Brian Taylor

Get Lamp is a 2010 documentary on the history of text adventures.

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I was in the library the other day, looking for a copy of David Sudnow's Pilgrim in the Microwold. A maze of straight shelves, all alike. But with plenty of signage to guide me.

I was looking for the G1469.3s. I found them, but I also found G1469.22.M34 1984: Compute!'s Guide to Adventure Games.

From the cover: "A comprehensive guide to designing, writing, and playing computer adventure games. Includes 'Tower of Mystery,' a ready-to-type-in adventure game for virtually any home computer, as well as reviews of many popular commercial games."

How could I turn down a ready-to-type-in adventure game?

Compute! magazine was published from the late 1970s into the early 1990s. They published a lot of books. This one, from 1984, was written by Gary McGath (I think this McGath?) and published in 1984.

It's really neat because it's not dedicated to one game or one company or one platform, but to an entire type of game. McGath charts the then-9-year history of adventure games, or computer text adventures (apparently in 1984 they're not yet called interactive fiction). His explanation of how the genre works includes descriptions of text input, of the kind of puzzles you may encounter, and that old saw, the Dungeons and Dragons game presented as dialogue script. McGath first played text adventures on ARPANet while working in a lab at MIT, so he writes about games from Adventure to Zork as well as early computer science experiments with artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Military and academic technology appropriated for gaming.

McGath makes the argument that games have always been social (in 1984! About computer games and not the arcade!) and trash-talks a different kind of game while he's at it:

"The games also promote a special sort of interaction among people, even though they are played solitaire. In playing an adventure, you may find yourself stuck on some point; if you've tried your best, there's nothing wrong with asking a friend who's already played the game to offer you a hint. Experienced players delight in coming up with subtle, devious hints in response to inquiries. A good hint still lets the player solve the puzzle mostly on his or her own; it just gives another perspective on the situation. Pac-Man, on the other hand, doesn't lend itself to much conversation beyond asking which fruit is in the tenth maze." (15)

He mentions the CompuServe Games Special Interest Group many times as a great resource for hints, and the book's chapter on Sierra On-Line Adventures is written by Scorpia, who was a sysop for that group at the time. She would later go on to write for, among other places, Computer Gaming World.

I know I said it wasn't about a single company, and it's not. Infocom and Scott Adams get their own chapters as well. Each of these chapters talks a bit about history and then talks about individual games for a page or two each. There's another chapter on adventures by various authors (all of these games have specific authors) and publishers.

General adventure game strategies (seven pages on how to draw a map!) are followed by a detailed description of the program structure that underlies adventures. It's an introduction to programming by way of gaming -- computational literacy!

The reviews and history that had come earlier in the book were raw material for this section, dedicated to creating simple text adventures. I wonder if there's something about text adventures that drives their players to make them, or if that drive is present in the players of all games but the barriers to entry are lower.

In any case, as time has gone on and commercial text adventures are no longer made, that community of players has become the only producers. It's a fascinating place, where authors and players, creators and fans are all individuals who shift between those roles easily.

For McGath and his audience, for McGath's book, making adventures is just as important as playing them. It's the same for modern interactive fiction aficionados, who have to go grassroots in their hobby, in their distribution. They don't have the luxury of going to the store and picking out one of two or three options that they can then hang their gamer identity on. Their fandom isn't just about consuming the game, it's about making their own.

And here, a few other IF links that didn't make the post: 

• The annual Interactive Fiction Competition
• An archive of adventures for Eamon, an Apple II that supported user generated content.
• Inform7, a modern language for programming IF.
  

Brian Taylor is a INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIST, freelance writer and freelance photographer and freelance librarian and freelance anthropologist. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA. He is on Twitter. He has an email address.