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The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

236 points by mad_ned 5y ago

mad_ned 5y ago
I was really honored for a chance to talk with one of computer gaming's true pioneers, Scott Adams. His text adventure games launched an entire game genre and influenced and inspired a lot of other programmers and game developers. If you read the interview and come away thinking, "why didn't he ask him about X?", today's your lucky day, because Scott has graciously agreed to stop by here and answer a few questions. He's new to HN, so be sure and give him a warm welcome!
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Ned I really appreciate the interview you did! And this opportunity here, because of it, to connect with so many cool folks.
  - mad_ned 5y ago
    Thanks Scott - I'm really enjoying sitting back and reading all the great discussions you've been having here and interesting questions people have, nothing makes me happier as a writer than to be able to spark something like that.
ScottAdams 5y ago
Hi all this is Scott Adams. I am open for an AMA (Ask Me Anything), awaiting your comments!
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  It's wonderful to see the GOOD Scott Adams here on Hacker News! I can still crisply remember the places and frames of mind I was in while walking around and solving puzzles in your worlds. How do you think Adventure games are like the Method of Loci, or Memory Palaces, in that they can help you remember and retrieve vast amounts of information geographically? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci What do you think the world be like if an Adventure-like geographical Memory Palace oriented user interface had taken over the world instead of MS-DOS and Unix and Windows? Your adventure programs and others were monumental to my development as a programmer, and define how I think about code and programming and organizing information. By playing adventure games, I finally reverse engineered the "Adventure Algorithm" for keeping track of rooms and connections and objects and inventory. Then I wrote my own adventures and parsers and maps in BASIC and FORTH, and my first commercial program was a Logo implementation of Adventure for C64 Terrapin Logo. https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapin-logo-4c684a240b53 https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapi... At first I played all of your adventures as well as Microsoft Adventure on my Apple ][, and mainframe Adventure on a terminal to my mom's work, and that led me to the ARPANET to play Zork at MIT, and even MUD at Essex University, then TinyMud at CMU, and MOOs, and LambdaMOO at PARC. I keep returning to that essential idea of a map of rooms connected by doors, and I kept reimplementing it on different platforms, each time a little different and a little better, as technology advanced. I developed a user interface technique called "pie menus", which are menus with their items arranged in a circle around the cursor, each in a different direction, so you can select them by moving in different directions, even gesturing quickly without looking at the screen. https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-of-pie-menus-80db1e1b5293 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-... >The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus: They’re Fast, Easy, and Self-Revealing. Don Hopkins. Originally published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Dec. 1991. Eventually I realized that 4-item and 8-item pie menus are the essential elements of an Adventure map, as long as you think of "menus" as rooms in a map with two-way links that you can move back and forth through, instead of a hierarchal tree of menus with one-way exits! So I made series of graphical Adventure map editors that were also pie menu editors if you looked at them right, because rooms behaved just like pie menus: you can move back and forth between rooms with quick pie menu gestures: up, down, left, right, diagonal. And you can also edit the map of rooms by simply dragging the rooms around and bumping them up against each other to make and break connections. And an editable navigable map like that is essentially a "Memory Palace" that you can build and navigate in your imagination, to help you spatially remember anything. It's a computerized note taking application that still works when you're away from your computer and forgot your phone, since you can remember geographical relationships easily, and memorize facts and lists with the Method of Loci. >'the method of loci', an imaginal technique known to the ancient Greeks and Romans and described by Yates (1966) in her book The Art of Memory as well as by Luria (1969). In this technique the subject memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete loci. When desiring to remember a set of items the subject 'walks' through these loci in their imagination and commits an item to each one by forming an image between the item and any feature of that locus. Retrieval of items is achieved by 'walking' through the loci, allowing the latter to activate the desired items. The efficacy of this technique has been well established (Ross and Lawrence 1968, Crovitz 1969, 1971, Briggs, Hawkins and Crovitz 1970, Lea 1975), as is the minimal interference seen with its use. Here's the first iteration called "DreamScape", which I demonstrated in 1995 at WWDC: https://donhopkins.medium.com/1995-apple-world-wide-developers-conference-kaleida-labs-scriptx-demo-64271dd65570 https://donhopkins.medium.com/1995-apple-world-wide-develope... >1995 Apple World Wide Developers Conference Kaleida Labs ScriptX DreamScape Demo. Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Don Hopkins, Kaleida Labs. The second iteration was called "MediaGraph", for making and navigating maps of music, which I implemented in Unity3D: https://donhopkins.medium.com/mediagraph-demo-a7534add63e5 https://donhopkins.medium.com/mediagraph-demo-a7534add63e5 >MediaGraph Demo. MediaGraph Music Navigation with Pie Menus. A prototype developed for Will Wright’s Stupid Fun Club. The most recent iteration was called "iLoci", an iPhone app: https://donhopkins.medium.com/iphone-app-iloci-by-don-hopkins-mobile-dev-camp-6192ca6b5dcd https://donhopkins.medium.com/iphone-app-iloci-by-don-hopkin... >iPhone iLoci Memory Palace App, by Don Hopkins @ Mobile Dev Camp. A talk about iLoci, an iPhone app and server based on the Method of Loci for constructing a Memory Palace, by Don Hopkins, presented at Mobile Dev Camp in Amsterdam, on November 28, 2008. Your Adventure games inspired me, and I hope we can inspire others to build even better ways of creating and elaborating information maps, easily navigating and editing them with gestures, capturing and communicating ideas and information, writing and telling interactive stories, and generally augmenting human memory and intelligence.
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    Hi Don! Wow, I am still reading through your amazing accomplishments. I love it! Give me a few minutes to finish reading your post! OK, I am blown away at your creativity and ideas. I am aware of Memory Palaces and you certainly make an excellent tie-in with adventure game handling. Absolutely incredible. Thanks so much for sharing all that! It certainly helps spur my own creative juices! Happy Adventuring!
    - DonHopkins 5y ago
      I know Memory Palaces work for me because I can so vividly remember my times in the palaces and castles and fun houses that you built! Thanks! The Method of Loci (aka a "Memory Palace") is not just some woo hoo pseudo-science bullshit like "Neurolinguistic Programming" or "Dianetics" -- it's the real thing, a very old, well proven idea. It actually and measurably works, it used to be taught as a part of a classical education for thousands of years until it was banned by the Puritans in 1584 for evoking "bizarre and irrelevant" imagery, and it's still regularly and successfully used by many memory contest champions to recall faces, digits, and lists of words. Mnemonics was seen as dangerous and magical and heretical back in the Medieval world... And they were right, fortunately: Dangerous magic that works by evoking bizarre and irrelevant imagery can be quite useful as well as entertaining! https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/historically-method-of-loci-banned-any-sources-giordano-bruno-experts/46695 https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/historically-method-of-loci-... HN discussions about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088556 >juliend2 on Jan 19, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Nototo – Build a unified mental map of notes >It's called the Method of loci: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci >Another term for that is the "memory palace". >BTW, I wonder if anyone here in HN used it to learn significant things using this method? >netsharc on Jan 19, 2020 | next [–] >I first learned about memory palaces in the book Hannibal, named after the character in Silence of the Lambs [0], but the description there is of a lavish imaginary palace inside your mind you can wander in. I did use this technique to try to remember some physics formulae for an exam once, in my memory palace there was a room with giant equations. >This website is a bit of a let-down for me since it's just a bird's eye view, it would be cool to create a palace using a 3d game engine, with signs that point to things like physics formulae, and then some Sims or Google-Sketchup-like tool to add objects that you want to remember. >[0] The relevant excerpt about Hannibal's memory palace: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/illusion-chasers/hannibal-lecter/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/illusion-chasers/hannib... , it describes a painting that he uses to remember the fictional address "3327 Tindal, Arlington VA 22308". >todd8 on Jan 19, 2020 | prev | next [–] >Hans-Lukas Teuber[1] was the head of the psychology department and my professor for the intro psychology class at MIT. He gave one two-hour evening lecture per week, which were delivered without notes. The lectures were riveting, they were given in MIT's largest lecture hall; it was standing room only to hear him speak--many students and faculty would attend even though not enrolled. I don't remember ever hearing a better live lecture than those that he gave (and I've heard many lectures--I spent more years at university than Belucci's character in Animal House). He used the memory palace method to remember his lecture's organization. >[1] http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/teuber-hans-lukas.pdf http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/m... >DonHopkins on Jan 19, 2020 | prev | next [–] >I visualize and remember code that way. For me, it's hard to forget somewhere I've been, even if I only imagined being there. >Each function is a little building like an office or a shop, which has a sign out front telling what services or products it sells, and contains everything inside you need to solve some kind of problem or produce some kind of product or service (where equipment in the room is like references to other objects and functions and imported libraries). >You're standing behind the front counter, just about to receive a customer though the front entrance door with the parameters you need for one particular instance of that problem. >You go into the back room, solve the problem, then deliver the results out the exit door at the back of the building (or through any of the other earlier emergency exits, if you had to exit prematurely or throw an error and run away). >The front/back flow is a metaphor for the top/bottom flow of control through a function. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi%E2%80%93Shneiderman_diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi%E2%80%93Shneiderman_diag... >If you squint you can see the example Nassi-Shneiderman diagram in that article as a map of a building, with its front at the top, and exit at the bottom. >You can have internal hallways and rooms for branches and loops, like a Nassi-Shneiderman diagram. The "Sub to Determine Wiki-Article" room is like the front entrance lobby of a theater where buy your ticket. The "Select Favourite Genre" room is like the stage of The Price is Right, and you get to pick what's behind door #1 (History), #2 (Science), or # (Geography), or else choose Other. They each have one or two rooms behind them with your rewards, and then they all finally exit out to the same back stage loading dock, where you take your wonderful prize (or consolation donkey) home. >kruasan on Jan 19, 2020 | prev [–] >I once memorized 200 digits of pi when I had nothing more fun to do on a long boring lecture. Sherlock popped into my mind, so I imagined a journey through my house where I chunked numbers to make them represent certain things or people, and me interacting or talking with them, like in a story of some sort. But it feels like I never applied this method to anything significant, apart from memorizing a few things from my biochemistry course. Although now I remember credit card numbers, every single phone number of my friends and family (by associating numbers with particular facial features or character traits), and some other things. I would say before that day I never fully realized just how much I actually like to memorize stuff like words and numbers. Anyway, I think everyone should give it a try, this is fun.
