Revisiting 'Zork': What We Lost in the Transition to Visual Games | Hacker News Reader

Revisiting 'Zork': What We Lost in the Transition to Visual Games

theatlantic.com

178 pointsJamesLowell133 comments

This article brings to mind what I dislike about the modern game industry.

First off, what is a game? Let's consider two broad types of games: competitive games and puzzle games. Competitive games (like chess) feature more than one player and the outcome of the game is unknown (both in terms of the winner and the final game state). Puzzle games (generally speaking) don't have a strong competitive element and the final outcome is known (i.e., a lone player solves the puzzle).

I contend that first-person shooters (in single player mode) are nothing more than big puzzle games. This isn't bad per se, but the problem lies in how these games have evolved.

Rather than make the "puzzles" in FPS games more challenging and innovative (i.e., focus on gameplay), the major game studios have instead focused on increasing the audio-visuals and cinematic attributes of their products. As a result, gameplay has consistently been minimized in favor of eye candy.

No better example comes to mind than the recent smash hit, L.A. Noire. The extent to which the producers of this game clearly wish they were making movies comes off as obsequious. The tiny sliver of game mechanics they did include is mind-numbingly repetitive and utterly without challenge.

These things are no longer "games", they're shitty movies.

1911: "Edison's Frankenstein proves the simple fact that these things aren't 'film', they're shitty books."

I think at their best, video games do better than "shitty movies". If someone made a list of "Top 10 Moments" from film & video games, I'm betting Aeris' death at the hands of Sepiroth makes that list.

Building games around movie-like cutscenes is like filming a stage production of a play and calling it a movie. There were plenty of people who did essentially that in the early days of movies, because of the higher prestige of stage drama and their desire to produce "art", but that wasn't how film developed into an art form. If games want to fulfill their potential as art, they have to evolve toward their strengths instead of being just a shitty way of presenting mediocre renditions of an existing art form.

I'm not GP, but Aeris's death was a big deal because it happened after the player had invested several hours into playing her (and probably given her some nice items). This is one of the strengths of the form you're talking about.

P.S.

Since I've heard about Aeris being killed by Sepiroth before, I went ahead and watched it on YouTube, and I wasn't impressed. It must have been because I didn't play the game. If that scene affected you at all (if it looked like anything but cheesy crap animated with expressionless plastic dolls) it was because you were prepped by playing the game to experience that scene in a particular way. You can watch a clip of "La Strada" or "Midnight Cowboy" or "Unforgiven" or "Casablanca" out of context and at least get a sense of the emotional dynamics of the characters. That's the strength of movies. The strength of games is the immersion and feeling of personal involvement with the characters, personal involvement driven by your own actions, choices, and sacrifices. I may have felt like Ratso Rizzo was my friend, but I never picked up a john to get money for a bus ticket for us to leave town together. I may have shared Rick Blaine's feelings as he put Victor and Ilsa on the plane to Lisbon, but I didn't decide to do that. It just happened to me.

Games will always be second-rate next to movies when it comes to presenting scripted drama, but they don't have to feel that way. Aeris and Sepiroth is proof of that, I guess. Gameplay allows games to affect us in ways that movies can't and enables different and stronger emotional contexts for experiencing games as art. The art of games is in the gameplay. Detaching from gameplay is just a crutch, like filming a stage production, copying another art form because we don't understand the new one well enough yet.

Aeris' death is a bad example to show off the power of games due to the fact that most of the emotion in the scene comes from the players investment in the character. It's shocking and emotional because of the context, and you're right that it doesn't hold up without it. when FFVII was released, the state of graphics technology made expressing emotion in videogame characters solely through visuals difficult, at least for that 3D style. For some contrast, take a look at the intro of FFX. (I'm personally nowhere as fond of that as VII, but that's another debate) You have no idea who this guy his, who these people and this giant cat man are, but you can get the sense of emotion in that scene without context because the visuals were much, much better. Shiny graphics and audio may not matter if there's no story to hold them up, but they are useful to get a point across.

The example I've always use for how gameplay can make a scene more emotional is the end of your first battle in Shadow of the Colossus. You know your main character has been tasked to slay these massive creatures to bring back his dead love, but there's little information about them. It just lumbers slowly into view when you confront it, and what follows next is one of the most tense battles I've played in a videogame. You're clearly outmatched, a young man who barely knows how to swing a sword against this massive moving monolith, but you somehow manage to succeed. Just as you're ready to cheer out in victory as it falls, the game takes a shift. Instead of the triumphant battle theme, the music turns soft and sad, and you watch your foe slowly tumble down. Instead of glory, you feel regret, and your victory now seems like a tragedy.

