Rendering game worlds in text [video]

Same here :D

I really like the idea, but I see problems. I'm still watching the video, so maybe they'll be addressed.

Repetition: repetition in text can get quite jarring if the text is written like a novel, as opposed to the classic RPG way of displaying it as a text log. It's not unsolvable, but it certainly is difficult. Not only does avoiding repetition require knowledge of previously generated text, I think it also requires adjustments to the game world itself. It can't be Skyrim in that regard, it needs to generate unique and meaningful situations.

Effort of parsing: it takes the user a lot more effort to parse free-flowing text, as opposed to graphical shorthand representations or even photorealistic scenes. We like to spend that effort when we read stories because we get something in return. I'm less convinced that a completely automated but open world can offer the same appeal. It doesn't seem impossible, but it's certainly quite hard.

Of course the other alternative to generating meaning as a reward for the brain's effort to parse the text is to just generate the text with predictable patterns. In that case though, we are exactly back at the point where MUDs left off. Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily.

Admittedly, I'm probably just jaded and very dubious about well-produced videos making a lot of grandiose promises when it comes to games. I would certainly buy this game and give it a try.

I tried this once by essentially making a Zork-like text adventure that played itself. The result[2] was horrible.

[1] https://nanogenmo.github.io/ [2] https://github.com/smcameron/nanogenmo-2017

As far as actually writing a text adventure game goes these days, there's lots of options for languages and libraries that are specific to making text adventures.

There's Inform and TADS for making parser based games.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TADS

There's renpy, Quest and a bunch of others for making more visual novel/choose your own adventure style stories.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%27Py

http://textadventures.co.uk/quest/

There's actually still a fairly large text based game community out there these days.

> the first games were played on machines that only had text mode

This is also mentioned in the video, the author's aim seems to be to describe all elements of the game with natural language (e.g. rogue doesn't count, it uses text but in a graphical form).

You can watch the video with 2x speed and captions. He talked about this!

Unfortunately, the best sources about "old school" NLG are physical books. I really liked Building Natural Language Generation Systems as a start.

Newer NLG tries to merge ML and the old approaches. The only source there are academic papers, afaik.