- deleted 5y ago
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- technothrasher 5y ago
  Why did you cause me to have childhood nightmares about chiggers? I didn't even know what they were, growing up in New England, but they scared the heck out of me at six years old. Thanks for that! Actually, honestly, thanks for sparking my imagination enough to want to code my own text adventures, which began my life long love of programming.
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    I am so very sorry about the chiggers. I grew up with them in Florida and they were not a fun experience for me either. I am though delighted to hear that my classic games were helpful in you understanding your own gifts! I appreciate you sharing that with me!
    - castwide 5y ago
      I can't imagine how many future developers were originally inspired to learn programming by playing your games. A text adventure was the first thing I wanted to make when I learned BASIC on a VIC-20. Even now, I maintain an interactive fiction SDK for Ruby (https://gamefic.com https://gamefic.com). Thanks, Scott!
      - ScottAdams 5y ago
        That is so neat. Ruby running IF is very special! Wonderful to hear you using your gift that way!
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - dekhn 5y ago
    hahahha, same here- grew up in CT but my dad is from FL and he explained. It always just sounded like an epithet to me.
    - ScottAdams 5y ago
      Here lies Scott, bitten to death by chiggers :) LOL!
- ggambetta 5y ago
  Hi, Scott! Fun to see you here :)
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    Great to see you as well. From the short handle I suspect you are one of my long term Italian friends! Am I correct? If so cool! If not, then I am happy to make a new friend!
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    Now I know who you are! You gave some excellent advice on a project I was working on! Nice to see you here as well!
- mysterydip 5y ago
  What's a question you've always wanted to be asked?
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    Oh you are an excellent interviewer! No one has ever asked that one of me. Probably thing I love the share the most is how amazed I was to find out the Creator of the Universe and is real and that He actually cares about me. A subject I am now always williing to share but not many inquire about it.
    - mysterydip 5y ago
      Thanks for sharing! Were you able to put that into any of your games in one way or another? I am a hobbyist gamedev and am struggling to find a way that doesn't come off as "in your face".
      - ScottAdams 5y ago
        Best one I did in that area was The Inheritance. It requires you to read and show you understand some bible verses. You don't have to agree with them but you do need to comprehend what they are saying.
- 1970-01-01 5y ago
  Thank you for making such wonderful adventure games! Will your games ever be ported directly to app stores or game stores such as XBOX Live? I think you would get thousands of new fans. Any updates on your Lyme resources?
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    HI! I don't have any plans of putting my classic (or new adventure games) on XBox as they don't really lend themselves to console play. You really need a keyboard to enjoy them. Though I do have one game on Alexa www.EscapeTheGloomer.com www.lyme-resource.com is still around but I haven't updated in some time. Most folks tend to be more focused on Covid than Lyme. Yet Lyme is still a deadly killer that is often misdiagnosed.
- Rd6n6 5y ago
  Hi Scott. I started playing parser based IF less than a month ago. I find it so immersive that the only parallel I have for the experience is high quality VR. I love it so much that I wrote my own parser engine 2 weeks ago and I have some ideas for side projects to revive the genre. Thanks for helping to create these! Are you aware at the moment of any interesting developments in the “text games for people with vision problems” field?
  - anthk 5y ago
    You may like using Inform6 instead of writting your own parser. Most verbs and room behaviours are already implemented: https://www.inform-fiction.org/ https://www.inform-fiction.org/
    - Rd6n6 5y ago
      Part of the fun is making the engine and figuring out how the games work under the hood. The world model is surprisingly simple and flexible in these games. Learning about this style of world model gave me some ideas for other projects
      - anthk 5y ago
        You can make an v3 z-machine interpreter in weeks :).
    - ScottAdams 5y ago
      Very neat indeed but I am partial to my own engine as I know it so well and can tweak it to do exactly what I need :)
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    My Return To Pirate Island 2 (turn of the century), the Inheritance (2013) were blind compatable. I also released Escape The Gloomer on Alexa (fully audio only) Currently working on making AdventurelandXL (www.AdventurelandXL.com) Windows screen reader compatable as well.
- kbutler 5y ago
  Wanted to say thanks for many hours of puzzling and enjoyment with my brothers growing up. I always appreciated that the puzzles you created had logical solutions, though I confess we also examined the strings embedded in the programs for clues! And I remember being stuck and playfully trying to jump into a certain ravine and realizing that instead I had just found out how to get across it (I guess it was a smaller ravine than I had imagined). Another poster mentioned learning "flotsam & jetsam" - I also learned calliope - though not how to pronounce it. But I think we never completed The Golden Voyage - I should see if I can convince my children raised with Minecraft and HD games to give your adventures a shot. This is good timing, as my family often plays older games over Thanksgiving.
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    If you want to try something special see about playing www.EscapeTheGloomer.com or wwww.AdventurelandXL.com with them as a group. They are more forgiving than my classic games and designed with more modern audiences :)
- Jiro 5y ago
  I can get many of your adventures from your old website. The readme file says that four of the later adventures are in SAGA+ format and are not included because ScottFree can't play them. Since this was written 24 years ago, is there now anything that can play them and if so will you be releasing them? (I'd think that at least it should be possible to play through emulation.) Trying to google this is harder than it seems, and shows me graphical versions that are so different between systems that they look like they were written from scratch for each system rather than using the same data format with an engine.
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    All my games used either my original engine or my later SAGA engine. I have since built on that engine and created CLO+# (pronounced Clopas Sharp) The reason the later games may not be available would also be due to licensing. The licenses for the Marvel games and Buckeroo Banzai have all expired and can't be legally used anymore. Keep searching on the internet though. There are users and user groups still playing them :)
  - fistynuts 5y ago
    I believe ScummVM supports many of Scott's games.
    - anthk 5y ago
      Gargoyle supports all engines and the text rendering it's far better.
  - Jiro 5y ago
    I was referring to this text from the 0readme.txt: >Most of the "later" and "Marvel" games were published in SAGA+ format (with a better parser). These versions are not included because ScottFree cannot play them yet. The following games were available in SAGA+ format: When I searched for SAGA+, I found almost no evidence (outside that readme) that "SAGA+ format" is even a thing that really exists, let alone that any particular version of the game is in that format or that anyone has written a parser that can parse it. Also, it lists three licensed games and Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle in SAGA+, which sounds as though it's not licensed, and should be releaseable.
- andrewstuart 5y ago
  Hi Scott, You changed my life when at 12 years old I first saw a computer and the first things I saw running on it was Voodoo Castle and The Count. Back in 1979 it was literally like I had discovered magic was real because here in Australia computers were unknown to most ordinary people. It's hard to convey how much this blew my 12 year old mind. I don't think I stopped thinking about Scott Adams adventures for years after that. I LOVED all your games, so much atmosphere. Thanks for creating that magical part of my life. Favorites: Voodoo Castle The Count Mystery Fun House AdventureLand Savage Island (though it was too hard for me)_
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    I am so excited that my games were such an inspiration to you! Have you tried any of my newer ones at all? www.Clopas.net see if anything strikes your fancy now?
- Ishmaeli 5y ago
  Wow, your stuff looks amazing and I can't believe I've never heard of you. I can't wait to dive in. I came of age in the Infocom era. Do you know any of those guys? (Brian Moriarty, Steve Meretzky...)
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    Hi! Happy to make a new friend. My classic games were fun but tiny due to the 16k limits I had to work with. Be sure and check out some of my newer games as well www.clopas.net I don't think I have never had the pleasure to interact with Brian or Steve but I greatly respect their work!
- anthk 5y ago
  Have you ever played a modern IF game made in Inform6/7? The modern ones from the IF Archive for the Z-Machine, I mean. https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXzcode.html https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXzcode.html
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    Sorry to say other than the original Zork etc I have not. In general I have stayed away from other text based adventures so as not to accidentally copy some one else's puzzle or idea in one of my own games.
- thereare5lights 5y ago
  What's it like to share a name with the comic?
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    It's been interesting. I have a personal sig that reads: Not Dilbert, Adventure! Say yoho and everything spins around and suddenly I'm elsewhere...
pamoroso 5y ago
Thanks for sharing your story Scott. Back when you wrote your early games, what were your toolchain and development process?
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Really good question! I was working on a TRS-80 Level II machine (this was a model 1 before there wer models). It was my first home appliance computer, before that I had homebrews. It came with Microsoft Basic. I had only used tiny basic up until then and wanted to play with strings. It sounded neat to be able to manipulate language with them. I wrote a game language, a compiler for the language, and an interpreter for the language to play the game, all in BASIC. I also wrote Adventureland (my first game) at the same time. Adding features to the tools and the game as I was inspired. Much later I converted the BASIC interpreter into Z80 assembler to be able to give me more memory. The entire game with interpreter had to fit in 16K bytes!
