7 ms·

50 Years of Text Games parses the rich history of a foundational genre

67 points by KnuthIsGod 3y ago

mircea_eliade 3y ago
This book introduced me to Super Star Trek, which I have now lost many hours to
rado 3y ago
A GPT version of parser adventures would be awesome.
- palad1n 3y ago
  Like AI Dungeon?
- anthk 3y ago
  It would suck a lot. GPT lacks coherence in lots of fronts. A game made with Inform6 (OOP) or Inform 7 (natural language), even done by an amateur it's much better on consistency and playability.
  - ilaksh 3y ago
    You could use a similar engine to keep track of things and feed them to GPT could provide new descriptions or ideas, or use functions provided by the engine to modify map state or run appropriate commands according to the what the user says. To start, it could be as simple as giving GPT the list of valid commands for the user state and location and having it translate if the user asks for something that is equivalent but doesn't match the command exactly.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  Maybe. The problem is that it could hallucinate it's way into a corner and kill the intended narrative as it creates non-sensical objects and characters. But it is very funny to think of a system requiring massive amounts of compute being used to try and replicate a genre as old as PCs itself.
  - DennisP 3y ago
    My girlfriend uses Siri to add up numbers. That's a massive amount of compute to replicate a mechanical adding machine.
  - anthk 3y ago
    A GTX 3080 Golden Edition TM vs a Pentium MMX/32MB with Inform6 (and that's more than enough to run several builds in parallel) or a Pentium II@333 with Inform7 and some text editor. More than funnny, it's shameful. And a huge waste of resources. I mean, if they used AI's for parsing papers helping bioinformatics and medicine, that would be a great case. Not for text adventures, where with Inform6 and basic logic you can create a game in a month. A week to write a good script (literarian script), another one to code it and two weeks polishing things and bugs here and there.
    - DennisP 3y ago
      Your brain does far more computation and you're saying to use it for a good part a month to do something an AI can do on the fly in seconds.
      - anthk 3y ago
        Tell me you never played IF (even the basic ones) without telling me so explicitly. If you play Entangled, Anchorhead, All Things Devours... the gameplay it's far above an AI can do. In ...devours... you have a time travelling puzzle where you must avoid a paradox with yourself. Good luck with that. And that's a game that will run under Frotz from DOS/Windows 95/old Linux/NetBSD in a 486. Or your basement Raspberry Pi, without even sweating a cycle. Put a Pentium MMX or a basic RpiA, play Galatea https://www.ifwiki.org/Galatea https://www.ifwiki.org/Galatea or Counterfeit Monkey https://www.ifwiki.org/Counterfeit_Monkey https://www.ifwiki.org/Counterfeit_Monkey and then enforcing an AI to create a coherent game with narrativeness, feelings and drama (without being formulaic on speech or narrative) without shitting itself over a few iterations of gameplays it's a dauntisk task. And these are text games, I repeat, an Amiga, Atari or a 486 could run without too much hazzle. Yet they are created with trivial tools also runable in a Pentium machine from 1997. Yet an AI can't reach these levels of gameplay even if they tried. Because maintaing coherence on described media with full of twists and easy to create "hard" puzzles like nothing (for an Inform6 progrmmer) it's a very hard task for a machine having to do plays on semantics.
- spencerflem 3y ago
  "There’s no question in my mind that such software could generate reasonably good murder mysteries, action thrillers, or gothic romances. After all, even the authors of such works will tell you that they are formulaic. If there’s a formula in there, a deep learning AI system will figure it out. Therein lies the fatal flaw: the output will be formulaic. Most important, the output won’t have any artistic content at all. You will NEVER see anything like literature coming out of deep learning AI. You’ll see plenty of potboilers pouring forth, but you can’t make art without an artist. This stuff will be hailed as the next great revolution in entertainment. We’ll see lots of prizes awarded, fulsome reviews, thick layers of praise heaped on, and nobody will see any need to work on the real thing. That will stop us dead in our tracks for a few decades. " from https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/interactive-storytelling/why-i-am-ending-further.html https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/interactive-storytelling/... (2018)
pavlov 3y ago
