster than any other nine-letter word.
- endgame 15y agoI think that the old MUDs have great potential as a teaching tool. It might be harder in this modern age of fantastic graphics, but if you get someone hooked on a MUD, they usually get a typing speed of 200wpm or so. Further, the persistent nature of the world lends itself to programming. I've been meaning to write a small mudlib and course around MudCore, a server I finished recently. It's at https://github.com/endgame/MudCore https://github.com/endgame/MudCore , if anyone is interested.
- sltkr 15y agoLucky then, that nobody told you you could just type 'i' too. ;-)
- StavrosK 15y agoendgame's comment below is dead, so I'll repost it here because it is very good: I think that the old MUDs have great potential as a teaching tool. It might be harder in this modern age of fantastic graphics, but if you get someone hooked on a MUD, they usually get a typing speed of 200wpm or so. Further, the persistent nature of the world lends itself to programming. I've been meaning to write a small mudlib and course around MudCore, a server I finished recently. It's at github.com endgame/MudCore , if anyone is interested.
- psykotic 15y ago> they usually get a typing speed of 200wpm or so Impressive. The world record sustained typing speed is around 180 WPM. :) Playing MUDs definitely helped my typing speed but so did live chatting with BBS sysops, programming and just general computer use. Most of my computer friends growing up had decent typing speed just from using DOS for everything. Practice makes perfect. I'm always impressed by kids who grew up with mobile phones from an early age and can SMS at lightning speed.
- cageface 15y agoThis is exactly why I tend to prefer books to theatre, and theatre to film. Filling in the details engages my imagination in a way that the polished, finished surfaces of contemporary games and films do not.
- eru 15y agoThere are still lots of contemporary indie games and films.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- shawndumas 15y agohttp://www.getlamp.com/ http://www.getlamp.com/
- mgkimsal 15y agoAwesome documentary on the history of interactive fiction - big focus on the early days up through infocom (actually, I just realized I never finished watching it!)
- nprincigalli 15y agoOn youtube, from a google tech talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU
- dsr_ 15y agoWe didn't lose anything -- interactive fiction games are still being produced, and you can play them on your android or iphone these days, too. http://ifarchive.org/ http://ifarchive.org/ and http://xyzzyawards.org/ http://xyzzyawards.org/ are good places to start.
- gmkoliver 15y agoA great front end to the archive is http://ifdb.tads.org http://ifdb.tads.org.
- jonhendry 15y agoZoom is a nice OS X app for running IF games, and it incorporates a GUI interface to ifdb. http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk/mac/zoom.html http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk/mac/zoom.html The developer of Zoom also does the Mac IDE for Inform 7.
- billybob 15y agoIf someone wanted to write an interactive text game like these and put it on the web, are there any frameworks available? If not, a lot of the work would be on figuring out how to parse the player's input, how to map out the possible paths through the game, etc, instead of writing the story.
- dsr_ 15y agoHeck yes. It all started out with the Z-Machine, the first major virtual machine architecture. The most recent is Glulx. Glulx itself is here: http://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/ http://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/ with a new interpreter here: http://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/ http://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/ /
- mquander 15y agoThere's a whole programming language, testing & documentation framework, and IDE. http://inform7.com/ http://inform7.com/
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- orenmazor 15y agoI miss these games.
- lylejohnson 15y agoI still remember bicycling over to the "L" building on Auburn's campus to play ADVENT and DND and DUNGEON on their PDP-11 (or whatever model of minicomputer it was at the time). Thanks to the OP for sharing this article. Now I have to will myself to do some actual work today instead of playing old IF games online.
- Hoff 15y agotelnet gein.vistech.net Login: games / pressplay A ADVENTURE The original Collosal Cave adventure B BLIND Escape the unseen maze C BUNNY Destroy the man-eating bunny rabbits D CATCH Navigate a star-field E CHICKEN Chicken hunt F CONNECT4 Connect 4 in a row G CROSSFIRE Evade and attack within the grid H DALEKS Terminate... Terminate... I DEFENDER Defend the planet from the invaders J DESTROYER Destroy the aliens K DIG Dig Dug L DOOR Watch out for the monster in the maze M EMPIRE The original single player Empire N GRANNY Road Rage! O MOLE Hunt the moles P TETRIS Manipulate the falling blocks
- adrianN 15y agoGlobal Thermonuclear War
- cschmidt 15y agoMy favorite text adventure was Pirate's Cove, on my trusty Vic 20. You can still play it, with an emulator http://www.c64gg.com/Adams_Scott_DL.html http://www.c64gg.com/Adams_Scott_DL.html although that version seems to have some simple graphics, which is just wrong. There's more information on the Scott Adams games here http://www.lysator.liu.se/adventure/Adventure_International/Classic.html http://www.lysator.liu.se/adventure/Adventure_International/... Good times....