  - pamoroso 5y ago
    Very interesting, thanks. I wonder whether you distributed those early commercial games as BASIC source on tape.
    - ScottAdams 5y ago
      Adventureland and Pirate Adventure were both originally done in BASIC and the interpreter with the compiled language (it reduced it to numbers) was on the tape. I did have some extremely clever folks reverse engineer my language and then write games in it! Hat tip to Alvin Files and William Demas amongst others!
      - pamoroso 5y ago
        Got it, thanks again.
      - mypalmike 5y ago
        Pirate Adventure was the first game I had on my Atari 800. I really loved it. I still remember coming across the terms "pieces of eight" and "flotsam and jetsam" and having to ask my mom what they meant. I seem to recall it was my first encounter with the the word "flat" meaning apartment. My vocabulary was thus improved by your work. Thanks!
moolcool 5y ago
(Not the Dilbert one)
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Which is a good point. Back when the internet was starting to bloom I got a nice email from Scott Adams of Dilbert. Seems he had gotten a number of fan mails meant for me and was trying to find who to send it to. I also had a number of fan mails meant for him! We exchanged the mails and had a nice chat about it!
  - JshWright 5y ago
    > Which is a good point. Especially as he seems to have kind of gone off the proverbial deep end with his political fanaticism in recent years...
    - zalequin 5y ago
      If you read his books, it’s obvious he’s doing that on purpose in order to get more attention (which eventually is converted to fatter bottom line for him). Essentially, the dude is a professional troll.
      - mmastrac 5y ago
        Totally agree, but it really felt like he had drunk his own kool-aid at times.
        smilespray 5y ago
        First rule of drugs and propaganda: Don't get high on your own supply.
      - weswpg 5y ago
        His wife is extremely young and I can't look at them together without thinking something is really wrong there. He might be older than his father-in-law.
MPSimmons 5y ago
Scott, are there any “modern” games that you feel capture the same spirit of exploration and discovery that your games embraced?
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  I do love exploration and discovery games. Especially with a good story line. Some of the games that I have greatly enjoyed are (in no particular order) Myst, Everquest (1 and 2), Dark Age of Camelot, Age of Empires, Fable, Guild Wars 2, Baldurs Gate, Half Life, Valheim (currently playing), Descent (played with two joysticks, one in each hand to give full 3D controls), Star Wars Galaxy, Sims, Call of Heroes, Ultima Online
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
Scott, what was the thinking behind publishing the source code to some of your early games in magazines (at a time when you could still sell them profitably)? It obviously worked out well, but it sounds like a bold step to take.
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  I was approached by Byte Magazine to do a feature article for them. I included my game source code in it as I wanted to share the technology I had developed with others. Sadly there were a number of typos when they transcribed it into the magazine. Yet many people were able to press through and debug it to get it work which was pretty amazing. My thought was we are all standing on the shoulder's of those who went before us. By helping each other we build towards a better future. I have received a load of fan mail over the years from folks who have now gone from being fans to being friends. One of the major threads in most of the emails was how my games or gaming systems made a big impact on their life. There are literally a number of very well known gaming companies now, who's founders have written me about how my early games were an ispiration for them. I had no idea at the time, but God was using me through the gift He gave me to inpsire others. It is wonderful to be able to see that happen!
  - s7r 5y ago
    > My thought was we are all standing on the shoulder's of those who went before us. By helping each other we build towards a better future. Inspired by this comment, just wanted to share this with you: https://manyworlds.pages.dev/about https://manyworlds.pages.dev/about Still in development (first time sharing the site!) — in any case, thought it might resonate!
    - ScottAdams 5y ago
      Oh that is really cool! Thanks for sharing it. I signed up! Hey folks take a look!
      - s7r 5y ago
zalequin 5y ago
To Mr. Adams - what sort of games would you make today if you were starting from scratch?
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Hi! Please feel free to call me Scott! Well I am still making games and some from scratch :) See www.FinalPilot.com it is something I did for another company who had a vision and I and my team have a had a great deal of fun creating it. Still a work in progress with a major update coming out shortly. In terms of adventure type games I am really fond of www.EscapeTheGloomer.com it tells a parallel story to book 2 of the Redwall series Mossflower. I did a lot of new things in this game. One of which is that the player is actually writing their own story as they play. The game reads as a novel as the player explores, discovers and creates. And lastly I am currently working on www.AdventurelandXL.com which stands for Roman numeral 40 for the 40th anniversary of Adventureland and also for Extra Large. It includes the entire base game along with an entire new section with saluates to some of the cultural myths and fantasys that I did not get to include in Advenutreland originally. It also includes what is now one of my favorite puzzle sequences (deals with the chimp in the jungle). It is currently in early access on Steam for Windows, everyone playing it is helping make the game better for eventual final release. It is like ET and phones home after each play sesssion with the player's trace file. The entire game is in there except for the very final scene. I love to hear get email from folks playing it too with their impressions.
cenazoic 5y ago
To piggyback on MPSimmons’ question, have you played any of the interactive fiction from the 1995 revival on? I read in your interview that you consider your company Clopas as a ‘company of Christians’, rather than a ‘Christian company’, and that you make games “[which] God can use in His glory to uplift people..” Can you discuss more about what ‘uplift’ means to you, and how it’s reflected in your games? What’s an example of a non-uplifting game/mechanic? I’m not a Christian, but I find this idea a fascinating one. My mind first goes to something like RDR2, which while perhaps not uplifting in the traditional sense, reminded me of the awe of natural beauty (or God’s creation, if you prefer). Or do you mean more like - the game somehow inspires the player to be a better person, for various definitions of ‘better’? Thanks for taking the time today!
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  You raise execellent questions. Thanks for asking! To me uplift means to leave the player in a better state than when they started. To bring them closer to God's Glory and plan for their life. To see the Universe and as an incredible place to be and to see Life as an incredible gift from our most awesome and loving Creator. I am looking forward to an eternity of exploration, discovery and insprired creation due to the agency of my savior and friend Jesus.
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  I did miss your first part of your questions and appologize. In most cases I have not played most IF that is out there. Though Myst stands out as an incredible exception to that. But it of course was mostly non-verbal and delight to eyes. Part of the reason of not playing many is a reticence to accidentally steal a puzzle idea (via absortion as it were) and the other is simply I have way more fun writing, coding and designing :)
nsxwolf 5y ago
Hi Scott, for the TI-99/4A versions of your games, did you handle the development of the ROM cartridge? What was that like? Did you have to split up any of your code to separate the game engine from the adventures themselves?
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Hi! I did the entire programming of obth of the TI cartrige games, the text adventure cartridge (read in the games from cassette) and the special made-for-TI graphical text adventure in a cartridge: Return to Pirates Island. My game language interpreter was already separate from games written in my adventure language. So putting the interpreter on the cartridge was not very difficult. See one of the other threads on this AMA for more information about that! I acutally have a TI/99 still today. It is the only classic machine I have. :)
  - nsxwolf 5y ago
    You were using good software engineering principles way back then! Now my obligitory fanboying: Those text adventures were an important part of my formative years. They inspired me to learn how to write more advanced programs, because I desperately wanted to create my own text adventures. My first one was a gigantic, unwieldy tree of if/then/else statements, and that painful experience led me to more learn advanced data structures and concepts.
    - ScottAdams 5y ago
      I am so glad my classic games were such a great inspiration for you!
jim_lawless 5y ago
Scott, I am curious about the genesis of your game language interpreter. Did you have a background in building interpreters / compilers before going in this direction?
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  I always looked at a computer issue as a challenge. How can I best handle it. My brother built a 32 bit computer from bit slice chips, my other brother made a tv typewriter IO for it. I was the one who was going to program it. So I made a game. I had no compiler, not even an assembler or linker. I had to write it in psuedo assembler and then hand assemble and link the code. One issue I discovered early on was I made mistakes and it made lots of branch statements invalid if things moved. Not having a linker I devised a system where i put a jump table at the top of every module and then all other modules accesed that module via it's jump table. Just an example of approaching a problem. I had the first ever Sphere computer (look them up! Amazing machine) It was a text only screen and I wanted to write a graphic game for it. So I designed an built my own graphics card, designed and built tank controllers for 2 players and wrote a tank war game for 2 players. I never saw problems as a wall to walk away from, I saw them as an incredible chance to do something different to be able to scale it. So when it came to writing a text adventure on a machine with tiny memory I had to get creative. I had not done anything like this before and i was just insprired to do the game, the language, the compiler and the interpreter all at the same time. It just felt right :) I continue to push myself over walls and today I use Unity, C# and continue to do things that aren't supposed ot be possible. For example www.finalPilot.com has an underlying network communication package I derived because I couldnot find a current solution that would totally fit the problem domain. It had to work on both UDP and WebGL with the same code base. It was a lot of fun coming up with a working system. WE are in the process of soon starting a new game with some new challenges and its network system will be much different from what Final Pilot uses. Sorry if I rambled a bit and happy to fill in more details if needed.
  - timbit42 5y ago
    I read or heard you talk about Mike Wise's Sphere before. I wish there was more information about it available online. I know there was a BASIC for it before Microsoft or Tiny BASIC came along. Did you have BASIC on the Sphere? How did it compare to other BASICs? Any other info about the Sphere would be appreciated. I know BYTE magazine called it the first true personal computer.
seanwilson 5y ago