Seeing that in film would be emotional, but it's not some character doing it on a screen. You did this, and you killed this strange and magnificent creature. Was it worth it? There's a similar example in the ending of Metal Gear Solid 3, but I'd rather not spoil the amazing ending of that game (which would generally works as well in film, except that one particular moment).

"It just happened to me."

No, you have years of experience in a medium that prepared you to interpret that event a certain way.

"it was because you were prepped by playing the game to experience that scene in a particular way."

That's like saying, "Yeah, I jumped into the Iliad at the funeral games for Patroclus, and I just don't get it: it didn't have an impact at all." Duh. The literary experience leading up to that event leads to a connection to the characters that has little weight if you skip it. Saying the same thing applies to video games isn't an argument as to why video games can't be expressive. It means they can, and you have to invest in them to have that experience, much like reading a book.

And the best games aren't "built around" movie-like cutscenes. But suppose they were, and that those scenes were evocative. How, exactly, is that a bad thing? It's not, unless you've a priori decided it is.

That's like saying, "Yeah, I jumped into the Iliad at the funeral games for Patroclus, and I just don't get it: it didn't have an impact at all." Duh.

Actually, my point was just the opposite. You can appreciate a passage from the Iliad or a scene from a movie without context. Not fully, but there's something there.

I think the analogy falls apart because with both books and movies, you just watch or read them. Since games are interactive, watching a cutscene without any of the prior interaction is, I think, substantially different from reading a passage in a book without having read prior passages.

There's as much 'there' in, say, the 'never let go' of "Titanic" as there is in FFVII. You being obstinate does not an argument make.

Absolutely true, I think destroying the "companion cube" in Portal is a much better example of what video games can do. Before you finish the level, you have to destroy the cube. You can't get through the game with the illusion that you would have done something differently than the protagonist, because you choose to destroy the cube. It's a completely different experience than you can get from a movie.

That crushed me until I discovered the secret where you could go back in time and bring her back to life.

While many generic games may have been reduced to, 'shitty movies', I think developers have evolved gaming into a medium that would have been hard to imagine twenty years ago. Games like Fallout 3 or Mass Effect 2 are brilliantly designed hybrids of action, adventure, startegy, puzzle and rpg elements all wrapped in gorgeous, well written and immersive worlds built to evolve around a player's individual play style.

Even the base concept of challenge is not a given in modern gaming with titles like Little Big Planet where creating games is a major focus, or Kinectimals in which atmosphere and light hearted play trump all (actually, that second title could use even less, 'forced' challenge, IMO).

I applaud modern developers for constantly pushing the limits of what it means to 'experience' a game, rather than just play one as we have in the past.

That said, Zork totally rules! I've always thought there was room for Interactive Fiction in the modern world, it's just a matter of how/when (I hope!).

> I've always thought there was room for Interactive Fiction in the modern world, it's just a matter of how/when (I hope!).

There is room for interactive fiction. The community of interactive fiction writers didn't grow quite as quick as the community of professional and hobbyist video game developers, but they're among us. You may have heard of Andrew Plotkin and his runaway Kickstarter deal: http://money.cnn.com/2010/11/15/technology/kickstart_plotkin.... If you haven't played his games, do yourself a favor and take a look, there's a javascript interpreter, so you don't even need to download anything: http://eblong.com/zarf/if.html. Dreamhold is the easiest to get into; Shade and Dual Transform are both single-room games, but each provides wonderfully peculiar game mechanics.

If you want go get a perspective on the present state of interactive fiction, http://brasslantern.org/ is a hub of sorts, you can find game files and reviews there. There are annual competitions. If you use iOS, there's a port of Frotz interpreter.

While I agree with everything you've said, I really only apply these criticisms to the so-called "triple-A" developers out there. There are quite a few indie developers out there that are making engaging, thought-provoking puzzle games. They are typically short, have interesting gameplay mechanics, and inexpensive.

One great example is SpaceChem. It's a joyously frustrating game that revolves around "programming" reactors to create molecules from other molecules. The joy of finishing a level (particularly if you can beat the curve in terms of time/instructions) is tangible.

Don't despair too much at the state of the game industry, just don't look to the "leaders" for your interesting games.

Braid is another example of this.

