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Comment by anodin3 | Hacker News Reader

I've never played any text adventure games, do they usually have dead ends?

Sort of. Sometimes it's deliberate, but they're really just another terminal state (different win/loss conditions, like you get 10 points for getting either character to their room, but 30 for both). Often, though, it's because puzzles and such aren't well considered so players are able to do things that prevent any further progress (unintentionally). This means the game won't terminate (or will take unreasonably long, like sitting for 40 turns for a timer to finish counting down).

In the example (simple) game in the post, a player character may be able to pass into the red room and "win", but perhaps there's no condition for returning and the game only terminates when both make it to their individual rooms. If the other character lacks the keys to move through the green and blue doors, then they will be stuck and the game won't terminate. This is easy to guard against in a small game (small state space, easy to manually or mentally compute), but in larger games it's almost trivially easy to cause these sorts of dead-end states. Consider the puzzles of Sokoban, where pushing a block onto certain walls or a corner prevent further progress and require a restart. Now, that's part of the game in that case, but perhaps a designer wants to prevent (in their puzzles) this sort of situation from occurring. This sort of analysis of the game model (states and actions) will help them prevent it.

Right, in text adventure games it is very easy to code a one-way door (e.g. "your brother Ralph has been kidnapped!") and a door which requires a key (e.g. "if you have the voodoo doll you can give it to Alice, who will then open the portal to the underworld"). If the one-way doors are dynamic (e.g. "if you tell the police the secret, then you piss off the mob boss: afterwards any attempt to go into the mob lair leads to death and restarting from the last save point") and you are not paying careful attention, then that key might easily be in an unreachable part of the game ("crap, if I wait too long to get Ralph back and, before that, I piss off the mob boss, then I can never get the voodoo doll from Ralph, and so Alice will never open the door to the underworld and now there's nothing left that I can really do").

It is especially important because of how frustrating the resulting loss is; it does not even have the dignity that you get from killing Vivec in Morrowind, where the game informs you "sorry, this game just became unwinnable." You just wander around after doing a bunch of actions that made sense at the time, not realizing that your brother Ralph was twisted up in some crazy voodoo plot. "Yes, Alice, I see that you have pains in your arm that you think come from some voodoo doll, I don't see how that has any relevance to anything though: I've searched this whole damn city and there are no voodoo dolls anywhere." Until later "Oh wait... there was that one alley on the other side of the mob lair, it looked empty at the time but what if that's where Ralph is now?"

And in a bit of irony versus the particular subexample within Morrowind, it turns out you can still win if you kill Vivec... might cost you more than you'd prefer though.

Often. Sometimes by design, sometimes not.

See http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Cruelty_scale . Not only do they have dead-ends, but sometimes you don't realize you've hit one until long after you do the thing that set you down the unwinnable path.

It depends. It's more likely in the older ~80's games done by poor game writers. The great companies like Infocom and the modern games done by those like Emily Short are excellent works of art.

Infocom games are full of dead ends. Best to save separate files often or you could find yourself missing an important item with nothing to do but start over (and it's often the case that you don't realize you're missing something until much later in the game.)

Yea I guess I should have specified that Infocom had them, but they weren't stupid mostly. They aren't as common in modern IF.

Typically they made sense in the infocom games. If you needed matches for something but had already struck and burned them all, you were stuck.

Getting rid of dead ends makes some of these games feel like they are on rails. If you try enough combos of everything, eventually you'll progress.

There is a difference between always reaching a winning state or getting stuck without any resolution.

I think its important that there is no state were you just get stuck, you should at least have a game over sequence, so that you know you have done something wrong.

I have plenty of bad memories of being stuck on the Vogon ship with no way that I could figure out to get the Babel Fish. I hadn't realized that I needed the junk mail from the second room in the game.

[SPOILER]

It gets worse -- there are a bunch of tools you go by throughout the game. If you fail to pick up any of them, that one will be the one you need to open one of the final doors.

In theory, I know the solution to every puzzle in the Hitchhiker's game. In practice, I've solved every one of them that you can solve while missing others (there's a gate right at the end of the game you have to have all of the items you can possibly get to get past)... but I have never strung all these solutions together into one winning game, despite several attempts.

It's a nasty little game, really.

I guess if I were doing it again nowadays I'd be going for a tool-assisted... umm... speedrun isn't really right here, so win-at-all-run.

I feel like Hitchhiker's is meant to be an exception to the rule.

If you have all the items with you and put them in place one at a time as you discover they're needed, the Babel Fish dispenser runs out of fish right on the attempt when you've finally got them all in place and are ready to collect it for real. Evil little game.

Andrew Plotkin (aka "Zarf"), Emily Short, Adam Cadre and many others are great and have written awesome pieces of work for modern IF that can rightfully claim to be art, but...

...classic Infocom games had plenty of dead-ends :)

Even the great modern authors have issues dealing with dead ends (both in trying to prevent them and finding surprise dead ends they didn't anticipate in their own games). Emily Short has many blog posts on the subject. Zarf put a lot of effort into the state-space solver/prover in his most recent game Hadean Lands. (There was some very interesting Kickstarter posts on that subject.)

Wow, a new game by Zarf! Awesome, thanks for letting me know. Instant buy for me.

You can drown in monkey island. Not exactly text only but close enough. Wouldn't say it was poorly written

I thought the rare occasions in monkey island games where you could 'die' it basically rewound to an acceptable state before that? (IIRC the second one even made a joke out of this with a falling off a cliff and bouncing back up thing)

The drowning ending is more of an easter egg than something you're likely to find in normal play. There's only one item you can interact with, so even if you can't think of the solution, it's easy to brute force it before the 10 minute timer runs out.

Some do by choice, as part of the gameplay and part of the feel of the world.

Some do by accident, for example if you can proceed to the next location in the game without an object you need to solve the challenge in it and without the ability to return to the previous one.

Well, they are not supposed to, yet... One of the most notorious among gamers when I was a teenager (okaaaaay maybe not strictly a 'text' adventure game) was Delphine Software's infamous 'Operation Stealth' where if you forgot to pick up an item say, at the beginning, you could not finish the game and you could not go back. You had to do precisely what the author describes at the beginning: call saved games or start over.

If dead-end is defined as the article does:

    ... no "dead ends". I.e. all player actions will result in a state in which the game is still winnable

 - then, yes, fairly common, although not always intentionally.

I think the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game had a dead end very early in the game. If you didn't solve a non-obvious puzzle you'd be off in the weeds not getting anywhere interesting.

I think Leisure Suit Larry 1 had a dead end if you didn't get the apple.

Dead ends were sierras idea of replayablity. You could often get stuck near the end of a game and have no idea when or where you missed something. LSL games were some of the worst.

Often they do. The general computer science topic is dead locks.

A dead lock occurs when a state is reached and there is no way to exit the state. In complex state machines it is important insure they are 'deadlock free.' Sometimes people use a timeout to recover from a locked state machine, sometimes the system needs to be re-powered.

An adventure game is simply a state machine (or a collection of interlocked state machines). So proving the proving the game has no deadlocks will also prove that the state machine has no deadlocks.

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