Really great book. I had preordered it as a kind of semi-donation, to be honest, because I’ve never been that much into the various text gaming genres (and because I just spend too much on books that I want to exist but maybe not read that much). But this book is so well curated and written, I found myself itching to play several of these games from 1985 onwards. There’s a rich history of digital literature that I’ve completely missed. The author also looks into the various games’ implementation strategies and engines, even showing code samples. Unexpectedly fascinating.
- anthk 3y ago
  Thanks to the Z-Machine, Frotz and Inform6/Inform7 you can play games like Entangled, Anchorhead, Curses!, Jigsaw, Slouch over bedlamp, I-0, Spiritwrak, All Things Devours, Vicious Cycles, Woman... on any platform, from PC's, Mac, Android machines and even TRS 80's with an improved Z-Machine interpreter: https://intfiction.org/t/m4zvm-a-new-modern-z-machine-for-the-trs-80-model-4/54896 https://intfiction.org/t/m4zvm-a-new-modern-z-machine-for-th... Z Machine games. The mentioned games are all available. Use Frotz to play them under Unix, Winfrotz under Windows, Lectrote under Android. http://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXzcode.html http://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXzcode.html
  - BizarroLand 3y ago
    I played many of the games covered in the series as a kid thanks to kindly senior software pirates on my local BBS and my mom purchasing a copy of both the Lost Treasures of Infocom and the sequel. The only problem was that I was too young to really get the genre, it was difficult, so I only ever beat the easier ones, Zork Zero, Wishbringer, Enchanter, Sorcerer and Spellbreaker. The others completely wailed on me, I could barely get a third of the way through the original Zork without being eaten by a grue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Treasures_of_Infocom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Treasures_of_Infocom
mysterydip 3y ago
I'm almost through (in the 2010s right now) and really enjoying it. It's given me a ton of ideas of things to try in my own games (like quality-based narratives).
nickdothutton 3y ago
“ So many of these early gaming subgenres were abandoned before their time as gamers jumped on to the new shiny thing. It's really worth looking back at all the untapped potential we've left behind. “ I have felt this for years, and was an early Infocom customer. There exists (I think) a defensible space part-way between a book and a graphical game, which we are no-longer exploiting.
- marttt 3y ago
  Same here. I loved books before I got into Sierra adventure games, but I do think that text adventures (especially those in pure console mode, no graphics) are really good for developing language comprehension and vocabulary as a child. I'd say Al Lowe's work with Leisure Suit Larry and and Police Quest did play a significant role in how I sense a "good sentence", and, also, how I sense humor. At the language level, those Sierra games were incredibly good. I've been thinking about writing a text adventure for/with my son (in our native language, not English) for this exact purpose: fair enough, he's a gamer, but let's also deepen his understanding of the structures of written word.
billfruit 3y ago
Many of the games profiled seems narrative based games. Are there many text based games, that are not about narratives, like simulation or wordgame type text based games?
- anthk 3y ago
  - VMS Empire, for war sim a la XConq or Advance Wars but in terminal. - Word game, from Boggle to Hangman to Wordle.
- CBarkleyU 3y ago
  You bet'cha, but that depends on your definition of "text games" --- no, even your definition of "text". Is a game that uses ASCII art text based? There a whole universe of "text games" (literally, games consisting of text only) and in that universe there is a galaxy of "text adventure/interactive fiction" type games. For me personally, the latter are games that are predominantly defined by being parser based games; think "go north" type games. The Nordland trilogy (not even sure if it was ever translated to English) is a parser based role playing game; Oregon Trail is a choice based simulation game, Empire Wargame is an ASCII based strategy game, and so on and so forth. And there are still text based games of all coleur being released today.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Yes, tons of them. Command line "hangman" games being one very old and common example of "language/word" game. There are also text based RPGs and space exploration games, and so on. But this is about text "adventure" games.
- dekervin 3y ago
  I am hacking with others on a game that is part simulation, part narrative. It sets in the music industry. Here is the link. I would love some feedback while we are ironing it out. https://quantico.alwaysdata.net/static/game_text/game/index___iframe.html?lang=en https://quantico.alwaysdata.net/static/game_text/game/index_... Ps: not mobile friendly yet and there are english errors to be corrected.
Pelerin 3y ago
I recommend the author's interview on the Ludology podcast about his work on the book: https://ludology.libsyn.com/ludology-276-text-messages https://ludology.libsyn.com/ludology-276-text-messages