Interactive Fiction as a genre is significantly less accessible than FPS. Not only due to the medium of text, which is inherently less flashy and instantly compelling than 3D environments, but due to the nature of the puzzles.

Taking the rose-colored glasses off, a large part of the adventure gaming genre (including point-and-clicks) relied on obscure object interactions or guessing the right command to proceed. Freeing a bird to drive away a snake in Colossal Cave Adventure is not necessarily intuitive.

For some people, including myself, this is fun. But it's not an easy, thoughtless, escapist form of entertainment - which is where the modern FPS comes in.

I feel that both forms are missing the mark for my taste. Essentially, they represent two of the classic failures in crafting a good ("pencil and paper") role-playing game: This game is all fighting and This game is all puzzles. The really fun games are the ones that have a cool environment (like text adventures) and let you make interesting choices.

I know there have been some efforts to do that sort of thing with a text-adventure-y environment (Storytron?) but don't know of anyone who has really gotten it right yet.

the really annoying bit was when you had figured out what to do, but had to play "guess the verb". (i remember the otherwise very fun "unkuulian unventure" having a few frustrating examples, e.g.). and later, when graphical adventures got popular, that was supplemented by "hunt the pixel".

Calling all non-competitive games "puzzle games" is too reductionist. For a long time now - as far back as the SNES and perhaps even NES era - games have been about more than just the raw gameplay at their core. They are often just as much about having an interactive experience.

There are so many FPSes that don't match the "bad puzzle" description at all... Portal being one of the very good ones, very close to puzzle type games. Multiplayer shooters which are a good mix of competitive and puzzle (strategy-wise) games - just look at how many shooters and re-releases of the older versions are still very popular: quake 1, 3, 4, rtcw-et, tf. They don't really go for nice video effects. Actually many players happily sacrifice them for higher framerate / responsiveness (or will even tweak the display parameters to get mostly high-contrast, almost flat polygons - like quake3's filtering + overbright). And you can still find servers full of people playing them.

It seems that the shitty movies are pretty much only the single-player ones.

Someone should make a satirical text adventure about doing startups, where you wander around the valley trying to get funding and so on.

    >LOOK
    
    You are in a brand new air conditioned Palo Alto office.
    Empty packets of ramen litter the floor. There are two desks,
    each with brand new macbooks on them.
    
    >SIT DOWN
    
    There are no chairs. What are you, some kind of loser?

    >PIVOT

    You are bought by a google.

And so on. I know suggesting things for other people to do is bad form, "do it yourself!" goes the familiar cry. Unfortunately I don't have the requisite insider knowledge to make it funny.

This really is a marvellous idea! It could be totally hilarious.

It would be pretty easy, too, using Inform 7.

They have a nice history of IF coding here: http://inform7.com/if/

Zork really isn't the best example, just the first (and even then it was just an adaptation of Adventure). The Infocom adventures got far more sophisticated in every way over the following few years, in terms of prose, setting, gameplay and atmosphere.

I credit adventure games with teaching me to touch type. To this day I can still type "inventory" far faster than any other nine-letter word.

Lucky then, that nobody told you you could just type 'i' too. ;-)

endgame's comment below is dead, so I'll repost it here because it is very good:

I think that the old MUDs have great potential as a teaching tool. It might be harder in this modern age of fantastic graphics, but if you get someone hooked on a MUD, they usually get a typing speed of 200wpm or so. Further, the persistent nature of the world lends itself to programming.

I've been meaning to write a small mudlib and course around MudCore, a server I finished recently. It's at github.com endgame/MudCore , if anyone is interested.

> they usually get a typing speed of 200wpm or so

Impressive. The world record sustained typing speed is around 180 WPM. :)

Playing MUDs definitely helped my typing speed but so did live chatting with BBS sysops, programming and just general computer use. Most of my computer friends growing up had decent typing speed just from using DOS for everything. Practice makes perfect. I'm always impressed by kids who grew up with mobile phones from an early age and can SMS at lightning speed.

Is it? I have a friend who claims 200, I'll ask.

200 should be doable in spurts; I've hit 175 WPM in rounds of Type Racer. But my sustained typing speed over longer periods of time is much, much lower than that.

Ah, that's probably what it is. A sustained 200 wpm does sound improbable.

Can you give an example of one of the later, better games?

While not by Infocom, Photopia is probably the best Interactive Fiction I every played.

You can download it at http://www.wurb.com/if/game/255 (http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/photopia.... probably being the best choice). It's possible to play it online at http://www.ifiction.org/games/play.php?game=332&mode=htm..., but it's not as much fun as with the real version.