Hi Scott! Do you have any thoughts on how hard it is to come up with original adventure game puzzles and what your process is here? When I was looking at this once, I noticed there's a lot of puzzles that are shared between recent adventure games that you can find in older adventure games too e.g. screwdriver + screws, rusty door + oil, distract an NPC so you can steal something. Instead of this being from lack of originality, I think instead there's some limits on how many puzzle like this exist because they have to be common sense + not completely obvious + involve physical object manipulation + use common objects. I think this is one of the reasons a lot of recent adventure games and escape room games devolve into doors with abstract logic problems to unlock them. Alternatively, they need to introduce new mechanics to widen the design space, like adding time travel or magic.
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  My process has always been one of inspiration from a higher power. I would place a location, think of obvious items for the locations and then pretend I was there. What would I try to do and why? Then I would sit and think about it. I also enjoyed putting it in front of beta testers and seeing what new and unique things they might try that I would want to incorporate into the game. A big tip of the hat to Neil Novak one of my classic game testers from whom I got a lot of great inspiration! As far as new puzzles go I hope you try the new section I wrote for Adventureland XL. I have a large number of new puzzles and one that I am especially happy with that went in a direction I hadn't done before. To get into the XL section of Adventureland you do first need to complete the base game and it has changed a bit with a few new puzzles of its own. You can never loose so don't ever start over. Just keep playing and let me know what you think :)
- anthk 5y ago
  Most of IF games have puzzless very different from the ones from the graphical adventures as the text medium can set really complex interactions. Check out All Things Devour and Vicious Cycles, both have time travel mechanics.
  - seanwilson 5y ago
baggy_trough 5y ago
I still remember enjoying the TRS-80 games Scott made - I probably played 5 or 6 of them. Is there a (reasonable) way to play these games today?
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Hi! Good question. My clasic games are available on a number of places on the web. You can find links to some of them on my personal web page at www.msadams.com If you want to have a really fun experience check out www.AdventurelandXL.com which is the full original game and then something really special :)
PaulHoule 5y ago
Scott Adams wrote a simple interpreter which could be implemented in BASIC or Assembly Language for his games. https://6502disassembly.com/a2-scott-adams/interp.html https://6502disassembly.com/a2-scott-adams/interp.html This was like the Infocom interpreter (e.g. "Zork") but more specialized to writing games.
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Yes that is correct! I had a lot of fun inventing it and was able to do some interesting things with it. Every adventiure game I wrote I tried to do something different that I hadn't done before.
- anthk 5y ago
  The Z-Machine was made for games, too. And the then new Inform6 game was basically literal OOP with rooms, objects and people, thus making an adventure can be done in really trivial ways. If you read up Inform's Beginner Guide you'll get amazed of how the Inform6 library handles lots of stuff for you. Lots of verbs and objects types are already implemented, so you can set a game "room" for example in just four words split into two lines.
  - framsberg 5y ago
    Nowadays there's also PunyInform, an Inform 6 library that replaces the standard library. Programming for it is very similar, but the resulting games are much smaller and faster, to work well on 8-bit computers. https://github.com/johanberntsson/PunyInform https://github.com/johanberntsson/PunyInform There's currently a jam going on. Three PunyInform games have been released, and anyone can play and judge them at https://itch.io/jam/punyjam-2/entries https://itch.io/jam/punyjam-2/entries . One of the games (Opportunity) comes with source code too, so you can see how it works, if you're interested.
    - anthk 5y ago
      Yeah, I know Punyinform too, I already tried some game under Vice (C64 emu). I am curious about Tristan Island, it looks like a decent game for an v3 Z-machine.
devenson 5y ago
Did you have an office in Longwood FL, near Sabal Point in the 80s? If so, I fondly remember dumpster diving into your trash dumpster w other neighborhood kids in search of games or whatever.
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Hi! Yes I did! It was one of 3 in the greater orlando area. AI Computer Center. I have since heard from other new friends that were also kids back then dumpster diving at the store. Apparently a lof treasures found new homes in the local area. Very neat! Did you know a Brian, Jonathan, Rob or Kevin perhaps?
  - devenson 5y ago
    One of my partners in crime was named John Taylor.
    - ScottAdams 5y ago
      Lol yes I chatted today with him :) Cool!
      - devenson 5y ago
        Cool indeed!
ianbicking 5y ago
Game design question: Text adventures as a category always struck me as kind of lonely. They often take place in environments where all the people have been removed, like miniature apocalypses. It seems technically fairly obvious why this happens: other people are too hard to model. People have goals and expectations and so someone traipsing around trying random things is not generally acceptable, and creating characters that are disinterested in their environment is its own challenge. (Writing this I realize grumpy and stubborn characters are fairly common, maybe for these same reasons!) In all these years of advancement in games the NPC still seems either lifeless or absent. I'm afraid I haven't actually played your games, so I don't know how you've tried to address it, but I'm sure you've thought about it. I'd be curious to hear any of those thoughts, but maybe specific questions: 1. Have you had any successes you could share in making a NPC seem "alive"? 2. Any ideas you were convinced were great but failed when implemented? 3. Do you think new technology can be applied to this? For instance it sounds like you are using more advanced NLP in Escape the Gloomer. (But understanding is only half, NPC motivation and goals seem equally hard.) 4. Does a strong NPC distract from the autonomy of the player? (Sometimes I wonder if people even want a strong NPC, or if players actually prefer NPCs to be background.) 5. And separately, have you tried AI Dungeon and if so what did you think?
- Rd6n6 5y ago
  Play Galatea. It’s a famous, award winning parser game about a conversation with a sentient statue and has approx 70 endings. The game models your relationship along several axes as you go and the writing is superb
  - andybak 5y ago
    Oh god. I might have just installed the wrong Galatea.
    - ianbicking 5y ago
      The erotic literature collection for women? That was the first program I found with that name :)
ScottAdams 5y ago
Just a quick note that I am off to meet family flying in for Thanksgiving. I will continue to reply to this thread later this afternoon.
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  I am back for a bit and trying to catch up with all the amazing comments on this thread. You folks are super!
hitekker 5y ago
For new folks like myself, Scott Adams is a prolific game designer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer)
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Thanks for putting up the link! Great to make a new friend btw! Happy Adventuring!
strenholme 5y ago
I actually figured out the format for Scott Adams adventures and created a Scott Adams port of the “Cloak of Darkness” mini adventure, as well as my own small adventure game, Desert adventure, which can be played online at https://samiam.org/software/parchment/desert.html https://samiam.org/software/parchment/desert.html Downloads follow. Cloak of Darkness: https://samiam.org/software/parchment/Cloak-Scott.zip https://samiam.org/software/parchment/Cloak-Scott.zip Desert adventure: https://samiam.org/software/parchment/desert-scott.zip https://samiam.org/software/parchment/desert-scott.zip
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  So cool you were able to do that! Big congratulations on taking it to the next level and making your own games! Love it!
- eps 5y ago
  > desert.html Issuing two "go north" commands causes the page to go completely blank in mobile Safari.
  - strenholme 5y ago
    Works for me (Firefox, Windows). Try this URL: https://samiam.org/software/parchment/desert-smartphone.html https://samiam.org/software/parchment/desert-smartphone.html (The version of Parchment I use is somewhat unusual because I had to be 100% GPL compliant)
digger1970 5y ago
Just wanted to say thanks for all the memory's. Took me weeks to get all the treasures in Return To Pirates Isle on my old TI 99/4A. Without any spoilers, finding the alarm clock took forever...
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Yes the alarm clock was basically but an annoying and hopefully rewarding puzzle. It was designed to remind you that something was still unknown and also to get a great moment of AHA when solved. Big congratulations on staying with it and solving that puzzle! By the way the alarm clock makes a return visit in my 2013 game The Inheritance.
anthk 5y ago
Those adventures had been converted to the Z-Machine long ago. Get them from IF archive and you can play them anywhere. https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/adamsinform.zip https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/adamsinform.zip
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Very cool! Thanks for the link.
roomey 5y ago
Stupid question, how do I play these games? They sound great.
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Hi check out the downloads and links section of my personal site www.msadams.com for the classic games or www.clopas.net for new ones.
KarlKemp 5y ago
Oh, hey, what a celebrity. I'd like to use this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to clearly state: You suck. (Also: Dilbert isn't even funny. The character is stuck in a dystopia because he is too cynical to realize that he could life a more meaningful life. Why anyone would willingly identify with him is left for psych majors to explore)
- dang 5y ago
  Posting like this to HN will get you banned here, even if you hadn't gotten your Scott Adamses mixed up. You may not feel you owe someone better, but you owe this community far better if you're participating in it. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future, we'd appreciate it. Edit: turns out I had to warn you about posting personal attacks just a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29311314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29311314. No more of this, please, or we'll have to ban you. Please don't post any more flamewar comments, either—for example like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29259077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29259077. All this is emphatically not what the site is for, and is not welcome here. Edit 2: I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29335724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29335724 and hope that Scott hasn't seen how rude you were, so we can all feel slightly less ashamed of this.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pigeons 5y ago
I loved questprobe spider-man on the Commodore 64, but I didn't finish it.
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Sorry you didn't get to finish it. I had a lot of fun writing that one and working with the incredible folks at Marvel!
BashiBazouk 5y ago
I wonder if I have played one of his games. When I was a preteen the adults in the house I lived in took a three week computer course. For the period of the course, my friend and I had access to a Commodore Pet. There was a text adventure that was kind of DnDish. A game we had recently started to play. We went through the text adventure then started to look at and play with the code changing all text to something much more juvenile...
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  It is possible. Adventureland was available for the Pet as was Pirate Adventure.

