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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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!)

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.

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