67 points by KnuthIsGod 3y ago

mircea_eliade 3y ago

This book introduced me to Super Star Trek, which I have now lost many hours to

rado 3y ago

A GPT version of parser adventures would be awesome.

palad1n 3y ago
Like AI Dungeon?
anthk 3y ago
It would suck a lot. GPT lacks coherence in lots of fronts. A game made with Inform6 (OOP) or Inform 7 (natural language), even done by an amateur it's much better on consistency and playability.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  You could use a similar engine to keep track of things and feed them to GPT could provide new descriptions or ideas, or use functions provided by the engine to modify map state or run appropriate commands according to the what the user says. To start, it could be as simple as giving GPT the list of valid commands for the user state and location and having it translate if the user asks for something that is equivalent but doesn't match the command exactly.
SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
Maybe. The problem is that it could hallucinate it's way into a corner and kill the intended narrative as it creates non-sensical objects and characters. But it is very funny to think of a system requiring massive amounts of compute being used to try and replicate a genre as old as PCs itself.
- DennisP 3y ago
  My girlfriend uses Siri to add up numbers. That's a massive amount of compute to replicate a mechanical adding machine.
- anthk 3y ago
  A GTX 3080 Golden Edition TM vs a Pentium MMX/32MB with Inform6 (and that's more than enough to run several builds in parallel) or a Pentium II@333 with Inform7 and some text editor. More than funnny, it's shameful. And a huge waste of resources. I mean, if they used AI's for parsing papers helping bioinformatics and medicine, that would be a great case. Not for text adventures, where with Inform6 and basic logic you can create a game in a month. A week to write a good script (literarian script), another one to code it and two weeks polishing things and bugs here and there.
  - DennisP 3y ago
    Your brain does far more computation and you're saying to use it for a good part a month to do something an AI can do on the fly in seconds.
    - anthk 3y ago
      Tell me you never played IF (even the basic ones) without telling me so explicitly. If you play Entangled, Anchorhead, All Things Devours... the gameplay it's far above an AI can do. In ...devours... you have a time travelling puzzle where you must avoid a paradox with yourself. Good luck with that. And that's a game that will run under Frotz from DOS/Windows 95/old Linux/NetBSD in a 486. Or your basement Raspberry Pi, without even sweating a cycle. Put a Pentium MMX or a basic RpiA, play Galatea https://www.ifwiki.org/Galatea https://www.ifwiki.org/Galatea or Counterfeit Monkey https://www.ifwiki.org/Counterfeit_Monkey https://www.ifwiki.org/Counterfeit_Monkey and then enforcing an AI to create a coherent game with narrativeness, feelings and drama (without being formulaic on speech or narrative) without shitting itself over a few iterations of gameplays it's a dauntisk task. And these are text games, I repeat, an Amiga, Atari or a 486 could run without too much hazzle. Yet they are created with trivial tools also runable in a Pentium machine from 1997. Yet an AI can't reach these levels of gameplay even if they tried. Because maintaing coherence on described media with full of twists and easy to create "hard" puzzles like nothing (for an Inform6 progrmmer) it's a very hard task for a machine having to do plays on semantics.
spencerflem 3y ago
"There’s no question in my mind that such software could generate reasonably good murder mysteries, action thrillers, or gothic romances. After all, even the authors of such works will tell you that they are formulaic. If there’s a formula in there, a deep learning AI system will figure it out. Therein lies the fatal flaw: the output will be formulaic. Most important, the output won’t have any artistic content at all. You will NEVER see anything like literature coming out of deep learning AI. You’ll see plenty of potboilers pouring forth, but you can’t make art without an artist. This stuff will be hailed as the next great revolution in entertainment. We’ll see lots of prizes awarded, fulsome reviews, thick layers of praise heaped on, and nobody will see any need to work on the real thing. That will stop us dead in our tracks for a few decades. " from https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/interactive-storytelling/why-i-am-ending-further.html https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/interactive-storytelling/... (2018)

pavlov 3y ago

Really great book. I had preordered it as a kind of semi-donation, to be honest, because I’ve never been that much into the various text gaming genres (and because I just spend too much on books that I want to exist but maybe not read that much). But this book is so well curated and written, I found myself itching to play several of these games from 1985 onwards. There’s a rich history of digital literature that I’ve completely missed. The author also looks into the various games’ implementation strategies and engines, even showing code samples. Unexpectedly fascinating.

