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I don't see why not.

Where does this myth come from

Since the late 90s there have been mumblings ("Someone I know who works at MS said they knew someone who said...") that code from BSD TCP/IP stack was in Windows but there was never any proof. Some speculated that because they were susceptible to some of the same vulnerabilities they must share common code but there were some vulnerabilities that affected the Windows TCP/IP stack not the BSD one (and vice versa) so this seems unlikely.

In 2001 the FreeBSD folks decided to search for proof but other than utilities nothing much was found. You can even see them correcting the "Windows uses the BSD TCP/IP stack" misconception years later.

Around the same time an article saying Microsoft uses open source code was published in the Wall Street Journal. Here's a quote:

Software connected with the FreeBSD open-source operating system is used in several places deep inside several versions of Microsoft's Windows software, such as in the "TCP/IP" section

This assertion is somewhat broard but it was enough to kick off a new round of speculation and rebuttals with regard to the Windows TCP/IP stack but everyone loves a good tale so the counterclaims are less well known. Perhaps this would qualify as a Snopes urban myth.

[H]ow did it end up being passed of as fact on wikipedia?

Who says Wikipedia only consists of facts? :-) Nothing saves you from having to use critical analysis on sources, especially since anyone can edit Wikipedia but I will note there is a citation needed link further down on that page.

All the above sources were found via a Google Windows/BSD stack query so with these starter links and a quick search you're now well armed to correct Wikipedia and anyone else who repeats this rumour. Welcome to the club!

Zork is somewhat overrated; it's from a time when adventure games were a grab-bag of fantasy cliches and "zany" objects. The past two decades have been spent retconning it into something grander than it actually was.

However, there's some amazing interactive fiction out there; atmospheric, tight writing. Totally immersive story. Brain-wrenching puzzles. It'd be great to read / play these on a Kindle. Some of my favourites:

• Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin - possibly the most unreliable narrator ever. See how long it takes you to work out what's really happening.
• Varicella by Adam Cadre - renaissance period intrigue.
• Anchorhead by Michael S. Gentry - Lovecraftian horror.
• A Bear's Night Out by David Dyle - adorable kid's story

Other couple I like are A Day for Soft Food (have you ever wanted to roleplay as a cat?) and Trinity (a mix of high fantasy and nuclear history)

I'd heartily recommend Adam Cadre's "Photopia". It's one of the most affecting pieces of fiction of any time I've ever read. http://adamcadre.ac/if.html

"Before the Eternal September, but after the Great Renaming, I learned about sex on Usenet."

No need to read any further...

Wow! When I come to think about it, that actually sounds like a winning Lyttle Lytton entry.

This has, of course, already happened.

As artists can't even agree on what is and isn't art when they're talking about art, it's unlikely we'll come to an agreement with games, but even if the vast majority of games are just there to be popular and fun, there will always be the Frank Millers and others who aren't as popular, but continue to create not because they just want the money, but because they want to actually create something artistic (choose some definition of art: your choice). Even if they don't sell as much, people have a natural inclination to search for what they consider beautiful, and that will always attract a decent amount to the good stuff, even if the rest has no more plot than Packman (even if they're fun).

As a medium, though, games actually have a vast amount of untapped potential, because they are so different from movies or books or paintings. When you start up Half-Life, you are IMMEDIATELY Gordon Freeman. When people talk to you, you have a direct connection to them and you're a part of things. You aren't just reading, "'...', said Gordon blankly." You get to be Gordon... err... blankly '...'ing. In a way, this is similar to interactive fiction. Check out Adam Cadre's IF for instance, which makes extensive use of using an immediate connection as a player to shape perspective. Photopia is an excellent example. It's a game with virtually no real gameplay, but it tells a story in a way no book or movie could. I think video games in general have this same potential. This potential is around storytelling and communicating ideas and emotions in a different, direct way than anything else - through experience rather than empathy or capturing a single moment. Whether it's art or not is irrelevant, though personally, I'd say that the quality and ability to communicate ideas and emotions is probably pretty important in the definition of art.

I think the term you're looking at to satisfy #1, #2, and #3 is "interactive fiction." Players of pedantic text adventures may not look down on others, but I assure you, connoisseurs of interactive fiction, of the literary type produced by Adam Cadre , Emily Short , and Zarf , among others, most likely look down on all other "gamers," and are probably scorned in kind by WoW players! And not nobody is selling IF at Wal-Mart...

Agreed; Photopia (http://www.adamcadre.ac/, then go to 'Interactive Fiction') is fantastic - without trying to give too much away, you definitely can't stop the tragedy, no matter how hard you try. Really moving, from start to finish. Adam is very good at sculpting a believable character.

