Solving the “Zork” Mystery | Hacker News Reader

Solving the “Zork” Mystery

dpolakovic.space

66 pointsdpola26 comments

General jargon like foobar is not that far off in meaning from "unfinished software". I think it's possible there's not really a contradiction between the different sources. The "unfinished software" meaning in the NYT article might have just been an example of one possible use of a more general nonsense word.

Isn't it supposed to be fubar? fucked up beyond any recognition?

Yes that’s the original spelling & meaning. But using the spellings foobar, foo, bar, and sometimes baz, have been used for decades in programming as examples, temporary names, stand-ins etc. I just assumed that spelling it foo was meant to distance it from the curse word slightly while simultaneously making the pronunciation more clear (i.e. foo not fuh); foo just makes a good nonsense word.

They are called metasyntactic variables and there’s a handful of them for English, but also standard ones in other language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable

I only just realized the z in foobaz stood for zork

> foo not fuh

not to be confused with: fuh not pho

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar

not in code, the tradition has been two words actually, foo and bar

Note the Etymology of "Foo" RFC

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3092.html

Before I came across Zork, I thought I was quite intelligent...

To be fair, the earliest text adventures are brutally, brutally difficult and in many cases, very much unfair! There are nowhere near enough in-game indicators or foreshadowing of what might work in a certain context. Some solutions are obvious, but others are truly ridiculous and won’t realistically be solved without a walkthrough or “invisi-clue” book. All imo, of course.

Back in the 80’s we used to play these games in a group, with one person driving and a group of others helping out. Even then we used to fall back on hints occasionally.

I played Dungeon, the much larger mainframe version of Zork in 1978. Between me and six other guys it took us nearly a year to finish the game.

At that time, there were no video terminals. There were no monitors (this is high school).

We played Dungeon and Adventure on 17” wide green bar paper terminals, usually a Digital Equipment Corporation DECWriter II or III.

There was no Internet. There was nowhere to go for hints. We simply had to figure everything out.

At that time, these were the first complex computer games. When the Imps created Infocom they made the top ten most popular games until video arrived in classrooms and homes.

There is a fairly active community of hobbyists that still make text games, though evolved away from the brutal puzzles to more balanced narrative and seamless puzzles.

Using Claude I even built my own platform: https://sharpee.net/.

There a thousands of free text games. Check out https://ifdb.org for more.

I too wrote my own platform, in the early 80s, in C++. I didn't use C++ for the user-written code, instead I used a Forth like, implemented in C++. This probably doomed the program, along with my inability to get string literals and vehicles such as boats right. But it was a great intro to C++, and I spent some time writing an easy, story-telling game, based on Jack Vance's Dying Earth books, in it.

Time is never wasted when you are doing something new.

I had Claude code up a Slack bot so I could play any Z-machine game co-op with friends. We started up Zork 1, wandered the available map, made it to the cellar, walked north, and hit a room that was insta-death. We still haven't gotten back into it.

https://gitlab.com/briann/slork

and if you happen to use zulip instead you can use zulip-zork!

https://github.com/mnky9800n/zulip-zork

> without a walkthrough or “invisi-clue” book.

Or exhaustive brute-force trial and error, which was much more expected to be standard back then.

These days you'd use an LLM for that.

Now they sprinkle dopamine rewards all over the place to incentivize the thirst for even more. Especially if there are ads shown every time you get that dopamine hit.

TBF, text adventures absolutely "sprinkle dopamine rewards all over the place." The random-reinforcement effect is a big part of their appeal — as a player, you never quite know if you've seen "all the good stuff" yet.

WOOD0350: Did you try using the bird on the dragon? PLAT0550: Did you try going back across the troll bridge after tricking the troll? HHGTTG: Did you CONSULT GUIDE ABOUT everything you found? Frog Fractions: Did you try SCORE? Did you try applying every verb to MYSELF?

Maybe current adventure games are easy. I've read that early D&D was especially lethal by today's standards.

I recall the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy one being exceptionally rough

I spent countless hours as a kid trying to figure out the games secrets. Only, 20-years later, did I read that you were supposed to be collecting specific items and putting them in the trophy case to "win".

Spellbreaker was the one that broke me.

I looked into the well known triva about name of most popular text adventure.

Don’t want to be that guy but brace yourself for part 2… if the first one disappointed you in some places, the 2nd is going to beat you to a pulp. And I won’t even start on the third. I’m the kind of person who prefers not to finish a game than to read hints or walkthroughs, and parts 2 and 3 have been sitting on my unfinished stack for literally decades. :(

Clearly “zork” is a mispronunciation of “source”. ;)

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