[HN Gopher] From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text gam...
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From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and
interactive fiction
Author : pseudolus
Score : 146 points
Date : 2024-06-21 13:30 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm very familiar with the Infocom era and am still in touch with
| some of the folks. I admit I haven't kept up with the latest
| developments. Probably should take a look.
|
| For folks interested in the early history, Jason Scott's Get Lamp
| documentary is highly recommended. (He also has an Infocom-
| focused edit.)
| 7thaccount wrote:
| The latest developments in IF are pretty amazing compared to
| the Infocom days. The parsers are a lot more advanced and this
| was all before things like LLMs, which I assume could be used
| in some way here.
| ghaff wrote:
| I can imagine. While sophisticated for the time, the Infocom
| parsers were often sort of an exercise in figuring out the
| right incantation. (Sort of like Alexa :-/ Low blow I know.)
| Especially with LLMs and voice recognition, there's a huge
| amount of potential present and future for a lot more fluid
| interactions. Not that I expect it to ever be a really
| mainstream genre.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I dunno, I think it could with the right evolution in the
| interface. Imagine an interactive story app that you listen
| to on your commute, where voice commands back to it are the
| only interface (eg so it's safe to interact with while
| driving).
|
| Maybe that's just a subset of the more general "AI
| companion" opportunity, but I expect you could get some
| really interesting experiences by calibrating the balance
| between the manually curated/composed parts of it and the
| parts that get a bit more painted-in by the LLM.
|
| Am thinking especially of stories with conflicting
| timelines, unreliable narrators, etc, where you'd maybe be
| revisiting the same events from multiple perspectives to
| piece together what actually happened.
| scioto wrote:
| I still have the Infocom game Leather Goddesses of Phobos,
| complete with scratch and sniff card, and the 3-D (blue-red)
| glasses for the enclosed comic book. If you don't have VR or
| first-person, it was the next best thing: they told you when to
| scratch and sniff.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| I still have a couple of Invisiclues hint books. I wonder if
| the special markers are still available and if they would still
| work on these old books.
| ghaff wrote:
| There were a couple of standard "invisible inks." [0] I
| assume Invisiclues used one of them--most likely baking soda
| given they didn't use heat to reveal. No idea how stable
| either of those were as inks.
|
| [0] https://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/files/secretstoppers1pdf
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I think that Invisiclues is good idea, and that UHS format
| can be used as a computer file with a similar use. There are
| FOSS implementations of UHS such as OpenUHS and FreeUHS.
| Maybe someone will be able to rewrite the Invisiclues in UHS
| format. (I also wrote a UHS writer program in uxn. And, I had
| written UHS parser in PostScript; if you have printer with
| invisible ink (or scratch-off layer) then maybe it will be
| possible to use this PostScript code to make a program that
| will print out with invisible ink, too.)
| autoexec wrote:
| It might be the same as the markers found in these "Yes &
| Know" books: https://www.amazon.com/Lee-Publications-
| Invisible-Know-8-88/...
| zabzonk wrote:
| i had that back in the 80s - managed to move something like
| n,s,w and then gave up, good name for a game though, and about
| typical for me and infocom.
| ghaff wrote:
| I've never been great at working my way all the way through
| games. I think I may have completed that one--mostly because
| I could get hints from the author :-)
| 867-5309 wrote:
| with zero prior knowledge other than its title, should one
| approach the sights and smells cautiously..?
| ralferoo wrote:
| Favourite part of this game: the untangling cream and the bonus
| joke about the rabbit.
|
| Most hated part of this game: HOP, CLAP, KWEEPA.
|
| Also funny how I recall this stuff vividly more than 3 decades
| later!
|
| My first experience of IF was the tape-based Classic Adventure
| on the Amstrad CPC. My family bought the CPC late 1985, I
| bought Amstrad Action in December 1985 and saw the advert for
| it and new I wanted it more than all the other games that were
| reviewed with their flashy graphics and beeps and what-have-
| you.
| nathell wrote:
| For a history of IF between 1972-1999, see the Inform Designer's
| Manual Edition 4, Chapter 46.
|
| https://www.inform-fiction.org/manual/html/s46.html
| pimlottc wrote:
| It's barely mentioned aside from the title, but I just wanted to
| say that 80 Days is a really wonderful game that is well worth
| your time if you're into text-based games.