- frobozz 15y agoHere's Scott Adams' site: http://www.msadams.com/ http://www.msadams.com/ You can download Windows versions of all the SAGA adventures there (apart from the Marvel ones, I think), and he has links to web-playable versions.
- minikomi 15y agoAny suggestions for Infocom games? Just missed them I'm afraid - cut my teeth on nethack and commander keen.
- wladimir 15y agoPersonally I found Trinity very good. The story starts in the cold war, and then takes you into a weird alice-in-wonderland like dimension, where you have to visit various places before a nuclear bomb hits. The Enchanter, Sorcerer, Spellbreaker trilogy was also a lot of fun. And of course Hitchhikers Guide to The Universe :-)
- lylejohnson 15y agoIt's hard to go wrong with any of them, really. You should play through the original Zork trilogy. I really liked their mystery titles, especially "Deadline"; I seem to recall that you had a lot more interaction with the other characters in the game (i.e. the suspects). The "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" game was pretty good, too; even though I'd already read the books, some of the puzzles were tricky to figure out. I think I still have my "Don't Panic!" button that came in the box with that one.
- lylejohnson 15y agoForgot to say, also check out cschmidt's recommendation elsewhere in this thread for the Scott Adams adventure games. I played a bunch of those too, back in the day.
- JonnieCache 15y agoh2g2 is difficult to the point where it seems like a parody of the genre. Some of it makes stuff like monkey island seem trivial, and I find it hard not to assume that the whole thing was a big joke on the part of Douglas Adams.
- sp332 15y agoYeah, H2G2 is really, really funny and pretty much impossible. Spend some time fumbling around in each room (there really are some funny responses you should see!) and then refer to a walkthrough to advance to the next room. Save often - although even saving often won't help if you don't get the screwdriver in the first room. It really is a player-hostile game.
- saddino 15y agoYou can play zork in your browser here: http://thcnet.net/zork/index.php http://thcnet.net/zork/index.php
- kingmanaz 15y agoGreat article. Ultima 7 was a graphical game that had a similar effect on me. The graphics were somewhat abstract and generic and left a lot for the imagination to fill in. The writing was wonderful and put flesh on the world. Playing the game was like reading a novel. It seems like game makers need to focus less on graphics and more on music and writing.
- MetallicCloud 15y agoUltima 6 and 7 were awesome games. I haven't had a chance to play it, but they have done remakes of 5 and 6 with better graphics. u6project.com/
- rsbrown 15y agoThis article brings to mind what I dislike about the modern game industry. First off, what is a game? Let's consider two broad types of games: competitive games and puzzle games. Competitive games (like chess) feature more than one player and the outcome of the game is unknown (both in terms of the winner and the final game state). Puzzle games (generally speaking) don't have a strong competitive element and the final outcome is known (i.e., a lone player solves the puzzle). I contend that first-person shooters (in single player mode) are nothing more than big puzzle games. This isn't bad per se, but the problem lies in how these games have evolved. Rather than make the "puzzles" in FPS games more challenging and innovative (i.e., focus on gameplay), the major game studios have instead focused on increasing the audio-visuals and cinematic attributes of their products. As a result, gameplay has consistently been minimized in favor of eye candy. No better example comes to mind than the recent smash hit, L.A. Noire. The extent to which the producers of this game clearly wish they were making movies comes off as obsequious. The tiny sliver of game mechanics they did include is mind-numbingly repetitive and utterly without challenge. These things are no longer "games", they're shitty movies.
- boredguy8 15y ago1911: "Edison's Frankenstein proves the simple fact that these things aren't 'film', they're shitty books." I think at their best, video games do better than "shitty movies". If someone made a list of "Top 10 Moments" from film & video games, I'm betting Aeris' death at the hands of Sepiroth makes that list.
- dkarl 15y agoBuilding games around movie-like cutscenes is like filming a stage production of a play and calling it a movie. There were plenty of people who did essentially that in the early days of movies, because of the higher prestige of stage drama and their desire to produce "art", but that wasn't how film developed into an art form. If games want to fulfill their potential as art, they have to evolve toward their strengths instead of being just a shitty way of presenting mediocre renditions of an existing art form.
- smackfu 15y agoFor everyone person who loved text adventures, another nine people gave up in the first room.
