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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Alright, time to get this off my chest:

I've been around this culture for a long time. I was on Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, and now HN. I've ascended in NetHack more than 10 times (and beaten a bunch of other Roguelikes as well). I've heard about the Infocom games repeatedly over the years.

I've tried to play Zork several times and I just don't get it. Every single time I end up in the maze of twisty little passages and I give up. What am I supposed to do? I tried dropping various objects as breadcrumbs and mapping the damn thing on graph paper... well, it turns out to be non-Euclidean. WTF is that? Is this tedious, bizarre exercise supposed to be fun? Will somebody help me get it?

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In my opinion zork is one of the least impressive infocom games out there, its historical importance cannot be ignored as it was really one of the first infocom games produced; and text based games such as zork did a lot to help computers gain traction as an entertainment medium back in the late 70s.

Many better infocom games have been written since zork and there is even a fairly active community of infocom enthusiasts on sites like IFDB (infocom database) http://ifdb.tads.org/ if you really want to try getting into infocom games try looking at the higher rated ones on that site. My first complete playthrough and all time favorite infocom games is called Vespers and I would highly recommend it as a primer to the infocom medium.

Planetfall, it's number 9 on the list (one of the only 2 on the top ten from before the late 90's) and is absolutely iconic

Once upon a time, games used to require much more work. :) I know someone who finished all the Zorks (I/II/III)... I never did, except maybe Zork Zero which I actually enjoyed the most (it had a "pigeon and perch" mechanic thing, where if you tossed the perch somewhere or dropped it, and then picked up the pigeon sometime and/or somewhere later, it would teleport you to wherever the perch was... often in humorous locations)

I have yet to ascend in NetHack, though. I was into https://alt.org/nethack/ for a time...

Ah, just noticed you can play the DOS version of Zork Zero here: http://playdosgamesonline.com/zork-zero-the-revenge-of-megab... Or here: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Zork_Zero_-_The_Revenge_of...

Playing Zork as your intro to text adventures in this day and age is akin to playing King's Quest as your intro to graphical adventures nowadays. You just don't do that. Not in a world where Monkey Island also exists.

KQ and Zork are both iconic for various reasons, but none of those reasons are because the games are particularly good. They wantonly kill the player, they let you get into unwinnable states, they have puzzles that are essentially impossible. . . hey, it was a new genre, folks were still figuring things out.

In the case of text adventures, I'd suggest starting with something like Anchorhead (long, horror), Lost Pig (short, humorous) or Savoir-Faire (medium, historical-ish).

Quit thinking in terms of literal two-dimensional graph paper, get a blank sheet and a pencil, and just draw arrows representing paths from point to point (even if they cross in non-Euclidean ways).

I played its variants, _Adventure_ and _Dungeon_, for many many hours when a teen. Pity all my maps, Zorkmids, and rolls of printed transcripts have vanished. Most memorable was an evening having the whole family involved figuring out how to defeat the Cyclops (who was programmed with a surprisingly extensive repertoire of boredom & eating you).

"The cyclops yawns and stares at the thing that woke him up."

https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl/blob/be079a4ed234071222...

I would recommend playing The Dreamhold[1] if you're new to interactive fiction. It was designed to be an intro to IF games.

[1]http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=3myqnrs64nbtwdaz

The fun used to be that you needed to figure out the object dropping thing and then the thing that you need to think about the rooms as an abstract graph instead of something that makes spatial sense. (Zork started off as a mainframe game whose audience was pretty much all computer scientists, so they would've been expected to know about graph data structures.)

Once you know the trick, the rest is annoying busywork, and adding a maze has been considered bad design in most text adventures made after the Zork era.

The generally annoying thing about text adventures is that if you hit a puzzle you don't get, your progress can grind into total halt. There's no alternative strategies or just getting lucky like there is in roguelikes. And there are plenty of badly designed games where after having the puzzle explained, you'll go "how was I supposed to figure out THAT?" (Zork 2 has a couple infamous puzzles like this.) If you want to get text adventures, you might want to just use hints when needed to get through a few so you'll get a sense of what the games consider appropriate hints and puzzles.