The Hitch-Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy is the only one of Infocom's titles that I ever completed, and it took me a decade to do, thanks to its' non-obvious puzzle design. Loved it to bits though. Don't play it unless you like bashing your head off the wall (or drinking more than three Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters; whichever hurts more).

I got HL2 Episode 1 today, and I think it is quite inspired for this reason. Absolute max with a game for me is an hour once or twice a week if I'm lucky. Judging from the hour I put in today, Episode One is extremely polished, immersive, and it doesn't overreach, which lets the devs get all kinds of tiny little things right. And, happily, it won't take me 6 months to play through with my current schedule. I'd much rather play one excellent, short game every three or four months than spend all my free time just to complete a damn game. I loved Planescape Torment but I played that one for the better part of a year.

Another good game if you like interactive fiction is Phototopia. It plays through in under two hours and is deeply moving and artful -- like Planescape and Grim Fandango, it is art. Game developers and designers want more stuff in their games -- more explosions, longer sequences, etc. I want something that will be thought-provoking, moving, and not take over my life to have those experiences.

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The View From The Ground : Internet citizen journalism from the inner city

If reading about this has started you jonesin' for the good ol' days, you can always play interactive fiction.

It's like Zork, except literary. I heartily recommend anything by Adam Cadre, especially Photopia (actually made me cry - it's an amazing piece of art) and Shrapnel.

Myself, I reccomend Return to Ditch Day and The Plant (as well as Adam Cadre's works.)

Anyone else played these?

Play the IFF game 'Photopia' now. It's moving, you will be moved.

Seriously.

Here, have a link to the game even.

I recommend the Lyttle Lytton contest. The entries there are usually funnier, IMO.

http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html

In 3010, the potatoes triumphed.

John, surfing, said to his mother, surfing beside him, "How do you like surfing?"

Do yourself a favor, follow these links, play these short (one or two hours) games.

Galatea

Photopia

The very talented Adam Cadre and Andrew Plotkin have a small hack on making infocom games. It's one of the most precise introductions to a programming language I've ever seen.

Best story ever? It was great, but not that great. It is my favorite Ultima game though, although I flipflop between it and 7.

Check out Grim Fandango by Lucasarts. Or the excellent (and free!) text adventure game Photopia .

Oh yes! Photopia! Great stuff. I've never been a great fan of interactive fiction (mainly because Zork and its sequels constantly stumped me when I played them on the venerable C64), but Photopia was truly an experience. I remember getting the chills when I finished it.

The great thing about Photopia is that for one, its puzzles are always obvious. So much so, that most of the time they don't even classify as traditional IF puzzles. There are some gems, however. Especially the IF mainstay, a maze, is done simply beautifully. Photopia focuses completely on story and that is a Good Thing by all accounts.

Another great (but very different) piece of IF is Winchester's Nightmare by Nick Montfort. I also enjoyed Narcolepsy (also by Adam Cadre and winner of the 2003 XYZZY award for best writing), although I never finished it.

A must run: Photopia (Winner 1998) http://adamcadre.ac/photopia.html - not another D&D type adventure, that's for sure

• I-0 (Interstate Zero)
• Lock & Key
• 9:05
• Photopia
• Textfire Golf

Adam Cadre's stuff is pretty cool. IF isn't dead, not by a long shot.

Adam Cadre's Photopia is one of only two works (the other is Kipling's The Light That Failed) which has ever made me cry when first I read it. An absolutely amazing example of art: it is a must for anyone who considers himself a student.

A few of my favourite games took about an hour or three to play through and had very little replay value. Still they left an impression not unlike that of leaving a movie theatre after a particularly impressive film. (Of course, none of these games are on the list as they're sort of ...under the radar for most.)

ICO is, of course, an excellent example and is probably one of the best modern exhibits of emotion in games MSNBC could have used (too bad they robbed it of that by spoiling the rather poignant ending). I like that someone mentioned KOTOR, as that probably consisted of the most cinematic emotional attachment I've ever experienced in a game (and most certainly Episode I & II).

Still, I love how these articles act as if this is something new. Likewise, the creater of Facade and Warren Spector, both of whom should have known better. In fact, as good as Deus Ex and System Shock were, all of Spector's work pales in comparison to what I experienced in Grim Fandango (and I'll save you the MSNBC treatment and not give away the ending). Facade sounds remarkably like Space Bar to me, only not in space or talking to three headed aliens, but the one-act emotional play is definitely borrowed, even if unknowingly. Of course, as always Planescape: Torment gets no love, even though it do created emotional attachments but within the context of a deceptively standard fare RPG.

More recently, interactive fiction (a fancy phrase for text adventure) has evolved to produce some amazingly emotional games as of late. After finishing the 30 minute Photopia, I sat in a daze for several minutes and then started to (I feel vulnerable here) cry. Easily the most intense emotional experience I've had playing a game, and certainly on the same level, in my opinion, as great literature.