To open the .z5 file you need something like Zoom [1] for Mac, or Frotz [2] for Windows.

[1] http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk/mac/zoom.html [2] http://frotz.sourceforge.net/

Fantastic, thank you.

Anchorhead is sort of a Lovecraftian story.

Violet is a fun, short, one-room game. You have to finish writing the last thousand words of your PhD thesis, or your girlfriend Violet will leave you and go back to Australia. Mostly this means you have to figure out how to deal with distractions. The characterization and narration (in Violet's voice) are charming.

These aren't Infocom games, they're recent games written for Inform. You should be able to find them online, probably playable in the browser.

Anchorhead looks promising, thank you.

If you like Anchorhead, you may enjoy Slouching Towards Bedlam, which has a similar atmosphere and similarly beautiful writing.

http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=032krqe6bjn5au78

thanks -- i just spent a very enjoyable evening playing violet. first interactive fiction i've ever finished.

if anyone is interested, you can play it online here - http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=4glrrfh7wrp9zz7b (button top right)

Thanks. I just spent 3 hours playing a game about procrastinating while working on your PhD thesis, procrastinating while working on my PhD thesis.

i hope you also have a sweet australian girlfriend! and now unplug your computer :o)

If you don't mind moderately difficult games (my personal preference) I strongly recommend taking a look at the blurbs for these few tremendously good games and seeing if they appeal to you:

Adam Cadre - Varicella http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=ywwlr3tpxnktjasd

Jon Ingold - Make It Good http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=jdrbw1htq4ah8q57

Andrew Plotkin - Spider And Web http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=2xyccw3pe0uovfad

OTOH if you want to start with something easier, but still with puzzles, Bronze by Emily Short is a good one.

If you want a very good game with almost no puzzles, then definitely Photopia.

Another game with moderately easy puzzles that might appeal to the HN demographic is Dan Schmidt - For A Change. The setting is an abstract, somewhat pastoral landscape full of things whose descriptions are alien but extremely evocative. The theme of the puzzles is imagining and understanding things about the world of the game. I found it rather entrancing.

http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=t61i5akczyblx2zd

Anyway, there are so many really must-play IF works from the last decade that the recommendations could go on forever.

Spider and Web is one of my favorite examples. It plays to the medium's unique strengths in ways that will be obvious to anyone who goes through most of it. It's also a fairly short game.

Zork was an adaptation of DUNGEON, not Adventure. (Or DUNGEO, as it was called on our PDP-11/34a in high school. Still have my maps!)

We didn't lose anything -- interactive fiction games are still being produced, and you can play them on your android or iphone these days, too. http://ifarchive.org/ and http://xyzzyawards.org/ are good places to start.

A great front end to the archive is http://ifdb.tads.org.

Zoom is a nice OS X app for running IF games, and it incorporates a GUI interface to ifdb.

http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk/mac/zoom.html

The developer of Zoom also does the Mac IDE for Inform 7.

If someone wanted to write an interactive text game like these and put it on the web, are there any frameworks available? If not, a lot of the work would be on figuring out how to parse the player's input, how to map out the possible paths through the game, etc, instead of writing the story.

Heck yes. It all started out with the Z-Machine, the first major virtual machine architecture. The most recent is Glulx. Glulx itself is here: http://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/ with a new interpreter here: http://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/

There's a whole programming language, testing & documentation framework, and IDE. http://inform7.com/

I actually started working on a Ruby IF framework, with the intent that it could also be used to create MUDs and IF-ish games that had combat, so they can be played like an RPG.

I haven't gotten far yet, sadly. You are correct about the player's input being an issue, and the mapping has some issues to resolve, but the biggest problem is actually the interactions between objects or the player and objects.

For instance, the 'push' command is going to mean something different to every entity. Some won't respond (default response) but others might move or react.

I actually implemented that once in C# in such a way that it confused most of the other developers and they quit. I offered to scrap my code, but that was kind of the end of the project. -sigh-

Have the ruby thing on github by any chance? Id love to check it out. I've been toying with the idea of writing a mud in ruby, and giving it a graphical web frontend to make it more accessible to new players.

Not Github. Back then I was using RubyForge.

Fair Warning: I think I as far as I got was logging in. I don't remember if I got any commands working at all.

http://rubyforge.org/projects/textualize/

I will probably move it to GitHub soon as I've been thinking about working on it again.