Yeah, I'm aware of graph data structures. I tried creating a map like that too. It ended up a big mess of nodes with all of these edges intersecting each other and looping back around. I might have made a mistake or two and that screwed up the graph even more! It drove me crazy with how tedious it was.

I guess I reached a point where I said "this is just too complex, it can't be the right solution, there's got to be a smarter way to do this". So to find out that there isn't a smarter way just makes me think it's a terrible puzzle design.

It is terrible puzzle design. Zork is old.

I solved it with a pencil and paper when I was 12 years old or so, and I'm pretty sure lots of other people did too.

I agree it's a little tedious by modern standards but it's really not that complicated. If I recall correctly you can represent the entire thing with about 5-10 boxes connected by a couple lines between them plus a bunch of little loops where the player remains in the same place.

It's a succinct area of the map. Perhaps you should try again with a fresh perspective.

Here's an example of a map like that [0] I made a while ago for an online game. Each room, uniquely identified by an arbitrary item (bagel, lantern, longsword, loaf of bread, etc), is drawn separately with lines in each of the four cardinal indicating where those exits end up. Some are indicated as one-way passages, while others are bent to indicate some sort of spatial relationship when it's reasonable to show (though the entire maze has no coherent planar form). Rooms are in rough order of distance from the end of the maze, which starts at "RED" (through the one-way passage from "FT") and ends at "BREAD" with the east exit back to "FT".

Of course, this is a cleaned up version once I had discovered all the connections; while mapping, each passage would be drawns as a straight one-way connection until bi-directional relationships were discovered.

The chart on the bottom shows the same maze in the form of an adjacency matrix, showing which rooms are connected to which, and by which direction. Again, the rooms are banded by number of steps from the exit. Note that pairs of rooms with bi-directional connections can be discovered by noticing filled cells whose positions are symmetrical about the diagonal of the chart.

The 3 x 3 square in the upper corner is a sort of simple compass I came up with for navigating the maze; it tells you which way to go based on the "shape" (i.e. which directions have exists) of the room. Even though not all room shapes are unique, if you follow those directions you are guaranteed to get out relatively quickly.

0: http://imgur.com/a/2SE8A

The problem with trying to map Zork by dropping objects around, is that the damn thief comes along and picks them up. (Think of the thief as an incremental garbage collector, but not conservative because he also steals objects from your inventory that are still in use!)

https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl/blob/be079a4ed234071222...

; "SUBTITLE A SEEDY LOOKING GENTLEMAN..."

So if you want to make a map by dropping objects, be sure to kill the thief first, otherwise he will rob you blind and take all the objects you dropped.

               (<NOT .DEAD?>
            <COND (<MEMQ .STILL <HOBJS .HACK>>
                   <PUT .HACK ,HOBJS <SPLICE-OUT .STILL <HOBJS .HACK>>>
                   <PUT .HOBJ ,OCONTENTS (.STILL)>
                   <PUT .STILL ,OCAN .HOBJ>)>
            <PUT .HACK ,HOBJS <SET HH <ROB-ROOM .RM .HH 100>>>
                <PUT .HACK ,HOBJS <SET HH <ROB-ADV .WIN .HH>>>
                <PUT .HACK ,HFLAG T>
                <COND (<AND <N==? .OBJT .HH> <NOT .HERE?>>
                   <TELL 
    "A seedy-looking individual with a large bag just wandered through
    the room.  On the way through, he quietly abstracted all valuables
    from the room and from your possession, mumbling something about
    \"Doing unto others before..\"" ,LONG-TELL1>)
                  (.HERE?
                   <SNARF-OBJECT .HOBJ .STILL>
                   <COND (<N==? .OBJT .HH>
                      <TELL 
    "The other occupant just left, still carrying his large bag.  You may
    not have noticed that he robbed you blind first.">)
                     (<TELL 
    "The other occupant (he of the large bag), finding nothing of value,
    left disgusted.">)>
                   <REMOVE-OBJECT .HOBJ>
                   <SET HERE? <>>)

But first be sure to hand him (or let him steal) the jewel encrusted egg before you kill him, since he's the only one with nimble enough fingers to open the egg without breaking it, to get to the clockwork canary inside. Once you retrieve the opened egg from his lair, take the canary to the tree and wind it, and you will receive a beautiful brass bauble!

