Better Living Through Introspection

When I was a kid (a long, long time ago), one of the weekend events I constantly looked forward to was the occasional trip to the public library a few towns over. Some genius had rigged a personal computer (perhaps an Apple II?) with a coin-op mechanism so that if you put in a quarter, the machine would boot up and launch a game that has shaped my interest in all manner of electronic games since.

The game was called Zork, and if you’re not familiar with it you — of course — have missed out. Zork was one of the earliest text adventure games (a genre that the intelligentsia now refer to as Interactive Fiction). In the game, you were an adventurer and gameplay was essentially this: on screen was a description of your world — where you were, which directions you could move, what items were lying around — and you could type (with a quite limited vocabulary) your actions.

So, for example:

West of House

You are standing in an open field

west of a white house, with a

boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.> north

North of House

You are facing the north side of

a white house. There is no door

here, and all the windows are

boarded up. To the north a narrow

path winds through the trees.

> east

Behind House

You are behind the white house.

A path leads into the forest to

the east. In one corner of the

house there is a small window

which is slightly ajar.

> open window

With great effort, you open the

window far enough to allow entry.

> enter window

Kitchen

You are in the kitchen of the

white house...

And so on.

I spent a lot of quarters at that library. And later, when our family finally got our first computer (a Commodore 64) I would spend my summer hire earnings on other games from the creators of Zork, Infocom. The adventurous Zork series continued, there was another series where you could cast spells and work your way up the ranks of spell-casters (Enchanter, Sorcerer, Spellbreaker), a mystery series (Deadline, Witness, Suspect), science fiction (Planetfall, Stationfall) and more…even an adaptation of the popular Douglas Adams novel, Hitchhikere’s Guide to the Galaxy (complete with peril-sensitive sunglasses!). With each new release, the games became a little more sophisticated, but for the most part stayed true to their nature: you explore your world and you solve puzzles, all the while creating in essence a dialogue between you and the story.

Naturally, text adventure games didn’t stick around once computer became capable of displaying more than a few blocks of color on screen. Their popularity dwindled and eventually they died off. Or so I thought. It turns out, for reasons I have yet to discern, that text adventures — or, rather, interactive fiction (IF) — didn’t disappear, they merely went to ground. Hiding in plain sight, as it were, communities of IF fans flourished, even as the commercial aspects of IF withered.

Which brings me to today (or rather, a few days ago) when, following a random chain of links (as usual) I came across Graham Nelson’s Inform 7. Inform 7 is “a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language.” In short, the system allows you to create your own text adventures, and I’m so damned excited about it that I really don’t have time to tell you the rest of the IF story. Luckily for us all, there is a decent wikipedia entry on interactive fiction.

From The Dilbert Blog

Can’t we just put a fence around Iraq and hope they turn into Australians over time? We might be on the verge of the best sting operation ever, now that we’ve cleverly tricked most of the terrorists into congregating.