Hi all this is Scott Adams. I am open for an AMA (Ask Me Anything), awaiting your comments!
You changed my life when at 12 years old I first saw a computer and the first things I saw running on it was Voodoo Castle and The Count.
Back in 1979 it was literally like I had discovered magic was real because here in Australia computers were unknown to most ordinary people.
It's hard to convey how much this blew my 12 year old mind. I don't think I stopped thinking about Scott Adams adventures for years after that.
I LOVED all your games, so much atmosphere.
Thanks for creating that magical part of my life.
Favorites:
Voodoo Castle
The Count
Mystery Fun House
AdventureLand
Savage Island (though it was too hard for me)_
Have you tried any of my newer ones at all? www.Clopas.net see if anything strikes your fancy now?
I am though delighted to hear that my classic games were helpful in you understanding your own gifts! I appreciate you sharing that with me!
Trying to google this is harder than it seems, and shows me graphical versions that are so different between systems that they look like they were written from scratch for each system rather than using the same data format with an engine.
The reason the later games may not be available would also be due to licensing. The licenses for the Marvel games and Buckeroo Banzai have all expired and can't be legally used anymore.
Keep searching on the internet though. There are users and user groups still playing them :)
>Most of the "later" and "Marvel" games were published in SAGA+ format (with a better parser). These versions are not included because ScottFree cannot play them yet. The following games were available in SAGA+ format:
When I searched for SAGA+, I found almost no evidence (outside that readme) that "SAGA+ format" is even a thing that really exists, let alone that any particular version of the game is in that format or that anyone has written a parser that can parse it.
Also, it lists three licensed games and Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle in SAGA+, which sounds as though it's not licensed, and should be releaseable.
Thanks for helping to create these!
Are you aware at the moment of any interesting developments in the “text games for people with vision problems” field?
I also released Escape The Gloomer on Alexa (fully audio only)
Currently working on making AdventurelandXL (www.AdventurelandXL.com) Windows screen reader compatable as well.
How do you think Adventure games are like the Method of Loci, or Memory Palaces, in that they can help you remember and retrieve vast amounts of information geographically?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
What do you think the world be like if an Adventure-like geographical Memory Palace oriented user interface had taken over the world instead of MS-DOS and Unix and Windows?
Your adventure programs and others were monumental to my development as a programmer, and define how I think about code and programming and organizing information.
By playing adventure games, I finally reverse engineered the "Adventure Algorithm" for keeping track of rooms and connections and objects and inventory.
Then I wrote my own adventures and parsers and maps in BASIC and FORTH, and my first commercial program was a Logo implementation of Adventure for C64 Terrapin Logo.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapi...
At first I played all of your adventures as well as Microsoft Adventure on my Apple ][, and mainframe Adventure on a terminal to my mom's work, and that led me to the ARPANET to play Zork at MIT, and even MUD at Essex University, then TinyMud at CMU, and MOOs, and LambdaMOO at PARC.
I keep returning to that essential idea of a map of rooms connected by doors, and I kept reimplementing it on different platforms, each time a little different and a little better, as technology advanced.
I developed a user interface technique called "pie menus", which are menus with their items arranged in a circle around the cursor, each in a different direction, so you can select them by moving in different directions, even gesturing quickly without looking at the screen.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-...
>The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus: They’re Fast, Easy, and Self-Revealing. Don Hopkins. Originally published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Dec. 1991.
Eventually I realized that 4-item and 8-item pie menus are the essential elements of an Adventure map, as long as you think of "menus" as rooms in a map with two-way links that you can move back and forth through, instead of a hierarchal tree of menus with one-way exits!
So I made series of graphical Adventure map editors that were also pie menu editors if you looked at them right, because rooms behaved just like pie menus: you can move back and forth between rooms with quick pie menu gestures: up, down, left, right, diagonal.
And you can also edit the map of rooms by simply dragging the rooms around and bumping them up against each other to make and break connections.
And an editable navigable map like that is essentially a "Memory Palace" that you can build and navigate in your imagination, to help you spatially remember anything.
