50 Years of Text Games parses the rich history of a foundational genre
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I had preordered it as a kind of semi-donation, to be honest, because I’ve never been that much into the various text gaming genres (and because I just spend too much on books that I want to exist but maybe not read that much).
But this book is so well curated and written, I found myself itching to play several of these games from 1985 onwards. There’s a rich history of digital literature that I’ve completely missed.
The author also looks into the various games’ implementation strategies and engines, even showing code samples. Unexpectedly fascinating.
Z Machine games. The mentioned games are all available. Use Frotz to play them under Unix, Winfrotz under Windows, Lectrote under Android. http://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXzcode.html
The only problem was that I was too young to really get the genre, it was difficult, so I only ever beat the easier ones, Zork Zero, Wishbringer, Enchanter, Sorcerer and Spellbreaker. The others completely wailed on me, I could barely get a third of the way through the original Zork without being eaten by a grue
I have felt this for years, and was an early Infocom customer. There exists (I think) a defensible space part-way between a book and a graphical game, which we are no-longer exploiting.
I've been thinking about writing a text adventure for/with my son (in our native language, not English) for this exact purpose: fair enough, he's a gamer, but let's also deepen his understanding of the structures of written word.
There a whole universe of "text games" (literally, games consisting of text only) and in that universe there is a galaxy of "text adventure/interactive fiction" type games. For me personally, the latter are games that are predominantly defined by being parser based games; think "go north" type games.
The Nordland trilogy (not even sure if it was ever translated to English) is a parser based role playing game; Oregon Trail is a choice based simulation game, Empire Wargame is an ASCII based strategy game, and so on and so forth.
And there are still text based games of all coleur being released today.
Here is the link. I would love some feedback while we are ironing it out. https://quantico.alwaysdata.net/static/game_text/game/index_...
Ps: not mobile friendly yet and there are english errors to be corrected.
But this is about text "adventure" games.
Therein lies the fatal flaw: the output will be formulaic. Most important, the output won’t have any artistic content at all. You will NEVER see anything like literature coming out of deep learning AI. You’ll see plenty of potboilers pouring forth, but you can’t make art without an artist.
This stuff will be hailed as the next great revolution in entertainment. We’ll see lots of prizes awarded, fulsome reviews, thick layers of praise heaped on, and nobody will see any need to work on the real thing. That will stop us dead in our tracks for a few decades. "
from https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/interactive-storytelling/... (2018)
But it is very funny to think of a system requiring massive amounts of compute being used to try and replicate a genre as old as PCs itself.
More than funnny, it's shameful. And a huge waste of resources. I mean, if they used AI's for parsing papers helping bioinformatics and medicine, that would be a great case. Not for text adventures, where with Inform6 and basic logic you can create a game in a month. A week to write a good script (literarian script), another one to code it and two weeks polishing things and bugs here and there.
If you play Entangled, Anchorhead, All Things Devours... the gameplay it's far above an AI can do. In ...devours... you have a time travelling puzzle where you must avoid a paradox with yourself. Good luck with that. And that's a game that will run under Frotz from DOS/Windows 95/old Linux/NetBSD in a 486. Or your basement Raspberry Pi, without even sweating a cycle.
Put a Pentium MMX or a basic RpiA, play Galatea https://www.ifwiki.org/Galatea or Counterfeit Monkey https://www.ifwiki.org/Counterfeit_Monkey and then enforcing an AI to create a coherent game with narrativeness, feelings and drama (without being formulaic on speech or narrative) without shitting itself over a few iterations of gameplays it's a dauntisk task.
And these are text games, I repeat, an Amiga, Atari or a 486 could run without too much hazzle. Yet they are created with trivial tools also runable in a Pentium machine from 1997.
Yet an AI can't reach these levels of gameplay even if they tried. Because maintaing coherence on described media with full of twists and easy to create "hard" puzzles like nothing (for an Inform6 progrmmer) it's a very hard task for a machine having to do plays on semantics.
On the other hand, I do find myself a bit skeptical that such a sophisticated game is likely to be written as quickly as you describe. If a game designed in a week is more basic, then perhaps that would be doable by a good LLM, either now or in the near future.
Later with Inform 7 they created an English like language, describing the game by just using English like sentences. Emily Short created Galatea with Inform6 which is more a conversation experiment than a game, think of Eliza but with stereoids, having even "feelings" and "topics" on the conversation. Depending on how you chat with a statue and what topics you uncover, after a long chat you will reach one ending or another. OFC the topic and the feelings, previous chat... it's dynamic and not pre-generated like a graphical adventure menu.
Then there is Counterfeit Monkey, where you can turn an object into anagrams of others in order to solve clever puzzles, and the object count it's really big. That could be really hard to implement with an LLM.
There are some other authors doing creative things with the parser. Junior Arithmancer by Mike Spivey is fun, but not as narratively rich as Emily Short's work.
Andrew Plotkin's Lists and Lists also turns Inform into a parser.
I think a future LLM could accomplish these feats. There's definitely a theme or class of Interactive Fiction: call it "simulation" or "meta" at play there. Some classic works like A Mind Forever Voyaging used it. And old Lucas Arts games like Day of the Tentacle even embedded games within the game. So given those kind of prompts something could be generated in a couple generations.
Not to take away from the current work. They build upon the shoulders of classic Interactive Fiction while being more forgiving and enjoyable.
I mean, on installing DOTT in any system you are actually installing both games of the series. DOTT just made a fancy way to launch the old MM while being ingame. You can launch it outside from DOTT by hand without opening DOTT first.
Is this "All Things Devours" or a different game? I'm very interested in trying it.
To start, it could be as simple as giving GPT the list of valid commands for the user state and location and having it translate if the user asks for something that is equivalent but doesn't match the command exactly.