           <SET EGG <SFIND-OBJ "EGG">>
           <MAPF <>
             <FUNCTION (X) 
                 #DECL ((X) OBJECT)
                 <COND (<G? <OTVAL .X> 0>
                    <PUT .HACK ,HOBJS <SET HH <SPLICE-OUT .X .HH>>>
                    <INSERT-OBJECT .X .RM>
                    <COND (<==? .X .EGG>
                       <SETG EGG-SOLVE!-FLAG T>
                       <TRO .X ,OPENBIT>)>)>>

https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl/blob/be079a4ed234071222...

    <OBJECT ["EGG"]
        ["BIRDS" "ENCRU"]
        "jewel-encrusted egg"
        <+ ,OVISON ,TAKEBIT ,CONTBIT>
        EGG-OBJECT
        (<GET-OBJ "GCANA">)
        (OFVAL 5
         OTVAL 5 
         ODESC1 "There is a jewel-encrusted egg here."
         OCAPAC 6
         ODESCO
    "In the bird's nest is a large egg encrusted with precious jewels,
    apparently scavenged somewhere by a childless songbird.  The egg is 
    covered with fine gold inlay, and ornamented in lapis lazuli and
    mother-of-pearl.  Unlike most eggs, this one is hinged and has a
    delicate looking clasp holding it closed.  The egg appears extremely
    fragile.")>

    <OBJECT ["BEGG" "EGG"]
        ["BROKE" "BIRDS" "ENCRU"]
        "broken jewel-encrusted egg"
        <+ ,OVISON ,TAKEBIT ,CONTBIT ,OPENBIT>
        <>
        (<GET-OBJ "BCANA">)
        (OCAPAC 6
         ODESC1 "There is a somewhat ruined egg here.")>

    <OBJECT ["GCANA" "CANAR"]
        ["CLOCK" "MECHA" "GOLD" "GOLDE"]
        "clockwork canary"
        <+ ,OVISON ,TAKEBIT>
        CANARY-OBJECT
        ()
        (OFVAL 6
         OTVAL 2
         ODESC1 "There is golden clockwork canary here."
         ODESCO
    "There is a golden clockwork canary nestled in the egg.  It has ruby
    eyes and a silver beak.  Through a crystal window below its left
    wing you can see intricate machinery inside.  It appears to have
    wound down.")>

    <OBJECT ["BCANA" "CANAR"]
        ["BROKE" "CLOCK" "MECHA" "GOLD" "GOLDE"]
        "broken clockwork canary"
        <+ ,OVISON ,TAKEBIT>
        CANARY-OBJECT
        ()
        (ODESC1 "There is a non-functional canary here."
         ODESCO

https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl/blob/be079a4ed234071222...

    <DEFINE EGG-OBJECT ("AUX" (BEGG <SFIND-OBJ "BEGG">) (EGG <SFIND-OBJ "EGG">)) 
        #DECL ((BEGG) OBJECT)
        <COND (<AND <VERB? "OPEN">
                <==? <PRSO> .EGG>>
               <COND (<TRNN <PRSO> ,OPENBIT> <TELL "The egg is already open.">)
                 (<EMPTY? <PRSI>>
                  <TELL "There is no obvious way to open the egg.">)
                 (<==? <PRSI> <SFIND-OBJ "HANDS">>
                  <TELL "I doubt you could do that without damaging it.">)
                 (<TRNN <PRSI> <+ ,WEAPONBIT ,TOOLBIT>>
                  <TELL 
    "The egg is now open, but the clumsiness of your attempt has seriously
    compromised its esthetic appeal.">
                  <BAD-EGG .BEGG>)
                 (<TRNN <PRSO> ,FIGHTBIT>
                  <TELL "Not to say that using the "
                    1
                    <ODESC2 <PRSI>>
                    " isn't original too...">)
                 (<TELL "The concept of using a "
                    1
                    <ODESC2 <PRSI>>
                    " is certainly original.">
                  <TRO <PRSO> ,FIGHTBIT>)>)
              (<VERB? "OPEN" "POKE" "MUNG">
               <TELL
    "Your rather indelicate handling of the egg has caused it some damage.
    The egg is now open.">
               <BAD-EGG .BEGG>)>>