|
| It's more of an interactive story than a puzzle game, with some
| light resource management elements. But the writing is wonderful
| and there are hundreds of possible paths and storylines to
| discover. Its replayability is very high, whether you're trying
| to find the fastest route, seeking out the most remote locations
| or unlocking hidden subplots.
|
| It really does well to invoke the spirit of adventure in travel,
| and it was a particular delight during the pandemic days when
| that wasn't possible.
|
| Plus they've open sourced the language and tools used to create
| the branching narrative!
|
| https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/
| wkat4242 wrote:
| That's not a text adventure though? Or is the interface text?
| It's hard to tell from the screenshots and I'm on my phone
| right now :)
| pimlottc wrote:
| The graphics are mostly for atmosphere, the main focus is
| paragraphs of prose that describe the story and what happens
| to the main characters. Instead of a parser, you tap to
| choose one of several choices at each decision point, and you
| can also decide which routes to take on the main map. Aside
| from that, you can buy and sell items to make money.
|
| Your choices depend on where you are, of course, but can also
| be affected by your money, items in your inventory, and past
| decisions. So, for example, if you help an inventor in
| Prague, he may give you a device that you can use later in
| Delhi.
|
| EDIT: Here's an example of the text scenes and how you choose
| options:
|
| https://youtu.be/oCKQVR9odHs?si=URPO8TngeM6_Jc83&t=242
| markx2 wrote:
| Loved text adventures since my CPC6128 days. They are about the
| only things I could still use my Psion 5 for. I have Lost
| Treasures 1 and 2, and the Classics on CD.
|
| This is fantastic: http://www.getlamp.com/
|
| You can also hunt down the Infocom Universe Bootleg. It has
| pretty much all the games, bonus games, invisiclues, IUB
| database, software tools.
|
| IUB.zip is 397.5mb zipped
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| How has nobody in these comments mentioned IFDB yet?
| https://ifdb.org
|
| You can play almost the whole history from your browser if you
| want.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| technothrasher wrote:
| 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.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| maxsilver wrote:
| 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.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| 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"?
| ta_1138 wrote:
| This nonsense still happens in the early sierra graphic
| adventures: Administer sobriety test!
| anthk wrote:
| 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...)
| TillE wrote:
| 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.
| lIl-IIIl wrote:
| 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.
| vunderba wrote:
| 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.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Mild spoiler warning!
|
| I'm playing Hadean Lands at the moment and wasn't expecting to
| have to scroll past a map of the game.
| MattGrommes wrote:
| I loved the recent newsletter-turned-book '50 Years of Text
| Games' by Aaron Reed. It's a bunch of deep dives into a bunch of
| games from throughout history, most of which I hadn't heard of.
|
| https://aareed.itch.io/50-years-of-text-games
| susam wrote:
| Colossal Cave Adventure (filename ADVENT) by William Crowther in
| 1976 on IFDB: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=fft6pu91j85y4acv
|
| This is the game that started it all!
|
| In my personal archives though, I only have a copy of the 1977
| update by Dan Woods where the player can score a maximum of 350
| points. This, I believe, is the Fortran source code of the 1977
| version: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-
| archive/games/source/adv350-p...
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I am #20071 on ifMUD.
|
| I had also written a document called "Tricky Document" which
| describes several tricks involved with Z-machine programming
| (many of which Infocom did not use).
| http://zzo38computer.org/zmachine/doc/tricky.txt (I also wrote
| implementations of Z-machine in C, PostScript, JavaScript, and
| Glulx.)
|
| Another text adventure system that I know of is "OASYS". The VM
| code was not documented, although it did include source code, and
| I have figured it out from the source code and written a
| document. The included OAC compiler was rather limited (no
| include files, you could not call a function that is defined
| later in the file, ambiguous syntax, strings duplicated in the
| output file, no pointer types, no type checking, no macros, no
| arrays, no bitwise operations, spurious vocabulary entries, and
| various other limitations), so I had written my own compiler
| (which still uses the same VM code, but with an entirely
| different syntax).