Cool, I have one from a while ago that I got about that far as well. I was thinking about working through the Mud Game Programming book to get a working foundation going, but send me an email (in profile) once you start working on it again.

Use TADS [0], if you like programming, or Inform [1], if you do not. Alternatively, for web only, you could try Undum [2].

[0] http://inform7.com/ [1] http://www.tads.org/ [2] http://undum.com/

Just FYI, your 0 and 1 links are swapped. ;)

Correct. I cannot edit it anymore, though. :(

http://code.google.com/p/iphonefrotz/

And for multiplayer versions of these, wherein players compete against each other or work together, there are still many MUDs and MUSHes online.

www.topmudsites.com is a pretty good place to find a MUD to play. I personally recommend Achaea, but I've heard good things about Aardwolf.

Dark Mists is also a bit different and has been running for over 13 years. (Disclaimer: I host the game.)

Let's also not forget the mechanics of these games tended to be maddening at times. Knowing what you wanted to do and having to guess at the nouns and verbs the designer expected was beyond frustrating.

I'm all for fond remembrance. But the problems of text-based games weren't limited to comparing poorly to graphics. Some of them were inherent; implicit companions of the desirable parts of such "written" games.

Are there any NLP guys here? Can we improve this situation with modern technology?

Yes, depending on your expectations.

With a LOT of effort it would be entirely possible to build something like SHRDLU that could handle a specific game:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU

Caution: Don't be misled by the impressive-looking conversation transcript. With no disrespect meant to Terry Winograd and the ground-breaking work he did it was- like every natural language demonstration since the dawn of computing- fragile, prone to odd mistakes and the transcripts were usually generated by someone already acclimated to the idiosyncrasies the system to make it look its best.

You could build something that recognized a richer grammar and even engaged in limited conversational discourse. It would be good enough that a person might briefly forget they were dealing with a system of limited capabilities until, inevitably, it would break down and remind them they are not conversing with a human.

The risk is those failures could be sufficiently frequent and severe as to make it worthless. The user might be better off with something less ambitious, more predictable and less frustrating. Then again, that wouldn't do anything to push the state of the art, so it should be worth the risk to try it.

Simply having modern RAM capacity helps, because authors can add many more synonyms in their code to handle various player inputs. The early parsers were constrained by having to run in tiny RAM spaces (64k, 128k, 256k); expanding vocabulary was difficult to do without removing space for description text and other important game data.

In Inform 7, when targeting the glulx VM the memory limits are much larger (i.e., the sizes we expect today) and you can define synonyms to your heart's content.

Depends on the parser. Infocom was pretty good, especially toward the end with the larger VMs.

http://www.getlamp.com/

Awesome documentary on the history of interactive fiction - big focus on the early days up through infocom (actually, I just realized I never finished watching it!)

On youtube, from a google tech talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU

For everyone person who loved text adventures, another nine people gave up in the first room.

This may be true, but it doesn't really address the point of the article. The argument is that modern games could take a lesson from text adventure games in engaging the players' imaginations.

My favorite text adventure was Pirate's Cove, on my trusty Vic 20. You can still play it, with an emulator

http://www.c64gg.com/Adams_Scott_DL.html

although that version seems to have some simple graphics, which is just wrong.

There's more information on the Scott Adams games here http://www.lysator.liu.se/adventure/Adventure_International/...

Good times....

Here's Scott Adams' site: http://www.msadams.com/

You can download Windows versions of all the SAGA adventures there (apart from the Marvel ones, I think), and he has links to web-playable versions.

Infocom was just the tip of the interactive fiction iceberg.

There's still a vibrant interactive fiction gaming scene. It has thrived despite Infocom's demise.

Many interactive fiction games continue to be developed, played, entered in competitions, and reviewed.

Here are some links to get you started:

http://www.wurb.com/if/genre

http://www.ifreviews.org

http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive.html

http://ifdb.tads.org/search?browse&list&sortby=new

Relatively recently the IF community has experienced a bit of a renaissance because of the release of Inform 7, which allows you to program games in the most natural sounding English I've ever seen in a programming language. Here's a sample:

---

  "Cave Entrance"

  The Cobble Crawl is a room. "You are crawling over cobbles in a low
  passage. There is a dim light at the east end of the passage."

  A wicker cage is here. "There is a small wicker cage discarded
  nearby."