236 points by mad_ned 5y ago

I was really honored for a chance to talk with one of computer gaming's true pioneers, Scott Adams. His text adventure games launched an entire game genre and influenced and inspired a lot of other programmers and game developers. If you read the interview and come away thinking, "why didn't he ask him about X?", today's your lucky day, because Scott has graciously agreed to stop by here and answer a few questions. He's new to HN, so be sure and give him a warm welcome!

ScottAdams 5y ago
Ned I really appreciate the interview you did! And this opportunity here, because of it, to connect with so many cool folks.
- mad_ned 5y ago
  Thanks Scott - I'm really enjoying sitting back and reading all the great discussions you've been having here and interesting questions people have, nothing makes me happier as a writer than to be able to spark something like that.

ScottAdams 5y ago

Hi all this is Scott Adams. I am open for an AMA (Ask Me Anything), awaiting your comments!

DonHopkins 5y ago
It's wonderful to see the GOOD Scott Adams here on Hacker News! I can still crisply remember the places and frames of mind I was in while walking around and solving puzzles in your worlds. How do you think Adventure games are like the Method of Loci, or Memory Palaces, in that they can help you remember and retrieve vast amounts of information geographically? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci What do you think the world be like if an Adventure-like geographical Memory Palace oriented user interface had taken over the world instead of MS-DOS and Unix and Windows? Your adventure programs and others were monumental to my development as a programmer, and define how I think about code and programming and organizing information. By playing adventure games, I finally reverse engineered the "Adventure Algorithm" for keeping track of rooms and connections and objects and inventory. Then I wrote my own adventures and parsers and maps in BASIC and FORTH, and my first commercial program was a Logo implementation of Adventure for C64 Terrapin Logo. https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapin-logo-4c684a240b53 https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapi... At first I played all of your adventures as well as Microsoft Adventure on my Apple ][, and mainframe Adventure on a terminal to my mom's work, and that led me to the ARPANET to play Zork at MIT, and even MUD at Essex University, then TinyMud at CMU, and MOOs, and LambdaMOO at PARC. I keep returning to that essential idea of a map of rooms connected by doors, and I kept reimplementing it on different platforms, each time a little different and a little better, as technology advanced. I developed a user interface technique called "pie menus", which are menus with their items arranged in a circle around the cursor, each in a different direction, so you can select them by moving in different directions, even gesturing quickly without looking at the screen. https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-of-pie-menus-80db1e1b5293 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-... >The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus: They’re Fast, Easy, and Self-Revealing. Don Hopkins. Originally published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Dec. 1991. Eventually I realized that 4-item and 8-item pie menus are the essential elements of an Adventure map, as long as you think of "menus" as rooms in a map with two-way links that you can move back and forth through, instead of a hierarchal tree of menus with one-way exits! So I made series of graphical Adventure map editors that were also pie menu editors if you looked at them right, because rooms behaved just like pie menus: you can move back and forth between rooms with quick pie menu gestures: up, down, left, right, diagonal. And you can also edit the map of rooms by simply dragging the rooms around and bumping them up against each other to make and break connections. And an editable navigable map like that is essentially a "Memory Palace" that you can build and navigate in your imagination, to help you spatially remember anything. It's a computerized note taking application that still works when you're away from your computer and forgot your phone, since you can remember geographical relationships easily, and memorize facts and lists with the Method of Loci. >'the method of loci', an imaginal technique known to the ancient Greeks and Romans and described by Yates (1966) in her book The Art of Memory as well as by Luria (1969). In this technique the subject memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete loci. When desiring to remember a set of items the subject 'walks' through these loci in their imagination and commits an item to each one by forming an image between the item and any feature of that locus. Retrieval of items is achieved by 'walking' through the loci, allowing the latter to activate the desired items. The efficacy of this technique has been well established (Ross and Lawrence 1968, Crovitz 1969, 1971, Briggs, Hawkins and Crovitz 1970, Lea 1975), as is the minimal interference seen with its use. Here's the first iteration called "DreamScape", which I demonstrated in 1995 at WWDC: https://donhopkins.medium.com/1995-apple-world-wide-developers-conference-kaleida-labs-scriptx-demo-64271dd65570 https://donhopkins.medium.com/1995-apple-world-wide-develope... >1995 Apple World Wide Developers Conference Kaleida Labs ScriptX DreamScape Demo. Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Don Hopkins, Kaleida Labs. The second iteration was called "MediaGraph", for making and navigating maps of music, which I implemented in Unity3D: https://donhopkins.medium.com/mediagraph-demo-a7534add63e5 https://donhopkins.medium.com/mediagraph-demo-a7534add63e5 >MediaGraph Demo. MediaGraph Music Navigation with Pie Menus. A prototype developed for Will Wright’s Stupid Fun Club. The most recent iteration was called "iLoci", an iPhone app: https://donhopkins.medium.com/iphone-app-iloci-by-don-hopkins-mobile-dev-camp-6192ca6b5dcd https://donhopkins.medium.com/iphone-app-iloci-by-don-hopkin... >iPhone iLoci Memory Palace App, by Don Hopkins @ Mobile Dev Camp. A talk about iLoci, an iPhone app and server based on the Method of Loci for constructing a Memory Palace, by Don Hopkins, presented at Mobile Dev Camp in Amsterdam, on November 28, 2008. Your Adventure games inspired me, and I hope we can inspire others to build even better ways of creating and elaborating information maps, easily navigating and editing them with gestures, capturing and communicating ideas and information, writing and telling interactive stories, and generally augmenting human memory and intelligence.
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Hi Don! Wow, I am still reading through your amazing accomplishments. I love it! Give me a few minutes to finish reading your post! OK, I am blown away at your creativity and ideas. I am aware of Memory Palaces and you certainly make an excellent tie-in with adventure game handling. Absolutely incredible. Thanks so much for sharing all that! It certainly helps spur my own creative juices! Happy Adventuring!
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    I know Memory Palaces work for me because I can so vividly remember my times in the palaces and castles and fun houses that you built! Thanks! The Method of Loci (aka a "Memory Palace") is not just some woo hoo pseudo-science bullshit like "Neurolinguistic Programming" or "Dianetics" -- it's the real thing, a very old, well proven idea. It actually and measurably works, it used to be taught as a part of a classical education for thousands of years until it was banned by the Puritans in 1584 for evoking "bizarre and irrelevant" imagery, and it's still regularly and successfully used by many memory contest champions to recall faces, digits, and lists of words. Mnemonics was seen as dangerous and magical and heretical back in the Medieval world... And they were right, fortunately: Dangerous magic that works by evoking bizarre and irrelevant imagery can be quite useful as well as entertaining! https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/historically-method-of-loci-banned-any-sources-giordano-bruno-experts/46695 https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/historically-method-of-loci-... HN discussions about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088556 >juliend2 on Jan 19, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Nototo – Build a unified mental map of notes >It's called the Method of loci: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci >Another term for that is the "memory palace". >BTW, I wonder if anyone here in HN used it to learn significant things using this method? >netsharc on Jan 19, 2020 | next [–] >I first learned about memory palaces in the book Hannibal, named after the character in Silence of the Lambs [0], but the description there is of a lavish imaginary palace inside your mind you can wander in. I did use this technique to try to remember some physics formulae for an exam once, in my memory palace there was a room with giant equations. >This website is a bit of a let-down for me since it's just a bird's eye view, it would be cool to create a palace using a 3d game engine, with signs that point to things like physics formulae, and then some Sims or Google-Sketchup-like tool to add objects that you want to remember. >[0] The relevant excerpt about Hannibal's memory palace: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/illusion-chasers/hannibal-lecter/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/illusion-chasers/hannib... , it describes a painting that he uses to remember the fictional address "3327 Tindal, Arlington VA 22308". >todd8 on Jan 19, 2020 | prev | next [–] >Hans-Lukas Teuber[1] was the head of the psychology department and my professor for the intro psychology class at MIT. He gave one two-hour evening lecture per week, which were delivered without notes. The lectures were riveting, they were given in MIT's largest lecture hall; it was standing room only to hear him speak--many students and faculty would attend even though not enrolled. I don't remember ever hearing a better live lecture than those that he gave (and I've heard many lectures--I spent more years at university than Belucci's character in Animal House). He used the memory palace method to remember his lecture's organization. >[1] http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/teuber-hans-lukas.pdf http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/m... >DonHopkins on Jan 19, 2020 | prev | next [–] >I visualize and remember code that way. For me, it's hard to forget somewhere I've been, even if I only imagined being there. >Each function is a little building like an office or a shop, which has a sign out front telling what services or products it sells, and contains everything inside you need to solve some kind of problem or produce some kind of product or service (where equipment in the room is like references to other objects and functions and imported libraries). >You're standing behind the front counter, just about to receive a customer though the front entrance door with the parameters you need for one particular instance of that problem. >You go into the back room, solve the problem, then deliver the results out the exit door at the back of the building (or through any of the other earlier emergency exits, if you had to exit prematurely or throw an error and run away). >The front/back flow is a metaphor for the top/bottom flow of control through a function. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi%E2%80%93Shneiderman_diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi%E2%80%93Shneiderman_diag... >If you squint you can see the example Nassi-Shneiderman diagram in that article as a map of a building, with its front at the top, and exit at the bottom. >You can have internal hallways and rooms for branches and loops, like a Nassi-Shneiderman diagram. The "Sub to Determine Wiki-Article" room is like the front entrance lobby of a theater where buy your ticket. The "Select Favourite Genre" room is like the stage of The Price is Right, and you get to pick what's behind door #1 (History), #2 (Science), or # (Geography), or else choose Other. They each have one or two rooms behind them with your rewards, and then they all finally exit out to the same back stage loading dock, where you take your wonderful prize (or consolation donkey) home. >kruasan on Jan 19, 2020 | prev [–] >I once memorized 200 digits of pi when I had nothing more fun to do on a long boring lecture. Sherlock popped into my mind, so I imagined a journey through my house where I chunked numbers to make them represent certain things or people, and me interacting or talking with them, like in a story of some sort. But it feels like I never applied this method to anything significant, apart from memorizing a few things from my biochemistry course. Although now I remember credit card numbers, every single phone number of my friends and family (by associating numbers with particular facial features or character traits), and some other things. I would say before that day I never fully realized just how much I actually like to memorize stuff like words and numbers. Anyway, I think everyone should give it a try, this is fun.
