Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

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There is a love/hate relationship with most of those old text adventures. They could make an entire world with just a handful of words and fill them with clever puzzles to delight the users.

But then the parser would be willfully obtuse and most of the gameplay would be figuring out the exact combination of commands to unlock the next snippit of the story. Sometimes requiring the player to telepathically connect with the developer to figure out precisely what phrasing he intended.

    You see a special looking rock on the ground.

    > PICK UP THE ROCK

    Huh?

    > PICK UP ROCK

    Huh?

    > PICK UP SPECIAL ROCK

    Huh?

    > PICK UP THE SPECIAL ROCK

    You pick up the rock, it feels special in your hands, you are certain it will be important sometime later.

    > PUT ROCK IN POCKET

    Huh?

    > PUT SPECIAL ROCK IN POCKET

    Huh?

    > PUT SPECIAL ROCK IN MY POCKET

    I can't do that.

    > OPEN POCKET

    Huh?

    > OPEN MY POCKET

    You open your pocket.

    > PUT SPECIAL ROCK IN MY POCKET

    You safely store the rock.

It is no mystery why graphical adventure games basically wiped out the text adventure games.

Oh, you'd love the Apple II game called "Prisoner 2". It's entire purpose was to frustrate you at every turn with things you had to telepathically guess what the developer was thinking. The very first puzzle is a maze which is almost impossible to escape from... until you discover you can hit the 'ESC' key. It gets more dastardly from there.

The IF community recognized these problems early (late 90's/early 2000's) and mitigated them with helpers and a lot of playtesting.

This is not really an issue in any games released in the last 20 years.

I think for me the worst "guess the verb" blocker was in Enchanter with the mouse hole and how to get the parchment out of it. Who the hell is going to think of "REACH IN HOLE"?

And even 25... Anchorhead, Curses!, Slouch over Bedlam...

Miles ahead of the V3 version of the ZMachine and any Scott Adam adventure for outdated microcomputers from its era (C64, ZX...)

This nonsense still happens in the early sierra graphic adventures: Administer sobriety test!

The scale of the IF text-parser problem isn't that bad, and they addressed a lot of the issues decades ago, modern games don't struggle with this nearly as much. It's just that that Interactive Fiction tends to be a niche hobby, so most of the IF written today assumes you are already at least a intermediate in the field -- they often don't throw in a Tutorial, the way every modern triple-A game does.

From an 'intro accessibility' standpoint, Modern videogames are often way more willfully-obtuse. We just don't recognize it, because it's assumed that everyone who plays a game already has basic understanding of twin-stick first-person and third-person gamepad controls, we assume it like it's another form of basic literacy. (Who hasn't played a game before, right?)

But for folks who don't -- for the (many) folks who have literally never touched a gamepad in their life, sitting them down to modern graphical interactive-fiction controller game (say something like Firewatch, or Gone Home, or Edith Finch, or Life is Strange) is even more challenging for those folks than the traditional IF text parser.

I've seen people spend thirty minutes just trying to figure out how to look in a general direction -- it takes truly-new adults quite a while to get used to the feel of twin-thumbsticks for movement+camera-control, it requires a lot of careful fine-motor control on both sticks simultaneously and often has to be felt to be learned well.

At least with text-based IF, most people have been exposed to typing at school or at work or at a library or such. The same is not usually true of twin-thumbstick gamepads.

I've though this is an opening for llm use. Feed all the possible valid commands to the llm and let it translate from anything close you type in.

That's bloat. Current Z-Machine interpreters and libraries (Inform6+Inform6lib and better with Inform 7) have a MUCH better parser than the typical adventures for limited 'computers' from the 80's.

There's some of that, and there's even a humorous game called Guess the Verb making that a game mechanic: https://www.ifwiki.org/Guess_the_Verb%21

but it's not so bad. I definitely run into this issue with graphical based games as well.

Graphical adventure games were largely parser-driven for like a decade. Sierra's AGI parser worked well; my recollection is that it usually looked for a verb and a noun and ignored any extraneous text.

Ah yes the "ye can't get ye flask" moment.

Overly literal text parsers and the obligatory tedious maze portion of text adventures were the major pain points back in the day.

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