50 Years of Text Games parses the rich history of a foundational genre(arstechnica.com)
arstechnica.com
50 Years of Text Games parses the rich history of a foundational genre
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/50-years-of-text-games-parses-the-rich-history-of-a-foundational-genre/
28 comments
Thanks to the Z-Machine, Frotz and Inform6/Inform7 you can play games like Entangled, Anchorhead, Curses!, Jigsaw, Slouch over bedlamp, I-0, Spiritwrak, All Things Devours, Vicious Cycles, Woman... on any platform, from PC's, Mac, Android machines and even TRS 80's with an improved Z-Machine interpreter: https://intfiction.org/t/m4zvm-a-new-modern-z-machine-for-th...
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
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
I played many of the games covered in the series as a kid thanks to kindly senior software pirates on my local BBS and my mom purchasing a copy of both the Lost Treasures of Infocom and the sequel.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Treasures_of_Infocom
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Treasures_of_Infocom
“ So many of these early gaming subgenres were abandoned before their time as gamers jumped on to the new shiny thing. It's really worth looking back at all the untapped potential we've left behind. “
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 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.
Same here. I loved books before I got into Sierra adventure games, but I do think that text adventures (especially those in pure console mode, no graphics) are really good for developing language comprehension and vocabulary as a child. I'd say Al Lowe's work with Leisure Suit Larry and and Police Quest did play a significant role in how I sense a "good sentence", and, also, how I sense humor. At the language level, those Sierra games were incredibly good.
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.
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.
I'm almost through (in the 2010s right now) and really enjoying it. It's given me a ton of ideas of things to try in my own games (like quality-based narratives).
I recommend the author's interview on the Ludology podcast about his work on the book:
https://ludology.libsyn.com/ludology-276-text-messages
https://ludology.libsyn.com/ludology-276-text-messages
Many of the games profiled seems narrative based games. Are there many text based games, that are not about narratives, like simulation or wordgame type text based games?
You bet'cha, but that depends on your definition of "text games" --- no, even your definition of "text". Is a game that uses ASCII art text based?
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.
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.
I am hacking with others on a game that is part simulation, part narrative. It sets in the music industry.
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.
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.
Yes, tons of them. Command line "hangman" games being one very old and common example of "language/word" game. There are also text based RPGs and space exploration games, and so on.
But this is about text "adventure" games.
But this is about text "adventure" games.
- VMS Empire, for war sim a la XConq or Advance Wars but in terminal.
- Word game, from Boggle to Hangman to Wordle.
This book introduced me to Super Star Trek, which I have now lost many hours to
A GPT version of parser adventures would be awesome.
"There’s no question in my mind that such software could generate reasonably good murder mysteries, action thrillers, or gothic romances. After all, even the authors of such works will tell you that they are formulaic. If there’s a formula in there, a deep learning AI system will figure it out.
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)
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)
Maybe. The problem is that it could hallucinate it's way into a corner and kill the intended narrative as it creates non-sensical objects and characters.
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.
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.
A GTX 3080 Golden Edition TM vs a Pentium MMX/32MB with Inform6 (and that's more than enough to run several builds in parallel) or a Pentium II@333 with Inform7 and some text editor.
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.
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.
Your brain does far more computation and you're saying to use it for a good part a month to do something an AI can do on the fly in seconds.
Tell me you never played IF (even the basic ones) without telling me so explicitly.
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.
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.
Ok, you're right that I haven't played a text game since I had a DOS machine, and now I'm intrigued.
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.
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.
Well, basically in the 90's fans of the ZMachine interpreter from Zork/Infocom
created games with amateur tools and a really easy OOP lang called Inform, which the latest OOP iteration it's Inform 6 and they made jewels such as Curses!, Jigsaw, Anchorhead... surpassing the quality of the infocom games, even creating an eigth (v8) version of the Zmachine, surpassing v3 and v5 editions from Infocom. One of the games features even time travelling puzzles having to fight with yourself and your previous steps you did in the game. That could make an LLM parser explode. Yet, you have the Inform6 source code at https//jxself.org/git/devours and you can compile and run it with inform6 on systems as small as a 486 or a Pentium with the inform6 compiler.
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.
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.
I'm really enjoying Counterfeit Monkey.
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.
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.
DOTT just spawned the OG maniac mansion EXE as a simple DOS call. Once you add DOTT to scummvm you will get the both games added to the game list as the MM data it's bundled as if it was a standalone MM install.
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.
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.
> time travelling puzzles having to fight with yourself and your previous steps you did in the game
Is this "All Things Devours" or a different game? I'm very interested in trying it.
Is this "All Things Devours" or a different game? I'm very interested in trying it.
My girlfriend uses Siri to add up numbers. That's a massive amount of compute to replicate a mechanical adding machine.
Like AI Dungeon?
It would suck a lot. GPT lacks coherence in lots of fronts.
A game made with Inform6 (OOP) or Inform 7 (natural language), even done by an amateur it's much better on consistency and playability.
You could use a similar engine to keep track of things and feed them to GPT could provide new descriptions or ideas, or use functions provided by the engine to modify map state or run appropriate commands according to the what the user says.
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.
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.
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.