  The Debris Room is west of the Crawl. "You are in a debris room
  filled with stuff washed in from the surface. A low wide passage
  with cobbles becomes plugged with mud and debris here, but an
  awkward canyon leads upward and west. A note on the wall says,
  'Magic word XYZZY'."

  The black rod is here. "A three foot black rod with a rusty star
  on one end lies nearby."

  Above the Debris Room is the Sloping E/W Canyon. West of the Canyon
  is the Orange River Chamber.

---

As you can see, it reads just like regular English, and it's very easy to understand what's going on here.

Here's a more complete example:

http://inform7.com/learn/man/ex74.html#e74

And here are some full, playable games (with source):

http://www.hpiweb.com/newmedia/

http://inform7.com/learn/complete-examples/

A couple of quick tutorials:

http://www.brasslantern.org/writers/howto/i7tutorial.html

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Beginners_Guide_to_Interactive_...

The full manual:

http://inform7.com/learn/manuals/

Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Inform_7

You can even do a form of map reduce.

Great article.

Ultima 7 was a graphical game that had a similar effect on me. The graphics were somewhat abstract and generic and left a lot for the imagination to fill in. The writing was wonderful and put flesh on the world. Playing the game was like reading a novel.

It seems like game makers need to focus less on graphics and more on music and writing.

Ultima 6 and 7 were awesome games. I haven't had a chance to play it, but they have done remakes of 5 and 6 with better graphics.

u6project.com/

I still remember bicycling over to the "L" building on Auburn's campus to play ADVENT and DND and DUNGEON on their PDP-11 (or whatever model of minicomputer it was at the time). Thanks to the OP for sharing this article. Now I have to will myself to do some actual work today instead of playing old IF games online.

telnet gein.vistech.net

     A  ADVENTURE        The original Collosal Cave adventure
     B  BLIND            Escape the unseen maze
     C  BUNNY            Destroy the man-eating bunny rabbits
     D  CATCH            Navigate a star-field
     E  CHICKEN          Chicken hunt
     F  CONNECT4         Connect 4 in a row
     G  CROSSFIRE        Evade and attack within the grid
     H  DALEKS           Terminate... Terminate...
     I  DEFENDER         Defend the planet from the invaders
     J  DESTROYER        Destroy the aliens
     K  DIG              Dig Dug
     L  DOOR             Watch out for the monster in the maze
     M  EMPIRE           The original single player Empire
     N  GRANNY           Road Rage!
     O  MOLE             Hunt the moles
     P  TETRIS           Manipulate the falling blocks

Global Thermonuclear War

This is exactly why I tend to prefer books to theatre, and theatre to film. Filling in the details engages my imagination in a way that the polished, finished surfaces of contemporary games and films do not.

There are still lots of contemporary indie games and films.

I miss the Infocom games. One of the most enjoyable parts of them was the feeling that you were engaging with an actual person and their own personality, sense of humor, etc. The programmer and author of these games were often one and the same; at the least, they weren't a huge team of people writing off a spec.

I love many modern games but the better they get, the more they seem to be strangled by their own content pipeline; the requirement to produce AAA-level graphics, sound, writing, advertising means the scale of these things is very large and the appetite for risk is low.

All that being said, many of the Infocom games were stupidly obscure and irritating and relied on you doing something almost completely arbitrary at some given point to make things work. But they were just so good in so many ways that this was forgivable. All of the Zorks, the Enchanter series, Suspended, Starcross, Deadline... the list goes on and on.

It's worth noting that Infocom themselves moved into a dodgy neither fish nor fowl territory towards the end with added graphics and some pretty mediocre titles.

Almost 30 years on, I can't work on a house using a ladder and not think "It's too bad that the ladder analysis department closes at noon".

I sometimes reflexively type 'l' or 'i' in Unix terminal windows rather than anything appropriate or functional.

> "It's too bad that the ladder analysis department closes at noon".

Out of curiosity, what game is this?

Deadline.

Spoiler explanation in rot13:

Gurer jnf (hfhnyyl) n frpbaq zheqre yngre va gur tnzr juvpu erdhverf n ynqqre sbe gur crecrgengbe gb pbzzvg. Lbh unq gb or va gur ubhfr gb gevttre gur riragf yrnqvat gb gur zheqre naq pbhyqa'g svg gur ynqqre vagb gur ubhfr. Gur tnzr unq n srngher jurer lbh pbhyq unir nal bowrpg gnxra njnl gb or nanylmrq, juvpu gbbx gur bowrpg bhg bs npgvba sbe na ubhe be fb. V qrpvqrq gb frr vs guvf jnf n ybbcubyr, naq guhf tbg gung zrffntr. Gurl jrer cerggl gubebhtu.