https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl/blob/be079a4ed234071222...

    <DEFINE CANARY-OBJECT ("AUX" (HERE ,HERE) (TREE <SFIND-ROOM "TREE">))
        #DECL ((HERE TREE) ROOM)
        <COND (<VERB? "WIND">
               <COND (<==? <PRSO> <SFIND-OBJ "CANAR">>
                  <COND (<AND <NOT ,SING-SONG!-FLAG>
                      <OR <MEMBER "FORE" <STRINGP <RID .HERE>>>
                          <==? .HERE .TREE>>>
                     <TELL ,OPERA>
                     <SETG SING-SONG!-FLAG T>
                     <INSERT-OBJECT <SFIND-OBJ "BAUBL">
                            <COND (<==? .HERE .TREE>
                               <SFIND-ROOM "FORE3">)
                              (.HERE)>>)
                    (<TELL
    "The canary chirps blithely, if somewhat tinnily, for a short time.">)>)
                 (<TELL
    "There is an unpleasant grinding noise from inside the canary.">)>)>>

https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl/blob/be079a4ed234071222...

    <PSETG OPERA
    "The canary chirps, slightly off-key, an aria from a forgotten opera.
    From out of the greenery flies a lovely songbird.  It perches on a
    limb just over your head and opens its beak to sing.  As it does so
    a beautiful brass bauble drops from its mouth, bounces off the top of
    your head, and lands glimmering in the grass.  As the canary winds
    down, the songbird flies away.">

"how was I supposed to figure out THAT?"

The worst one of this type, is the official solution to getting money from the slot machine in Leisure Suit Larry. You have to save the game state, play the slot machine, and if you win you save game state again. If you lose, you restore form the last save point, and repeat as necessary (until you get enough money). So there is no way to get past that puzzle without "breaking the 4th wall", so to speak.

Zork was a flattering rip-off of Colossal Cave Adventure. Go play that instead. Still has the maze(s) and yes, you have to map them out tediously. But try to remember we had no graphics back then. Text console was fairly new. It was awesome at the time.

Yes, ADVENT was a minor sensation. It was my first taste of OOP, as in "the troll is a modified dwarf".

Zork has a tribute to Don Woods, one of the authors of Adventure:

The "one lousy point" Don Woods Commemorative stamp featured an image of a Frobozz Magic Lamp Company brass lantern with "Donald Woods, Editor Splelunker Today" printed beneath. One of these stamps was part of the Treasures of Zork.

    +--v----v----v----v----v--+
    |         _______         |
    >  One   /       \     G  <
    | Lousy /         \    U  |
    > Point |   ___   |    E  <
    |       |  (___)  |       |
    >       <--)___(-->    P  <
    |       / /     \ \    o  |
    >      / /       \ \   s  <
    |     |-|---------|-|  t  |
    >     | |  \ _ /  | |  a  <
    |     | | --(_)-- | |  g  |
    >     | |  /| |\  | |  e  <
    |     |-|---|_|---|-|     |
    >      \ \__/_\__/ /      <
    |       _/_______\_       |
    >      |  f.m.i.c. |      <
    |      -------------      |
    >                         <
    |   Donald Woods, Editor  |
    >     Spelunker Today     <
    |                         |
    +--^----^----^----^----^--+

That's what passed for "graphics" back then. More stamps, bills, portraits and coins:

http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/interactive-fiction/solutions/Dun...