It's a computerized note taking application that still works when you're away from your computer and forgot your phone, since you can remember geographical relationships easily, and memorize facts and lists with the Method of Loci.
>'the method of loci', an imaginal technique known to the ancient Greeks and Romans and described by Yates (1966) in her book The Art of Memory as well as by Luria (1969). In this technique the subject memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete loci. When desiring to remember a set of items the subject 'walks' through these loci in their imagination and commits an item to each one by forming an image between the item and any feature of that locus. Retrieval of items is achieved by 'walking' through the loci, allowing the latter to activate the desired items. The efficacy of this technique has been well established (Ross and Lawrence 1968, Crovitz 1969, 1971, Briggs, Hawkins and Crovitz 1970, Lea 1975), as is the minimal interference seen with its use.
Here's the first iteration called "DreamScape", which I demonstrated in 1995 at WWDC:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/1995-apple-world-wide-develope...
>1995 Apple World Wide Developers Conference Kaleida Labs ScriptX DreamScape Demo. Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Don Hopkins, Kaleida Labs.
The second iteration was called "MediaGraph", for making and navigating maps of music, which I implemented in Unity3D:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/mediagraph-demo-a7534add63e5
>MediaGraph Demo. MediaGraph Music Navigation with Pie Menus. A prototype developed for Will Wright’s Stupid Fun Club.
The most recent iteration was called "iLoci", an iPhone app:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/iphone-app-iloci-by-don-hopkin...
>iPhone iLoci Memory Palace App, by Don Hopkins @ Mobile Dev Camp. A talk about iLoci, an iPhone app and server based on the Method of Loci for constructing a Memory Palace, by Don Hopkins, presented at Mobile Dev Camp in Amsterdam, on November 28, 2008.
Your Adventure games inspired me, and I hope we can inspire others to build even better ways of creating and elaborating information maps, easily navigating and editing them with gestures, capturing and communicating ideas and information, writing and telling interactive stories, and generally augmenting human memory and intelligence.
Wow, I am still reading through your amazing accomplishments. I love it! Give me a few minutes to finish reading your post!
OK, I am blown away at your creativity and ideas. I am aware of Memory Palaces and you certainly make an excellent tie-in with adventure game handling.
Absolutely incredible. Thanks so much for sharing all that! It certainly helps spur my own creative juices!
Happy Adventuring!
The Method of Loci (aka a "Memory Palace") is not just some woo hoo pseudo-science bullshit like "Neurolinguistic Programming" or "Dianetics" -- it's the real thing, a very old, well proven idea.
It actually and measurably works, it used to be taught as a part of a classical education for thousands of years until it was banned by the Puritans in 1584 for evoking "bizarre and irrelevant" imagery, and it's still regularly and successfully used by many memory contest champions to recall faces, digits, and lists of words.
Mnemonics was seen as dangerous and magical and heretical back in the Medieval world... And they were right, fortunately: Dangerous magic that works by evoking bizarre and irrelevant imagery can be quite useful as well as entertaining!
https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/historically-method-of-loci-...
HN discussions about it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088556
>juliend2 on Jan 19, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Nototo – Build a unified mental map of notes
>It's called the Method of loci: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
>Another term for that is the "memory palace".
>BTW, I wonder if anyone here in HN used it to learn significant things using this method?
>netsharc on Jan 19, 2020 | next [–]
>I first learned about memory palaces in the book Hannibal, named after the character in Silence of the Lambs [0], but the description there is of a lavish imaginary palace inside your mind you can wander in. I did use this technique to try to remember some physics formulae for an exam once, in my memory palace there was a room with giant equations.
>This website is a bit of a let-down for me since it's just a bird's eye view, it would be cool to create a palace using a 3d game engine, with signs that point to things like physics formulae, and then some Sims or Google-Sketchup-like tool to add objects that you want to remember.
>[0] The relevant excerpt about Hannibal's memory palace: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/illusion-chasers/hannib... , it describes a painting that he uses to remember the fictional address "3327 Tindal, Arlington VA 22308".