Thanks. It's nice when IF games take into account these small details.

You should really look at modern IF, which retain all the good things you mention but have a more modern/humane approach to the actual game play.

Lost Pig is a short, interesting one: http://pr-if.org/play/lostpig/

I have very positive memories of playing Graham Nelson's Curses. Nelson implemented the Inform language so that he could write Curses, making it a landmark game in modern IF games.

The game is like the best of the Infocom games in how it builds up a world in terms of initially confusing parallels that start to fit together like jigsaw pieces; it's achievement is that it does this in a more sophisticated and rewarding way, to my taste at least. It takes as much time to complete as the bigger of the Zork games.

You can play it online at:

http://z-machine.appspot.com/game/curses/

I have a regrettable snobbery towards modern IF for reasons that I can't fully justify. When it comes down to it, I think Infocom games got me at the right age, where almost all grown-up writing (even writing that has to 'work' when chopped into little interactive fragments) seemed very sophisticated and interesting.

It's a bit akin to a passage in one of Bret Easton Ellis' (yes, I know) early books where the 20-something protagonist realizes the Playboy centerfold is now _younger_ than he is and finds that it all doesn't work so well.

Plus, I've lost the long attention span for this stuff. My 12 year old self would regard his current self as a gibbering, ADHD-addled chimp. I hope to have some time to rectify this, and maybe play some modern IF at some point (or even write some?)...

I built a VoiceXML interface for Zork back in 1999. It was meant as a demo application for a VoiceXML interpreter that Cicso was trying to push and I was a test engineer on. It had automatic speech recognition and text to speech. So you could say "Go South" and then hear "You are standing in a forest. There is a bucket." Or whatever.

I thought it was really neat but it never made it past demo stage. I wrote a kind of lazy socket engine in PHP and then used phpzork.com for all my data. It was crude and you couldn't complete the entire game on the phone because I didn't have time to encode all possible actions for the ASR engine. But you could move around and grab a few things. All via telephone ;)

I just checked and it looks like phpzork.com is no longer. Pity, as it was a great way to enjoy Zork 10 years ago.

Great idea: you could have started a 1-800-ADVNTUR service ;) not to mention it would be tempting to be able to play adventure games in the car, while, er, not driving to strange and exotic places. I'd also love to hear what that sounds like - thinking of the voice acting in some adventure games I've played where you could do worse than replace the recorded drawl with TTS and cut down on the floppies.. http://www.adventuregamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29027

Someone coded a Z-machine to voice telephony interface to play Zork over phone:

http://www.freepbx.org/support/documentation/module-document...

The original project website seems down, though.

You can play zork in your browser here: http://thcnet.net/zork/index.php

Any suggestions for Infocom games? Just missed them I'm afraid - cut my teeth on nethack and commander keen.

Personally I found Trinity very good. The story starts in the cold war, and then takes you into a weird alice-in-wonderland like dimension, where you have to visit various places before a nuclear bomb hits.

The Enchanter, Sorcerer, Spellbreaker trilogy was also a lot of fun.

And of course Hitchhikers Guide to The Universe :-)

It's hard to go wrong with any of them, really. You should play through the original Zork trilogy. I really liked their mystery titles, especially "Deadline"; I seem to recall that you had a lot more interaction with the other characters in the game (i.e. the suspects). The "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" game was pretty good, too; even though I'd already read the books, some of the puzzles were tricky to figure out. I think I still have my "Don't Panic!" button that came in the box with that one.

Forgot to say, also check out cschmidt's recommendation elsewhere in this thread for the Scott Adams adventure games. I played a bunch of those too, back in the day.

h2g2 is difficult to the point where it seems like a parody of the genre. Some of it makes stuff like monkey island seem trivial, and I find it hard not to assume that the whole thing was a big joke on the part of Douglas Adams.

Yeah, H2G2 is really, really funny and pretty much impossible. Spend some time fumbling around in each room (there really are some funny responses you should see!) and then refer to a walkthrough to advance to the next room. Save often - although even saving often won't help if you don't get the screwdriver in the first room. It really is a player-hostile game.

It's all very well saying "fumble around in each room" but most of the time you only have a half dozen moves before you die.

There are so many things that you have to do in order not to render the game unfinishable further down the line, and they're thrown in so quickly and so covertly that I cannot believe it isn't satire.