anthk 3y ago
Thanks to the Z-Machine, Frotz and Inform6/Inform7 you can play games like Entangled, Anchorhead, Curses!, Jigsaw, Slouch over bedlamp, I-0, Spiritwrak, All Things Devours, Vicious Cycles, Woman... on any platform, from PC's, Mac, Android machines and even TRS 80's with an improved Z-Machine interpreter: https://intfiction.org/t/m4zvm-a-new-modern-z-machine-for-the-trs-80-model-4/54896 https://intfiction.org/t/m4zvm-a-new-modern-z-machine-for-th... Z Machine games. The mentioned games are all available. Use Frotz to play them under Unix, Winfrotz under Windows, Lectrote under Android. http://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXzcode.html http://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXzcode.html
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  I played many of the games covered in the series as a kid thanks to kindly senior software pirates on my local BBS and my mom purchasing a copy of both the Lost Treasures of Infocom and the sequel. The only problem was that I was too young to really get the genre, it was difficult, so I only ever beat the easier ones, Zork Zero, Wishbringer, Enchanter, Sorcerer and Spellbreaker. The others completely wailed on me, I could barely get a third of the way through the original Zork without being eaten by a grue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Treasures_of_Infocom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Treasures_of_Infocom

mysterydip 3y ago

I'm almost through (in the 2010s right now) and really enjoying it. It's given me a ton of ideas of things to try in my own games (like quality-based narratives).

nickdothutton 3y ago

“ So many of these early gaming subgenres were abandoned before their time as gamers jumped on to the new shiny thing. It's really worth looking back at all the untapped potential we've left behind. “ I have felt this for years, and was an early Infocom customer. There exists (I think) a defensible space part-way between a book and a graphical game, which we are no-longer exploiting.

marttt 3y ago
Same here. I loved books before I got into Sierra adventure games, but I do think that text adventures (especially those in pure console mode, no graphics) are really good for developing language comprehension and vocabulary as a child. I'd say Al Lowe's work with Leisure Suit Larry and and Police Quest did play a significant role in how I sense a "good sentence", and, also, how I sense humor. At the language level, those Sierra games were incredibly good. I've been thinking about writing a text adventure for/with my son (in our native language, not English) for this exact purpose: fair enough, he's a gamer, but let's also deepen his understanding of the structures of written word.

billfruit 3y ago

Many of the games profiled seems narrative based games. Are there many text based games, that are not about narratives, like simulation or wordgame type text based games?

anthk 3y ago
- VMS Empire, for war sim a la XConq or Advance Wars but in terminal. - Word game, from Boggle to Hangman to Wordle.
CBarkleyU 3y ago
You bet'cha, but that depends on your definition of "text games" --- no, even your definition of "text". Is a game that uses ASCII art text based? There a whole universe of "text games" (literally, games consisting of text only) and in that universe there is a galaxy of "text adventure/interactive fiction" type games. For me personally, the latter are games that are predominantly defined by being parser based games; think "go north" type games. The Nordland trilogy (not even sure if it was ever translated to English) is a parser based role playing game; Oregon Trail is a choice based simulation game, Empire Wargame is an ASCII based strategy game, and so on and so forth. And there are still text based games of all coleur being released today.
coldtea 3y ago
Yes, tons of them. Command line "hangman" games being one very old and common example of "language/word" game. There are also text based RPGs and space exploration games, and so on. But this is about text "adventure" games.
dekervin 3y ago
I am hacking with others on a game that is part simulation, part narrative. It sets in the music industry. Here is the link. I would love some feedback while we are ironing it out. https://quantico.alwaysdata.net/static/game_text/game/index___iframe.html?lang=en https://quantico.alwaysdata.net/static/game_text/game/index_... Ps: not mobile friendly yet and there are english errors to be corrected.

Pelerin 3y ago

I recommend the author's interview on the Ludology podcast about his work on the book: https://ludology.libsyn.com/ludology-276-text-messages https://ludology.libsyn.com/ludology-276-text-messages