Secondly, I think ICO represents Japan's open acceptance of emotions in games. While I rarely connect with the Japanese emotional experience as I did with ICO, this is most likely due to cultural nuances than my own fault, and there are exceptions. I hesitate to say it as it's a strong statement to use, but playing the fifth level of REZ was about as emotionally religious of an experience I think a video game could ever create. Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, even Metal Gear Solid; all these are representative that while I may not necessarily "get it," the Japanese obviously do not shy away from emotion in games like Americans do. Likewise, Europeans don't seem to have a problem with emotion. The potent Beyond Good & Evil, while I have yet to finish it, is shaping up that way as well, and Prince of Persia (which might as well have been European) attempts something similar, albeit a little less concentrated. I would assert that American gameplay, in either its intentional or non-intentional attempt at open-ended gameplay (from GTA to Battlefield 1942), is generally on a steady course of avoiding emotions, or relying on violence to propogate them. Miyamoto (Mario, Zelda) has made note in multiple interviews of Americans' over-reliance on violence to create emotion. He's right. Of course, this ought not be surprising when American industry leaders like Carmack decry story in video gaming every chance they get.

Finally, as a postscript I'm not entirely sure MSNBC ought to be asking Spector anyway. Oh, yeah, I think he's a gaming god like anyone else, and that moment in System Shock 2 when you walk into the room . . . (oh wait, I'm not MSNBC). But the latest incarnation of Deus Ex was about as emotionally involving as the default Windows XP screensaver. Perhaps he'll redeem himself with Thief III?

Well, to be honest, your examples reflect precisely what I dislike about NetHack, its arbitariness. How do you learn any of this stuff other than trial and error? Diablo has at least occassional attempts to produce a gameworld that makes sense, rather than just being a random and incomprehensible series of 'hacks'.

Baldur's Gate or Deus Ex are, to my mind, much more immersive than either NetHack or Diablo, not primarily because of the graphics, but because it's possible to do well in these games by thinking like a participant in the game world, rather than as an external player of the game. Much of the best recent Interactive Fiction is immersive for similar reasons, and obviously in the case of IF, the immersiveness isn't to do with the graphics. Adam Cadre's I-0 is a good example.

I'm aware that some people like the NetHack style of gameplay, but frankly, they're wrong. More to the point, though, I do think the NetHack style, whether good or bad, is distinctly old-fashioned. Merely improving the graphics won't make the game more appealing to those who want a more modern style of gameplay, which seemed to be the suggestion being made by the guy I was originally replying to.

Oh, BTW:

GENOCIDE! Woot!

I can't help but think that's going to be quoted out-of-context against you, one of these days.

Somehow, I forgot some URLs. Here are Adam Cadre's games, and Emily Short's ones (scroll down a bit).

Actually, there are plenty of "Infocom-like" games still being made, though the games I'm talking about range from the traditional to the not so traditional.

If you're interested in finding out more, I'd suggest reading reviews of recent text adventures from a site or two and then downloading the games from the Interactive Fiction Archive.

Here are a few modern, independently-written Interactive Fiction games that match or beat anything Infocom has produced:

Photopia (scroll down)
Metamorphoses
For a Change
Babel
Worlds Apart

For lots more, head over to The Best of IF.

Check out the Lyttle Lytton Contest, where the objective is to produce the worst beginning sentence using a maximum of 25 words. The entries can't use long streams of overblown descriptions and metaphors, so they're terrible in new and creative ways.

Wow... they've created a Photopia!

Why are people posting fake adventure scripts that read like ADVENT, or tearfully reminiscing about playing Infocom games or reading adventure books?

The IF contest isn't about paying homage to old classics, it's about writing new ones. Play Photopia. Play Spider and Web. These are new styles, new ideas, new puzzles. Don't judge these games on 1980s commercial game merits; they're not month-long adventures with arcane puzzles to keep you going; They're short stories packed with innovation. Well, at least the good ones are. And it's your job to find those good ones and vote for them.

Single-player FPSes are puzzles that are so intricately molded that you can't tell they are puzzles.

I loved The Diamond Age, prolly because I like interactive fiction and it did it so well. The idea of phyles was also excellent, and the nanotechnology was cool, but some of the body-mods were just stupid. Skull-guns? Rumour has it Stephenson cut some of Purple's chapters dealing with sexuality... Adam Cadre who made the wonder piece of IF, Photopia, made a purple scene because of that cut. BTW, Adam just released a new game, and it's a doozie. But in the end, the ending was way to rushed and unexplained though I loved the Mouse Army, and the drummers, omigod, what a Beowulf cluster!