I mean, if you take it as anything apart from satire it's just unforgivably bad game design.

Adams was involved in writing it, and he was definitely into computers. He was the first person in the UK to own an apple machine. He would have almost certainly played zork/dungeon and such games, and therefore being Adams he would not have been able to resist parodying their ridiculous nature.

Hm, maybe you're right. Certainly Starship Titanic, which he also helped write, turned out to be a much better adventure game.

Douglas Adams was also involved with writing the Infocom title Bureaucracy, which was similarly odd in game play, though not as fiendishly difficult.

Two of the more critically acclaimed (or at least fan favorites) titles:

A Mind Forever Voyaging

Trinity

Both games really emphasize the narrative bankruptcy of modern games. The fact that people were developing games like this back in the 80s is kind of mind blowing. If Bioware put out 'A Mind Forever Voyaging' with nice shiny graphics the gaming press would be all over it as the greatest game ever.

Two great adventure games by Westwood Studios and published by Infocom:

- Circuit's Edge: A cyberpunk game set in the Middle East http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuits_Edge

- Mines of Titan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_of_Titan

The Lurking Horror is set at an analogue of MIT, where most of the Infocom people went.

Wow.. So many interesting sounding suggestions. I'll start with Trinity and go from there! Thanks!

"Visual" vs textual games is a bit of a false dichotomy though; in particular the Marathon series does a great job of blending action and intelligent, literary story: http://marathon.bungie.org/story/shakespeare.html The first Deus Ex also had plenty of literature in it, sampling heavily from The Man who was Thursday and other classics.

I remember as kid, playing the Zork series and exchanging hints with my 4th grade teacher. Great game, and that made it all the more fun.

I think the game that had the biggest impact on me, though, was a game for the Apple ][ called "Odyssey"... I remember many hours lost to that game:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_The_Compleat_Apventure

I miss these games.

If you want games with no/low graphics and lots of depth there are still MUDs out there. Or for war, empire is still out there.

Get ye flask

http://www.homestarrunner.com/dman3.html

Tangential question - has the original unsplit version of Zork ever been rereleased anywhere?

MIT Zork is bundled in with the iPhone/iPad Frotz interpreter, so it's probably in IFDB.

Indeed it is, thank you!

You can be eaten by a Grue in the Black Ops Terminal Interrogation Room :)

i foresee an article 'what we lost in the transition from keyboards to audio-visual interfaces'.

sassa frassa kids these days

What I miss in modern games is... really fun, great jump n runs and fun adventures like "Monkey Island" seem to be a dieing or already dead genre.

It is all about MMOs, RTS, role playing, shooters and sports games nowadays.

For what it's worth, Monkey Island on the iPad is amazing. Seriously the way it's meant to be played. I just introduced my girlfriend to the series on the iPad the other day.

Tablets seem to be bringing adventure games back a bit -- they were effectively dead for the longest time.

Monkey Island on the iPad? Sir, you've made my day :)

I miss the golden age of graphical adventure games: Monkey Island, Day Of The Tentacle, Space Quest, King Quest, Hands Of Fate and many others... :/ Today's games aren't that fun, or maybe I'm just old.

I had the realization the other day that the SCUMM games and Heroes of Might and Magic (an amazing game) would play very very well on an iPad.

What a pity, I have an iPad 2 in front of me and I can't play the games. Thanks, Apple. I can't wait to get rid of it for a Galaxy tab.

Um... ever heard of ScummVM? They have a wonderful iPad edition.

How can I install it on an iPad 2?

It's only available if you jailbreak your iPad. If it's not available by default in Cydia, there's a repository you can add to download it. The controls don't always feel 100% right, but it does work like a charm.

Alternatively, the new-fangled remakes of the first two Monkey Island games are available for sale on the App Store proper.

That's what I meant in the above comment, there's no jailbreak for the iPad 2 and they don't know when there will be one. It's as useless as a condom in a monastery.

If I understand it correctly, ScummVM itself is not allowed to run on iOS because it loads content (the games) after being installed, right?

What if one made a stripped version that just comes with one game and no loading? but then you would have to find a way of bundling those games legally...

I believe they have done that for Flight of the Amazon Queen on the app store.

Ben Chandler really has a lot of what's great about those games. Try Awakener[1], Air and Eternally Us

[1]http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=search...!

What I really miss about the golden age of games is that I was the golden age of 15. The same thing that 15 year old down the hall is going to miss in 20 years.

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