deleted 5y ago
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technothrasher 5y ago
Why did you cause me to have childhood nightmares about chiggers? I didn't even know what they were, growing up in New England, but they scared the heck out of me at six years old. Thanks for that! Actually, honestly, thanks for sparking my imagination enough to want to code my own text adventures, which began my life long love of programming.
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  I am so very sorry about the chiggers. I grew up with them in Florida and they were not a fun experience for me either. I am though delighted to hear that my classic games were helpful in you understanding your own gifts! I appreciate you sharing that with me!
  - castwide 5y ago
    I can't imagine how many future developers were originally inspired to learn programming by playing your games. A text adventure was the first thing I wanted to make when I learned BASIC on a VIC-20. Even now, I maintain an interactive fiction SDK for Ruby (https://gamefic.com https://gamefic.com). Thanks, Scott!
    - ScottAdams 5y ago
      That is so neat. Ruby running IF is very special! Wonderful to hear you using your gift that way!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dekhn 5y ago
  hahahha, same here- grew up in CT but my dad is from FL and he explained. It always just sounded like an epithet to me.
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    Here lies Scott, bitten to death by chiggers :) LOL!
ggambetta 5y ago
Hi, Scott! Fun to see you here :)
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Great to see you as well. From the short handle I suspect you are one of my long term Italian friends! Am I correct? If so cool! If not, then I am happy to make a new friend!
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Now I know who you are! You gave some excellent advice on a project I was working on! Nice to see you here as well!
mysterydip 5y ago
What's a question you've always wanted to be asked?
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Oh you are an excellent interviewer! No one has ever asked that one of me. Probably thing I love the share the most is how amazed I was to find out the Creator of the Universe and is real and that He actually cares about me. A subject I am now always williing to share but not many inquire about it.
  - mysterydip 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing! Were you able to put that into any of your games in one way or another? I am a hobbyist gamedev and am struggling to find a way that doesn't come off as "in your face".
    - ScottAdams 5y ago
      Best one I did in that area was The Inheritance. It requires you to read and show you understand some bible verses. You don't have to agree with them but you do need to comprehend what they are saying.
1970-01-01 5y ago
Thank you for making such wonderful adventure games! Will your games ever be ported directly to app stores or game stores such as XBOX Live? I think you would get thousands of new fans. Any updates on your Lyme resources?
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  HI! I don't have any plans of putting my classic (or new adventure games) on XBox as they don't really lend themselves to console play. You really need a keyboard to enjoy them. Though I do have one game on Alexa www.EscapeTheGloomer.com www.lyme-resource.com is still around but I haven't updated in some time. Most folks tend to be more focused on Covid than Lyme. Yet Lyme is still a deadly killer that is often misdiagnosed.
Rd6n6 5y ago
Hi Scott. I started playing parser based IF less than a month ago. I find it so immersive that the only parallel I have for the experience is high quality VR. I love it so much that I wrote my own parser engine 2 weeks ago and I have some ideas for side projects to revive the genre. Thanks for helping to create these! Are you aware at the moment of any interesting developments in the “text games for people with vision problems” field?
- anthk 5y ago
  You may like using Inform6 instead of writting your own parser. Most verbs and room behaviours are already implemented: https://www.inform-fiction.org/ https://www.inform-fiction.org/
  - Rd6n6 5y ago
    Part of the fun is making the engine and figuring out how the games work under the hood. The world model is surprisingly simple and flexible in these games. Learning about this style of world model gave me some ideas for other projects
    - anthk 5y ago
      You can make an v3 z-machine interpreter in weeks :).
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    Very neat indeed but I am partial to my own engine as I know it so well and can tweak it to do exactly what I need :)
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  My Return To Pirate Island 2 (turn of the century), the Inheritance (2013) were blind compatable. I also released Escape The Gloomer on Alexa (fully audio only) Currently working on making AdventurelandXL (www.AdventurelandXL.com) Windows screen reader compatable as well.
kbutler 5y ago
Wanted to say thanks for many hours of puzzling and enjoyment with my brothers growing up. I always appreciated that the puzzles you created had logical solutions, though I confess we also examined the strings embedded in the programs for clues! And I remember being stuck and playfully trying to jump into a certain ravine and realizing that instead I had just found out how to get across it (I guess it was a smaller ravine than I had imagined). Another poster mentioned learning "flotsam & jetsam" - I also learned calliope - though not how to pronounce it. But I think we never completed The Golden Voyage - I should see if I can convince my children raised with Minecraft and HD games to give your adventures a shot. This is good timing, as my family often plays older games over Thanksgiving.
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  If you want to try something special see about playing www.EscapeTheGloomer.com or wwww.AdventurelandXL.com with them as a group. They are more forgiving than my classic games and designed with more modern audiences :)
Jiro 5y ago
I can get many of your adventures from your old website. The readme file says that four of the later adventures are in SAGA+ format and are not included because ScottFree can't play them. Since this was written 24 years ago, is there now anything that can play them and if so will you be releasing them? (I'd think that at least it should be possible to play through emulation.) Trying to google this is harder than it seems, and shows me graphical versions that are so different between systems that they look like they were written from scratch for each system rather than using the same data format with an engine.
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  All my games used either my original engine or my later SAGA engine. I have since built on that engine and created CLO+# (pronounced Clopas Sharp) The reason the later games may not be available would also be due to licensing. The licenses for the Marvel games and Buckeroo Banzai have all expired and can't be legally used anymore. Keep searching on the internet though. There are users and user groups still playing them :)
- fistynuts 5y ago
  I believe ScummVM supports many of Scott's games.
  - anthk 5y ago
    Gargoyle supports all engines and the text rendering it's far better.
- Jiro 5y ago
  I was referring to this text from the 0readme.txt: >Most of the "later" and "Marvel" games were published in SAGA+ format (with a better parser). These versions are not included because ScottFree cannot play them yet. The following games were available in SAGA+ format: When I searched for SAGA+, I found almost no evidence (outside that readme) that "SAGA+ format" is even a thing that really exists, let alone that any particular version of the game is in that format or that anyone has written a parser that can parse it. Also, it lists three licensed games and Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle in SAGA+, which sounds as though it's not licensed, and should be releaseable.
andrewstuart 5y ago
Hi Scott, You changed my life when at 12 years old I first saw a computer and the first things I saw running on it was Voodoo Castle and The Count. Back in 1979 it was literally like I had discovered magic was real because here in Australia computers were unknown to most ordinary people. It's hard to convey how much this blew my 12 year old mind. I don't think I stopped thinking about Scott Adams adventures for years after that. I LOVED all your games, so much atmosphere. Thanks for creating that magical part of my life. Favorites: Voodoo Castle The Count Mystery Fun House AdventureLand Savage Island (though it was too hard for me)_
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  I am so excited that my games were such an inspiration to you! Have you tried any of my newer ones at all? www.Clopas.net see if anything strikes your fancy now?
Ishmaeli 5y ago
Wow, your stuff looks amazing and I can't believe I've never heard of you. I can't wait to dive in. I came of age in the Infocom era. Do you know any of those guys? (Brian Moriarty, Steve Meretzky...)
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Hi! Happy to make a new friend. My classic games were fun but tiny due to the 16k limits I had to work with. Be sure and check out some of my newer games as well www.clopas.net I don't think I have never had the pleasure to interact with Brian or Steve but I greatly respect their work!
anthk 5y ago
Have you ever played a modern IF game made in Inform6/7? The modern ones from the IF Archive for the Z-Machine, I mean. https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXzcode.html https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXzcode.html
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  Sorry to say other than the original Zork etc I have not. In general I have stayed away from other text based adventures so as not to accidentally copy some one else's puzzle or idea in one of my own games.
thereare5lights 5y ago
What's it like to share a name with the comic?
- ScottAdams 5y ago
  It's been interesting. I have a personal sig that reads: Not Dilbert, Adventure! Say yoho and everything spins around and suddenly I'm elsewhere...