>todd8 on Jan 19, 2020 | prev | next [–]
>Hans-Lukas Teuber[1] was the head of the psychology department and my professor for the intro psychology class at MIT. He gave one two-hour evening lecture per week, which were delivered without notes. The lectures were riveting, they were given in MIT's largest lecture hall; it was standing room only to hear him speak--many students and faculty would attend even though not enrolled. I don't remember ever hearing a better live lecture than those that he gave (and I've heard many lectures--I spent more years at university than Belucci's character in Animal House). He used the memory palace method to remember his lecture's organization.
>[1] http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/m...
>DonHopkins on Jan 19, 2020 | prev | next [–]
>I visualize and remember code that way. For me, it's hard to forget somewhere I've been, even if I only imagined being there.
>Each function is a little building like an office or a shop, which has a sign out front telling what services or products it sells, and contains everything inside you need to solve some kind of problem or produce some kind of product or service (where equipment in the room is like references to other objects and functions and imported libraries).
>You're standing behind the front counter, just about to receive a customer though the front entrance door with the parameters you need for one particular instance of that problem.
>You go into the back room, solve the problem, then deliver the results out the exit door at the back of the building (or through any of the other earlier emergency exits, if you had to exit prematurely or throw an error and run away).
>The front/back flow is a metaphor for the top/bottom flow of control through a function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi%E2%80%93Shneiderman_diag...
>If you squint you can see the example Nassi-Shneiderman diagram in that article as a map of a building, with its front at the top, and exit at the bottom.
>You can have internal hallways and rooms for branches and loops, like a Nassi-Shneiderman diagram. The "Sub to Determine Wiki-Article" room is like the front entrance lobby of a theater where buy your ticket. The "Select Favourite Genre" room is like the stage of The Price is Right, and you get to pick what's behind door #1 (History), #2 (Science), or # (Geography), or else choose Other. They each have one or two rooms behind them with your rewards, and then they all finally exit out to the same back stage loading dock, where you take your wonderful prize (or consolation donkey) home.
>kruasan on Jan 19, 2020 | prev [–]
>I once memorized 200 digits of pi when I had nothing more fun to do on a long boring lecture. Sherlock popped into my mind, so I imagined a journey through my house where I chunked numbers to make them represent certain things or people, and me interacting or talking with them, like in a story of some sort. But it feels like I never applied this method to anything significant, apart from memorizing a few things from my biochemistry course. Although now I remember credit card numbers, every single phone number of my friends and family (by associating numbers with particular facial features or character traits), and some other things. I would say before that day I never fully realized just how much I actually like to memorize stuff like words and numbers. Anyway, I think everyone should give it a try, this is fun.
I suppose directions would get very monotonous and negate some of the implementation. . .
Probably thing I love the share the most is how amazed I was to find out the Creator of the Universe and is real and that He actually cares about me.
A subject I am now always williing to share but not many inquire about it.
And I remember being stuck and playfully trying to jump into a certain ravine and realizing that instead I had just found out how to get across it (I guess it was a smaller ravine than I had imagined). Another poster mentioned learning "flotsam & jetsam" - I also learned calliope - though not how to pronounce it.
But I think we never completed The Golden Voyage - I should see if I can convince my children raised with Minecraft and HD games to give your adventures a shot. This is good timing, as my family often plays older games over Thanksgiving.
Will your games ever be ported directly to app stores or game stores such as XBOX Live? I think you would get thousands of new fans.
Any updates on your Lyme resources?
www.lyme-resource.com is still around but I haven't updated in some time. Most folks tend to be more focused on Covid than Lyme. Yet Lyme is still a deadly killer that is often misdiagnosed.
I came of age in the Infocom era. Do you know any of those guys? (Brian Moriarty, Steve Meretzky...)
I don't think I have never had the pleasure to interact with Brian or Steve but I greatly respect their work!
Not Dilbert, Adventure! Say yoho and everything spins around and suddenly I'm elsewhere...
If not, then I am happy to make a new friend!