Let's say I have a door on the east side of a room, and beyond it is a hallway that gradually curves 90 degrees to the right. Then I will have entered the next room through its north door, and going north from there will send me curving back around to the left where I came from.

Dropping objects is the right way to map it out. It's totally solvable, although a little bit unpredictable (because the thief may happen into a room you've mapped and pick up your object), and the directions aren't reversible in the obvious way.

The problem with this analogy is that in real life I know how to turn around and go back through the door I just arrived from. It does not matter how much the passageway twisted around, unless the door or passageway physically moved I can turn around and go right back through it.

In Zork, this is not the case. My character is effectively blind but has a compass built into his brain. When he walks through a door he is immediately teleported to the middle of the next room so he has no idea which door he just came through. This is silly and obnoxious.

And that's what makes it a maze.

The game is impossible. Its fun with a map and hints (http://www.lafn.org/webconnect/mentor/zork/zorkText.htm) I believe some of the puzzles are literally impossible without.

There are a few unguessable shortcuts, but every puzzle can be solved.

Is there a trick to playing Roguelike games? I usually explore the first few levels and eventually get killed by an enemy which has whittled down my HP or get ganged up. How do you get strong enough to last a reasonable time? Or is it really a matter of luck and I should expect to die often?

Yeah. The trick is that discretion is the better part of valour. Mainstream games (that lack permadeath mechanics) allow you to Groundhog Day your way to victory by abusing the save/load mechanics. With a Roguelike you've got to treat your character like a newborn duckling. Attempting to melee unknown enemies without ever having had any prior experience with them is just too big of a risk.

So: run away from enemies, lure them into traps, throw stuff at them, cast your spells, etc. Until you have a good idea of how powerful a monster is at melee combat, assume it's totally unsafe to fight.

After that, it's a matter of exploring and trying to gather as much information as you can. In a lot of Roguelikes, this means identifying your items, either formally or informally. Carrying an inventory full of completely unidentified items is not helpful.

The other big thing is remembering that it's a turn-based game. When you're in a tense situation it feels natural to play faster, but this is the opposite of what you should be doing. Lots of roguelike characters meet avoidable deaths because the player started rushing instead of stopping to consider all the options.

If I remember correctly, hint books were sold (or included with?) alongside all of these games and if you were a fan of text adventures, you purchased them all.

I remember a few of them with a tiny red filter you had to lay on top of the book to see the text behind it. These were the days where games came in full sized boxes with plenty of cool additions.

I had one for Zork 1 that used invisible ink. It came with a marker which would reveal the text so if you were really stuck you could look up the one question you wanted answered to see what to do without risking seeing other answers.

It's nostalgia. I have a great fondness for Zork because it was one of the few games my friends and I had on our Apples and Commodores in elementary school, but one thing this podcast really captures is that much of the game isn't logical at all. I remember picking up cheat books and getting outright angry at some of the solutions to the puzzles, like "touch mirror with crystal skull." Really??? How the hell was I supposed to think to do that???

So no, I don't recommend playing Zork, but I do recommend reading the wikipedia and other articles about it so you can know the history, but there many great modern text-adventure games out there (or you might even try writing your own) for enjoying the medium.

Yeah, that's actually supposed to be fun. You have to map it in both directions, like going East will take you to a room, but from that room, you might have to go East to get back to the first room. I do remember feeling a real sense of satisfaction figuring out the thief and the trophy case though.

But yeah, there are much better free Inform/parser games out there that are set in the Zork universe. Even for Infocom, I found Enchanter and Sorcerer much better. (Never finished Spellbreaker.)

Oh, and if we're listing our favorite modern IF pieces, go try Slouching Towards Bedlam, For a Change and All Things Devours.

for an old-school game that has much of the same feel as zork but which you might find more fun, check out unkuulian underworld [http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=tyu4zalevqkvujk4]. it doesn't take itself too seriously, which adds to its charm.

the mazes in early games was inspired by actual cave exploration.

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