pamoroso 5y ago

Thanks for sharing your story Scott. Back when you wrote your early games, what were your toolchain and development process?

ScottAdams 5y ago
Really good question! I was working on a TRS-80 Level II machine (this was a model 1 before there wer models). It was my first home appliance computer, before that I had homebrews. It came with Microsoft Basic. I had only used tiny basic up until then and wanted to play with strings. It sounded neat to be able to manipulate language with them. I wrote a game language, a compiler for the language, and an interpreter for the language to play the game, all in BASIC. I also wrote Adventureland (my first game) at the same time. Adding features to the tools and the game as I was inspired. Much later I converted the BASIC interpreter into Z80 assembler to be able to give me more memory. The entire game with interpreter had to fit in 16K bytes!
- pamoroso 5y ago
  Very interesting, thanks. I wonder whether you distributed those early commercial games as BASIC source on tape.
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    Adventureland and Pirate Adventure were both originally done in BASIC and the interpreter with the compiled language (it reduced it to numbers) was on the tape. I did have some extremely clever folks reverse engineer my language and then write games in it! Hat tip to Alvin Files and William Demas amongst others!
    - pamoroso 5y ago
      Got it, thanks again.
    - mypalmike 5y ago
      Pirate Adventure was the first game I had on my Atari 800. I really loved it. I still remember coming across the terms "pieces of eight" and "flotsam and jetsam" and having to ask my mom what they meant. I seem to recall it was my first encounter with the the word "flat" meaning apartment. My vocabulary was thus improved by your work. Thanks!

moolcool 5y ago

(Not the Dilbert one)

ScottAdams 5y ago
Which is a good point. Back when the internet was starting to bloom I got a nice email from Scott Adams of Dilbert. Seems he had gotten a number of fan mails meant for me and was trying to find who to send it to. I also had a number of fan mails meant for him! We exchanged the mails and had a nice chat about it!
- JshWright 5y ago
  > Which is a good point. Especially as he seems to have kind of gone off the proverbial deep end with his political fanaticism in recent years...
  - zalequin 5y ago
    If you read his books, it’s obvious he’s doing that on purpose in order to get more attention (which eventually is converted to fatter bottom line for him). Essentially, the dude is a professional troll.
    - mmastrac 5y ago
      Totally agree, but it really felt like he had drunk his own kool-aid at times.
      - smilespray 5y ago
        First rule of drugs and propaganda: Don't get high on your own supply.
    - weswpg 5y ago
      His wife is extremely young and I can't look at them together without thinking something is really wrong there. He might be older than his father-in-law.

MPSimmons 5y ago

Scott, are there any “modern” games that you feel capture the same spirit of exploration and discovery that your games embraced?

ScottAdams 5y ago
I do love exploration and discovery games. Especially with a good story line. Some of the games that I have greatly enjoyed are (in no particular order) Myst, Everquest (1 and 2), Dark Age of Camelot, Age of Empires, Fable, Guild Wars 2, Baldurs Gate, Half Life, Valheim (currently playing), Descent (played with two joysticks, one in each hand to give full 3D controls), Star Wars Galaxy, Sims, Call of Heroes, Ultima Online

TigeriusKirk 5y ago

Scott, what was the thinking behind publishing the source code to some of your early games in magazines (at a time when you could still sell them profitably)? It obviously worked out well, but it sounds like a bold step to take.

ScottAdams 5y ago
I was approached by Byte Magazine to do a feature article for them. I included my game source code in it as I wanted to share the technology I had developed with others. Sadly there were a number of typos when they transcribed it into the magazine. Yet many people were able to press through and debug it to get it work which was pretty amazing. My thought was we are all standing on the shoulder's of those who went before us. By helping each other we build towards a better future. I have received a load of fan mail over the years from folks who have now gone from being fans to being friends. One of the major threads in most of the emails was how my games or gaming systems made a big impact on their life. There are literally a number of very well known gaming companies now, who's founders have written me about how my early games were an ispiration for them. I had no idea at the time, but God was using me through the gift He gave me to inpsire others. It is wonderful to be able to see that happen!
- s7r 5y ago
  > My thought was we are all standing on the shoulder's of those who went before us. By helping each other we build towards a better future. Inspired by this comment, just wanted to share this with you: https://manyworlds.pages.dev/about https://manyworlds.pages.dev/about Still in development (first time sharing the site!) — in any case, thought it might resonate!
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    Oh that is really cool! Thanks for sharing it. I signed up! Hey folks take a look!
    - s7r 5y ago

zalequin 5y ago

To Mr. Adams - what sort of games would you make today if you were starting from scratch?

ScottAdams 5y ago
Hi! Please feel free to call me Scott! Well I am still making games and some from scratch :) See www.FinalPilot.com it is something I did for another company who had a vision and I and my team have a had a great deal of fun creating it. Still a work in progress with a major update coming out shortly. In terms of adventure type games I am really fond of www.EscapeTheGloomer.com it tells a parallel story to book 2 of the Redwall series Mossflower. I did a lot of new things in this game. One of which is that the player is actually writing their own story as they play. The game reads as a novel as the player explores, discovers and creates. And lastly I am currently working on www.AdventurelandXL.com which stands for Roman numeral 40 for the 40th anniversary of Adventureland and also for Extra Large. It includes the entire base game along with an entire new section with saluates to some of the cultural myths and fantasys that I did not get to include in Advenutreland originally. It also includes what is now one of my favorite puzzle sequences (deals with the chimp in the jungle). It is currently in early access on Steam for Windows, everyone playing it is helping make the game better for eventual final release. It is like ET and phones home after each play sesssion with the player's trace file. The entire game is in there except for the very final scene. I love to hear get email from folks playing it too with their impressions.

cenazoic 5y ago

To piggyback on MPSimmons’ question, have you played any of the interactive fiction from the 1995 revival on? I read in your interview that you consider your company Clopas as a ‘company of Christians’, rather than a ‘Christian company’, and that you make games “[which] God can use in His glory to uplift people..” Can you discuss more about what ‘uplift’ means to you, and how it’s reflected in your games? What’s an example of a non-uplifting game/mechanic? I’m not a Christian, but I find this idea a fascinating one. My mind first goes to something like RDR2, which while perhaps not uplifting in the traditional sense, reminded me of the awe of natural beauty (or God’s creation, if you prefer). Or do you mean more like - the game somehow inspires the player to be a better person, for various definitions of ‘better’? Thanks for taking the time today!

ScottAdams 5y ago
You raise execellent questions. Thanks for asking! To me uplift means to leave the player in a better state than when they started. To bring them closer to God's Glory and plan for their life. To see the Universe and as an incredible place to be and to see Life as an incredible gift from our most awesome and loving Creator. I am looking forward to an eternity of exploration, discovery and insprired creation due to the agency of my savior and friend Jesus.
ScottAdams 5y ago
I did miss your first part of your questions and appologize. In most cases I have not played most IF that is out there. Though Myst stands out as an incredible exception to that. But it of course was mostly non-verbal and delight to eyes. Part of the reason of not playing many is a reticence to accidentally steal a puzzle idea (via absortion as it were) and the other is simply I have way more fun writing, coding and designing :)

nsxwolf 5y ago

Hi Scott, for the TI-99/4A versions of your games, did you handle the development of the ROM cartridge? What was that like? Did you have to split up any of your code to separate the game engine from the adventures themselves?

ScottAdams 5y ago
Hi! I did the entire programming of obth of the TI cartrige games, the text adventure cartridge (read in the games from cassette) and the special made-for-TI graphical text adventure in a cartridge: Return to Pirates Island. My game language interpreter was already separate from games written in my adventure language. So putting the interpreter on the cartridge was not very difficult. See one of the other threads on this AMA for more information about that! I acutally have a TI/99 still today. It is the only classic machine I have. :)
- nsxwolf 5y ago
  You were using good software engineering principles way back then! Now my obligitory fanboying: Those text adventures were an important part of my formative years. They inspired me to learn how to write more advanced programs, because I desperately wanted to create my own text adventures. My first one was a gigantic, unwieldy tree of if/then/else statements, and that painful experience led me to more learn advanced data structures and concepts.
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    I am so glad my classic games were such a great inspiration for you!

jim_lawless 5y ago

Scott, I am curious about the genesis of your game language interpreter. Did you have a background in building interpreters / compilers before going in this direction?

ScottAdams 5y ago
I always looked at a computer issue as a challenge. How can I best handle it. My brother built a 32 bit computer from bit slice chips, my other brother made a tv typewriter IO for it. I was the one who was going to program it. So I made a game. I had no compiler, not even an assembler or linker. I had to write it in psuedo assembler and then hand assemble and link the code. One issue I discovered early on was I made mistakes and it made lots of branch statements invalid if things moved. Not having a linker I devised a system where i put a jump table at the top of every module and then all other modules accesed that module via it's jump table. Just an example of approaching a problem. I had the first ever Sphere computer (look them up! Amazing machine) It was a text only screen and I wanted to write a graphic game for it. So I designed an built my own graphics card, designed and built tank controllers for 2 players and wrote a tank war game for 2 players. I never saw problems as a wall to walk away from, I saw them as an incredible chance to do something different to be able to scale it. So when it came to writing a text adventure on a machine with tiny memory I had to get creative. I had not done anything like this before and i was just insprired to do the game, the language, the compiler and the interpreter all at the same time. It just felt right :) I continue to push myself over walls and today I use Unity, C# and continue to do things that aren't supposed ot be possible. For example www.finalPilot.com has an underlying network communication package I derived because I couldnot find a current solution that would totally fit the problem domain. It had to work on both UDP and WebGL with the same code base. It was a lot of fun coming up with a working system. WE are in the process of soon starting a new game with some new challenges and its network system will be much different from what Final Pilot uses. Sorry if I rambled a bit and happy to fill in more details if needed.
- timbit42 5y ago
  I read or heard you talk about Mike Wise's Sphere before. I wish there was more information about it available online. I know there was a BASIC for it before Microsoft or Tiny BASIC came along. Did you have BASIC on the Sphere? How did it compare to other BASICs? Any other info about the Sphere would be appreciated. I know BYTE magazine called it the first true personal computer.

seanwilson 5y ago

Hi Scott! Do you have any thoughts on how hard it is to come up with original adventure game puzzles and what your process is here? When I was looking at this once, I noticed there's a lot of puzzles that are shared between recent adventure games that you can find in older adventure games too e.g. screwdriver + screws, rusty door + oil, distract an NPC so you can steal something. Instead of this being from lack of originality, I think instead there's some limits on how many puzzle like this exist because they have to be common sense + not completely obvious + involve physical object manipulation + use common objects. I think this is one of the reasons a lot of recent adventure games and escape room games devolve into doors with abstract logic problems to unlock them. Alternatively, they need to introduce new mechanics to widen the design space, like adding time travel or magic.