- widget 15y agoThis may be true, but it doesn't really address the point of the article. The argument is that modern games could take a lesson from text adventure games in engaging the players' imaginations.
- kahawe 15y agoWhat I miss in modern games is... really fun, great jump n runs and fun adventures like "Monkey Island" seem to be a dieing or already dead genre. It is all about MMOs, RTS, role playing, shooters and sports games nowadays.
- Fargren 15y agoBen Chandler really has a lot of what's great about those games. Try Awakener[1], Air and Eternally Us [1]http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=search&sterm=awakener&submit=Search http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=search...!
- daeken 15y agoFor what it's worth, Monkey Island on the iPad is amazing. Seriously the way it's meant to be played. I just introduced my girlfriend to the series on the iPad the other day. Tablets seem to be bringing adventure games back a bit -- they were effectively dead for the longest time.
- marcocampos 15y agoMonkey Island on the iPad? Sir, you've made my day :) I miss the golden age of graphical adventure games: Monkey Island, Day Of The Tentacle, Space Quest, King Quest, Hands Of Fate and many others... :/ Today's games aren't that fun, or maybe I'm just old.
- StavrosK 15y agoI had the realization the other day that the SCUMM games and Heroes of Might and Magic (an amazing game) would play very very well on an iPad. What a pity, I have an iPad 2 in front of me and I can't play the games. Thanks, Apple. I can't wait to get rid of it for a Galaxy tab.
- tsunamifury 15y agoUm... ever heard of ScummVM? They have a wonderful iPad edition.
- fedd 15y agoi foresee an article 'what we lost in the transition from keyboards to audio-visual interfaces'.
- palebluedot 15y agoI remember as kid, playing the Zork series and exchanging hints with my 4th grade teacher. Great game, and that made it all the more fun. I think the game that had the biggest impact on me, though, was a game for the Apple ][ called "Odyssey"... I remember many hours lost to that game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_The_Compleat_Apventure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_The_Compleat_Apventure
- danssig 15y agoIf you want games with no/low graphics and lots of depth there are still MUDs out there. Or for war, empire is still out there.
- JonnieCache 15y agoSomeone should make a satirical text adventure about doing startups, where you wander around the valley trying to get funding and so on. >LOOK You are in a brand new air conditioned Palo Alto office. Empty packets of ramen litter the floor. There are two desks, each with brand new macbooks on them. >SIT DOWN There are no chairs. What are you, some kind of loser? >PIVOT You are bought by a google. And so on. I know suggesting things for other people to do is bad form, "do it yourself!" goes the familiar cry. Unfortunately I don't have the requisite insider knowledge to make it funny.
- malkia 15y agoYou can be eaten by a Grue in the Black Ops Terminal Interrogation Room :)
- Sniffnoy 15y agoTangential question - has the original unsplit version of Zork ever been rereleased anywhere?
- gnosis 15y agoInfocom was just the tip of the interactive fiction iceberg. There's still a vibrant interactive fiction gaming scene. It has thrived despite Infocom's demise. Many interactive fiction games continue to be developed, played, entered in competitions, and reviewed. Here are some links to get you started: http://www.wurb.com/if/genre http://www.wurb.com/if/genre http://www.ifreviews.org http://www.ifreviews.org http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive.html http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive.html http://ifdb.tads.org/search?browse&list&sortby=new http://ifdb.tads.org/search?browse&list&sortby=new
- gnosis 15y agoRelatively recently the IF community has experienced a bit of a renaissance because of the release of Inform 7, which allows you to program games in the most natural sounding English I've ever seen in a programming language. Here's a sample: --- "Cave Entrance" The Cobble Crawl is a room. "You are crawling over cobbles in a low passage. There is a dim light at the east end of the passage." A wicker cage is here. "There is a small wicker cage discarded nearby." The Debris Room is west of the Crawl. "You are in a debris room filled with stuff washed in from the surface. A low wide passage with cobbles becomes plugged with mud and debris here, but an awkward canyon leads upward and west. A note on the wall says, 'Magic word XYZZY'." The black rod is here. "A three foot black rod with a rusty star on one end lies nearby." Above the Debris Room is the Sloping E/W Canyon. West of the Canyon is the Orange River Chamber. --- As you can see, it reads just like regular English, and it's very easy to understand what's going on here. Here's a more complete example: http://inform7.com/learn/man/ex74.html#e74 http://inform7.com/learn/man/ex74.html#e74 And here are some full, playable games (with source): http://www.hpiweb.com/newmedia/ http://www.hpiweb.com/newmedia/ http://inform7.com/learn/complete-examples/ http://inform7.com/learn/complete-examples/ A couple of quick tutorials: http://www.brasslantern.org/writers/howto/i7tutorial.html http://www.brasslantern.org/writers/howto/i7tutorial.html http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Beginners_Guide_to_Interactive_Fiction_with_Inform_7/Getting_Started_with_Inform_7 http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Beginners_Guide_to_Interactive_... The full manual: http://inform7.com/learn/manuals/ http://inform7.com/learn/manuals/ Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Inform_7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Inform_7
- technomancy 15y ago"Visual" vs textual games is a bit of a false dichotomy though; in particular the Marathon series does a great job of blending action and intelligent, literary story: http://marathon.bungie.org/story/shakespeare.html http://marathon.bungie.org/story/shakespeare.html The first Deus Ex also had plenty of literature in it, sampling heavily from The Man who was Thursday and other classics.