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Also, this article misses a small point in time in 2007-2012
| where Textfyre was an unsuccessful attempt at commercial IF.
|
| One of the published games was written by Jon Ingold (with Ian
| Finley), called The Shadow in the Cathedral, which is available
| at https://textfyre.itch.io/.
|
| I'm not sure, but I think this is the last parser-IF game Jon had
| a hand in...and may have been a spark for Inkle Studios.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Also, NarraScope is in Albany, NY this weekend, if anyone is
| nearby and wants to check it out.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| The ink language mentioned in the article, created by Inkle
| studios for their games, is a joy to work with. It is designed to
| be embedded and makes writing branching dialog or complete
| stories very easy.
|
| As well as 80 Days, I really liked Inkle's implementation of the
| old Steve Jackson Sorcery books (for iOS and other platforms).
| They really know how to polish their games.
|
| Voyage of the Marigold[0] is a project I recently completed
| written in a mixture of ink and js for a the 2024 Spring Thing[1]
| Festival of Interactive Fiction. It didn't win a major prizes but
| I am happy with the way it turned out.
|
| [0] https://sheep.horse/voyage_of_the_marigold/
|
| (Your enjoyment will probably be proportional to how much you
| like Star Trek)
|
| [1] https://www.springthing.net/2024/play.html
|
| (I recommend Rescue At Quickenheath, another game that didn't win
| a major prize but was my favorite)
| dudinax wrote:
| This seems like a good spot to plug one of my favorite games
|
| Will Not Let Me Go
|
| https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2017/Will%...
|
| A Twine game that simulates dementia. It's a brilliant, well
| written game that ironically will stick in your memory.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Seconded -- this game was really excellent and stuck with me
| longer than the games that placed better than it in 2017.
| textfiles wrote:
| Always appreciate the GET LAMP shoutouts. - Jason Scott
| autoexec wrote:
| Six pages and no mention of Hunt the Wumpus which was thrilling
| text based spelunkers years before Colossal Cave Adventure
| Razengan wrote:
| "Interactive fiction" ..HOW the heck did "text adventures" end up
| with that name?? ALL games are "interactive fiction"!
|
| Did some non-gamer blog or something start this?
| nimih wrote:
| The IF archive (IF standing for "interactive fiction", and the
| archive containing exclusively text adventures and related
| content) has existed since 1992. So to answer your question, it
| is unlikely that a "non-gamer blog" invented the term. In fact,
| the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup apparently dates back to
| 1987, well before the concept of blogs, or really "gamer" in
| its modern sense, had come about.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| According to Jimmy Maher (who would likely know best) the term
| was coined in 1979. https://www.filfre.net/2011/09/robert-
| lafores-interactive-fi...
| kryptiskt wrote:
| It was used by Infocom to describe what they did.
|
| Here is the box art to Zork:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork#/media/File:Zork_I_box_ar...
|
| Look at the lower right, it says "Interactive Fiction"
| odysseus wrote:
| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy shown in the photo in the
| article is actually the very first piece of computer software I
| ever bought.
|
| I remember purchasing it in a Babbages or something for $14 and
| being so excited.
|
| Brought it home and ran it on a 286 with a monitor capable of
| displaying text in one color: amber
|
| > insert babelfish into ear
| salgernon wrote:
| It was also a great example of the 'feelies' that came with
| games back then - the peril sensitive sunglasses and little
| baggie of belly button lint. It helped bridge the virtual text
| world with a connection to the physical.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| Likewise. I remember the Infocom ads: A photo of a brain and a
| statement that it imagination was the best graphics anyone
| could get [1].
|
| I never could finish the Hitchhiker's game though.
|
| [1]
| https://www.atarimania.com/pgepub.awp?param=publisher-&value...
|
| --> "We stick our graphics where the sun don't shine..."
| cpfohl wrote:
| If you're looking for some accessible ones to play Inhave very
| fond memories of the ones at Rinkworks:
|
| http://www.rinkworks.com/adventure/
|
| The site is straight from the late nineties; mobile wasn't a
| concern at the time, and it remains not a concern. These are
| better consumed in a desktop. The whole site is a delightful
| bastion of "The Old Internet." The role playing games are also
| plenty fun!
| shmerl wrote:
| Apparently there is Nine Princes in Amber text adventure game.
| blueferret wrote:
| Very first game I played on a computer was Zork 1. Old Commodore
| 64. I think I still have the disk jacket for it (but not the
| disk, sadly).
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