ScottAdams 5y ago
My process has always been one of inspiration from a higher power. I would place a location, think of obvious items for the locations and then pretend I was there. What would I try to do and why? Then I would sit and think about it. I also enjoyed putting it in front of beta testers and seeing what new and unique things they might try that I would want to incorporate into the game. A big tip of the hat to Neil Novak one of my classic game testers from whom I got a lot of great inspiration! As far as new puzzles go I hope you try the new section I wrote for Adventureland XL. I have a large number of new puzzles and one that I am especially happy with that went in a direction I hadn't done before. To get into the XL section of Adventureland you do first need to complete the base game and it has changed a bit with a few new puzzles of its own. You can never loose so don't ever start over. Just keep playing and let me know what you think :)
anthk 5y ago
Most of IF games have puzzless very different from the ones from the graphical adventures as the text medium can set really complex interactions. Check out All Things Devour and Vicious Cycles, both have time travel mechanics.
- seanwilson 5y ago

baggy_trough 5y ago

I still remember enjoying the TRS-80 games Scott made - I probably played 5 or 6 of them. Is there a (reasonable) way to play these games today?

ScottAdams 5y ago
Hi! Good question. My clasic games are available on a number of places on the web. You can find links to some of them on my personal web page at www.msadams.com If you want to have a really fun experience check out www.AdventurelandXL.com which is the full original game and then something really special :)

PaulHoule 5y ago

Scott Adams wrote a simple interpreter which could be implemented in BASIC or Assembly Language for his games. https://6502disassembly.com/a2-scott-adams/interp.html https://6502disassembly.com/a2-scott-adams/interp.html This was like the Infocom interpreter (e.g. "Zork") but more specialized to writing games.

ScottAdams 5y ago
Yes that is correct! I had a lot of fun inventing it and was able to do some interesting things with it. Every adventiure game I wrote I tried to do something different that I hadn't done before.
anthk 5y ago
The Z-Machine was made for games, too. And the then new Inform6 game was basically literal OOP with rooms, objects and people, thus making an adventure can be done in really trivial ways. If you read up Inform's Beginner Guide you'll get amazed of how the Inform6 library handles lots of stuff for you. Lots of verbs and objects types are already implemented, so you can set a game "room" for example in just four words split into two lines.
- framsberg 5y ago
  Nowadays there's also PunyInform, an Inform 6 library that replaces the standard library. Programming for it is very similar, but the resulting games are much smaller and faster, to work well on 8-bit computers. https://github.com/johanberntsson/PunyInform https://github.com/johanberntsson/PunyInform There's currently a jam going on. Three PunyInform games have been released, and anyone can play and judge them at https://itch.io/jam/punyjam-2/entries https://itch.io/jam/punyjam-2/entries . One of the games (Opportunity) comes with source code too, so you can see how it works, if you're interested.
  - anthk 5y ago
    Yeah, I know Punyinform too, I already tried some game under Vice (C64 emu). I am curious about Tristan Island, it looks like a decent game for an v3 Z-machine.

devenson 5y ago

Did you have an office in Longwood FL, near Sabal Point in the 80s? If so, I fondly remember dumpster diving into your trash dumpster w other neighborhood kids in search of games or whatever.

ScottAdams 5y ago
Hi! Yes I did! It was one of 3 in the greater orlando area. AI Computer Center. I have since heard from other new friends that were also kids back then dumpster diving at the store. Apparently a lof treasures found new homes in the local area. Very neat! Did you know a Brian, Jonathan, Rob or Kevin perhaps?
- devenson 5y ago
  One of my partners in crime was named John Taylor.
  - ScottAdams 5y ago
    Lol yes I chatted today with him :) Cool!
    - devenson 5y ago
      Cool indeed!

ianbicking 5y ago

Game design question: Text adventures as a category always struck me as kind of lonely. They often take place in environments where all the people have been removed, like miniature apocalypses. It seems technically fairly obvious why this happens: other people are too hard to model. People have goals and expectations and so someone traipsing around trying random things is not generally acceptable, and creating characters that are disinterested in their environment is its own challenge. (Writing this I realize grumpy and stubborn characters are fairly common, maybe for these same reasons!) In all these years of advancement in games the NPC still seems either lifeless or absent. I'm afraid I haven't actually played your games, so I don't know how you've tried to address it, but I'm sure you've thought about it. I'd be curious to hear any of those thoughts, but maybe specific questions: 1. Have you had any successes you could share in making a NPC seem "alive"? 2. Any ideas you were convinced were great but failed when implemented? 3. Do you think new technology can be applied to this? For instance it sounds like you are using more advanced NLP in Escape the Gloomer. (But understanding is only half, NPC motivation and goals seem equally hard.) 4. Does a strong NPC distract from the autonomy of the player? (Sometimes I wonder if people even want a strong NPC, or if players actually prefer NPCs to be background.) 5. And separately, have you tried AI Dungeon and if so what did you think?

Rd6n6 5y ago
Play Galatea. It’s a famous, award winning parser game about a conversation with a sentient statue and has approx 70 endings. The game models your relationship along several axes as you go and the writing is superb
- andybak 5y ago
  Oh god. I might have just installed the wrong Galatea.
  - ianbicking 5y ago
    The erotic literature collection for women? That was the first program I found with that name :)

ScottAdams 5y ago

Just a quick note that I am off to meet family flying in for Thanksgiving. I will continue to reply to this thread later this afternoon.

ScottAdams 5y ago
I am back for a bit and trying to catch up with all the amazing comments on this thread. You folks are super!

hitekker 5y ago

For new folks like myself, Scott Adams is a prolific game designer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer)

ScottAdams 5y ago
Thanks for putting up the link! Great to make a new friend btw! Happy Adventuring!

strenholme 5y ago

I actually figured out the format for Scott Adams adventures and created a Scott Adams port of the “Cloak of Darkness” mini adventure, as well as my own small adventure game, Desert adventure, which can be played online at https://samiam.org/software/parchment/desert.html https://samiam.org/software/parchment/desert.html Downloads follow. Cloak of Darkness: https://samiam.org/software/parchment/Cloak-Scott.zip https://samiam.org/software/parchment/Cloak-Scott.zip Desert adventure: https://samiam.org/software/parchment/desert-scott.zip https://samiam.org/software/parchment/desert-scott.zip

ScottAdams 5y ago
So cool you were able to do that! Big congratulations on taking it to the next level and making your own games! Love it!
eps 5y ago
> desert.html Issuing two "go north" commands causes the page to go completely blank in mobile Safari.
- strenholme 5y ago
  Works for me (Firefox, Windows). Try this URL: https://samiam.org/software/parchment/desert-smartphone.html https://samiam.org/software/parchment/desert-smartphone.html (The version of Parchment I use is somewhat unusual because I had to be 100% GPL compliant)

digger1970 5y ago

Just wanted to say thanks for all the memory's. Took me weeks to get all the treasures in Return To Pirates Isle on my old TI 99/4A. Without any spoilers, finding the alarm clock took forever...

ScottAdams 5y ago
Yes the alarm clock was basically but an annoying and hopefully rewarding puzzle. It was designed to remind you that something was still unknown and also to get a great moment of AHA when solved. Big congratulations on staying with it and solving that puzzle! By the way the alarm clock makes a return visit in my 2013 game The Inheritance.

anthk 5y ago

Those adventures had been converted to the Z-Machine long ago. Get them from IF archive and you can play them anywhere. https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/adamsinform.zip https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/adamsinform.zip

ScottAdams 5y ago
Very cool! Thanks for the link.

roomey 5y ago

Stupid question, how do I play these games? They sound great.

ScottAdams 5y ago
Hi check out the downloads and links section of my personal site www.msadams.com for the classic games or www.clopas.net for new ones.

KarlKemp 5y ago

Oh, hey, what a celebrity. I'd like to use this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to clearly state: You suck. (Also: Dilbert isn't even funny. The character is stuck in a dystopia because he is too cynical to realize that he could life a more meaningful life. Why anyone would willingly identify with him is left for psych majors to explore)

dang 5y ago
Posting like this to HN will get you banned here, even if you hadn't gotten your Scott Adamses mixed up. You may not feel you owe someone better, but you owe this community far better if you're participating in it. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future, we'd appreciate it. Edit: turns out I had to warn you about posting personal attacks just a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29311314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29311314. No more of this, please, or we'll have to ban you. Please don't post any more flamewar comments, either—for example like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29259077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29259077. All this is emphatically not what the site is for, and is not welcome here. Edit 2: I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29335724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29335724 and hope that Scott hasn't seen how rude you were, so we can all feel slightly less ashamed of this.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

pigeons 5y ago

I loved questprobe spider-man on the Commodore 64, but I didn't finish it.

ScottAdams 5y ago
Sorry you didn't get to finish it. I had a lot of fun writing that one and working with the incredible folks at Marvel!

BashiBazouk 5y ago

I wonder if I have played one of his games. When I was a preteen the adults in the house I lived in took a three week computer course. For the period of the course, my friend and I had access to a Commodore Pet. There was a text adventure that was kind of DnDish. A game we had recently started to play. We went through the text adventure then started to look at and play with the code changing all text to something much more juvenile...

ScottAdams 5y ago
It is possible. Adventureland was available for the Pet as was Pirate Adventure.