- kingkawn 15y agosassa frassa kids these days
- onan_barbarian 15y agoI miss the Infocom games. One of the most enjoyable parts of them was the feeling that you were engaging with an actual person and their own personality, sense of humor, etc. The programmer and author of these games were often one and the same; at the least, they weren't a huge team of people writing off a spec. I love many modern games but the better they get, the more they seem to be strangled by their own content pipeline; the requirement to produce AAA-level graphics, sound, writing, advertising means the scale of these things is very large and the appetite for risk is low. All that being said, many of the Infocom games were stupidly obscure and irritating and relied on you doing something almost completely arbitrary at some given point to make things work. But they were just so good in so many ways that this was forgivable. All of the Zorks, the Enchanter series, Suspended, Starcross, Deadline... the list goes on and on. It's worth noting that Infocom themselves moved into a dodgy neither fish nor fowl territory towards the end with added graphics and some pretty mediocre titles. Almost 30 years on, I can't work on a house using a ladder and not think "It's too bad that the ladder analysis department closes at noon".
- jonhendry 15y agoI sometimes reflexively type 'l' or 'i' in Unix terminal windows rather than anything appropriate or functional.
- ramchip 15y ago> "It's too bad that the ladder analysis department closes at noon". Out of curiosity, what game is this?
- onan_barbarian 15y agoDeadline. Spoiler explanation in rot13: Gurer jnf (hfhnyyl) n frpbaq zheqre yngre va gur tnzr juvpu erdhverf n ynqqre sbe gur crecrgengbe gb pbzzvg. Lbh unq gb or va gur ubhfr gb gevttre gur riragf yrnqvat gb gur zheqre naq pbhyqa'g svg gur ynqqre vagb gur ubhfr. Gur tnzr unq n srngher jurer lbh pbhyq unir nal bowrpg gnxra njnl gb or nanylmrq, juvpu gbbx gur bowrpg bhg bs npgvba sbe na ubhe be fb. V qrpvqrq gb frr vs guvf jnf n ybbcubyr, naq guhf tbg gung zrffntr. Gurl jrer cerggl gubebhtu.
- InclinedPlane 15y agoGet ye flask http://www.homestarrunner.com/dman3.html http://www.homestarrunner.com/dman3.html
- smutticus 15y agoI built a VoiceXML interface for Zork back in 1999. It was meant as a demo application for a VoiceXML interpreter that Cicso was trying to push and I was a test engineer on. It had automatic speech recognition and text to speech. So you could say "Go South" and then hear "You are standing in a forest. There is a bucket." Or whatever. I thought it was really neat but it never made it past demo stage. I wrote a kind of lazy socket engine in PHP and then used phpzork.com for all my data. It was crude and you couldn't complete the entire game on the phone because I didn't have time to encode all possible actions for the ASR engine. But you could move around and grab a few things. All via telephone ;) I just checked and it looks like phpzork.com is no longer. Pity, as it was a great way to enjoy Zork 10 years ago.
- se1sm 15y agoGreat idea: you could have started a 1-800-ADVNTUR service ;) not to mention it would be tempting to be able to play adventure games in the car, while, er, not driving to strange and exotic places. I'd also love to hear what that sounds like - thinking of the voice acting in some adventure games I've played where you could do worse than replace the recorded drawl with TTS and cut down on the floppies.. http://www.adventuregamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29027 http://www.adventuregamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29027
- rl1987 15y agoSomeone coded a Z-machine to voice telephony interface to play Zork over phone: http://www.freepbx.org/support/documentation/module-documentation/zoip http://www.freepbx.org/support/documentation/module-document... The original project website seems down, though.