For about 10 years, I have been teaching Inform to students (mostly English majors) in courses that combine writing with media production. I start them off with HTML and CSS (just to get them familiar with the level of accuracy required of any kind of coding). I've also taught Flash, but this fall I will probably drop it to make more room for Scratch.
The point is not to make these English majors into professional programmers, but rather to familiarize them with fundamental processes such as iteration, versioning, scaling, beta-testing. To someone who has never written a computer program, even very simple concepts such as if-then statements and variables can be completely baffling. I notice that students who play old-school text adventure games are at first very unforgiving about the limitations of the parser, but after they've programmed their own short games, and watched their beta-testers come up with reasonable vocabulary words that they expected the programmer to have implemented, students are more ready to appreciate when a text-adventure author has done a good job anticipating the user's actions. This is a lesson that, I hope, translates to their encounters with other interfaces, making them more willing to take beta-testing seriously, in the future, when they might be writing the copy for team that includes programmers.
I agree that the lack of information and agency helps the player bond with the PC. Don't forget, though, the effect of Breen delivering his propaganda speech, and the little vignettes like the woman waiting for her husband, or the guy babbling in the train station. Those are atoms of narrative that do advance the story, chiefly by setting the scene, thereby providing a context for the action that follows.
Breen's narrative doesn't so much tell the story as give us a story to work against, but it does play an important part in establishing the ethos of the world your'e about to explore.
They would not however be computer games as there isn't generally an AI involved. I'm not sure if there are any, at least of the older generation, that do include a computer player.
Huh? Will Crowther's original Adventure (c. 1975) included dwarves that wandered through the maze and initiated combat. Don Woods expanded Adventure and released it (1977) in a form that included a pirate whose behavior was a little more complex. The thief of Dungeon/Zork (1977) is more complex still. They most definitely interacted with the player and moved through the shared environment, using instructions in the form of code executed by a computer. The command line parser definitely required a computer to work.
You can see the source code for Crowther's original Adventure discussed here:
Early text games were often played on printer terminals, so the "glass teletype" is not really the defining factor here. I remember going through reams and reams of paper in the computer room in the early/mid 80s.
Someone in another thread noted that kids who haven't yet had Algebra may not be ready for complex programming. I agree. If you're not actually planning to prepare these kids for life as code monkeys, and you're just trying to introduce them to procedural thinking, I'd suggest MIT's Scratch.
It's sort of like Flash for kids, with a modular interface so that kids never see an error message. If you try to put a number in a slot where the syntax demands an operator, the number will just bounce out of the line -- it won't fit. All the elements have shapes that plug in only a certain way. The Scratch website has screencast tutorials (with cute kids narrating them) and a community for sharing creations.
Unlike Mindstorms, Scratch is free.
I've taught my own son when he was 9 and 10, using Just BASIC (we created a simple Choose Your Own Adventure story) and Scratch (he created a catch-and-avoid game).
I have also taught college English majors the fundamentals of computer programming, using Inform 7 (a relatively new developing environment for creating classic text-adventure games).
I should think that most kids in your target age group would get very excited by making their own mods, which could be a gateway into teaching them actual coding.
That was the Crowther-Woods version that used to be on the Unix distribution, not Crowther's original, which as far as I know never left Woods's student account (until now).
This is actually a good question, and you're not alone. The interest is historical and cultural.
Crowther and Woods are fortunately both still with us, but this quote from T.S. Eliot applies: "Some one said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know."
Crowther's original has often been inaccurately described as a simulation, and Woods has been credited with turning a realistic textual map into a game. So for one thing, analyzing this code lets us correct a widely circulated error. It proves that Crowther's original already was a game, with magic, simple puzzles, basic combat, and humor.
Modern day literary historians often analyze differences between an author's hand-written manuscript and the published book. Their goal isn't to learn how to write better, cheaper, or faster books... I have nothing against the kind of research that does aim to create better, cheaper, or faster processes, and I am grateful that the world is full of people who put their creative energies into technological innovation.
Colossal Cave Adventure was something new -- a huge leap, in terms of concept and technical design, from Hunt the Wumpus or ELIZA and other similar programs. Computer games and digital culture in general are starting to draw serious attention from scholars who want to study and preserve digital artifacts so that future historians will be able to study them (which is no easy feat, given the rate at which storage media become obsolete or degrade).
Imagine if the original of the Mona Lisa were lost, and we could only study it through "Mona and Fred Lisa," a more popular painting that was made by someone who expanded on DaVinci's original vision? Or if none of Henry Ford's Model T's existed -- anywhere -- and our knowledge of the history of Ford's automotive assembly line depended on other models? We would have an incomplete picture of the history that led us to where we are.
Crowther used the tools that were available to him at the time, and understanding his achievement (and fully appreciating our progress since then) requires understanding the constraints under which he worked his creative magic.
Crowther also had adult playtesters, including his sister (who asked for a cheat code, leading to the invention of "XYZZY") and his colleagues at BBN. One of the vocabulary words it recognizes is "f*ck". Woods added the scoring and reincarnation system, a timer, and the game's conclusion. But Crowther's version had treasures, simple puzzles, basic combat, and magic (the crystal bridge, teleportation). Crowther's version was definitely a game. It's all in the Digital Humanities Quarterly article.
There are also photos of the inside of the real Colossal Cave, including photos of what's left of the famous brick building (just a foundation, sadly) the famous rock with a Y2 on it, and even a rusty axe head and an iron rod.
Nothing against Jennifer Ferris, the author of the Virginia Tech "article," but she was an undergraduate student in an honors seminar. Note the URL. Hardly a credible source. Several years ago I e-mailed her professor to try to get in touch with her, but never got a response.
This 1997 Nurseweek/Healthweek article (http://www.nurseweek.com/features/97-8/iadct.html ) does a very good job tracing the origin of the term "Internet Addition Disorder," which explains the term originated with a joke post (http://web.urz.uni-heidelberg.de/Netzdienste/anle itung/wwwtips/8/addict.html) by psychologist Ivan Goldberg, who was trying to point out that it's too easy to call anthing an addiction. According to the Nurseweek article: "I don't think Internet addiction disorder exists any more than tennis addictive disorder, bingo addictive disorder, and TV addictive disorder exist. People can overdo anything. To call it a disorder is an error," Goldberg said.
One of the earliest proponents of Internet Addiction Disorder is Dr. Kimberly Young, whose website, netaddiction.com, will be happy to sell you books and tapes to cure you of this malady. Until recently, her academic home page at http://www.pitt.edu/~ksy/ used to forward people directly to netaddiction.com. (Now it gives an error message, but you can see for yourself what the Wayback Machine has in its archives. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.pitt.edu/~ ksy/ )
Now, just becuase Dr. Goldberg made a joke about Internet Addiction Disorder doesn't mean that such a thing doesn't exist, and just because Dr. Young wants to sell books and tapes about the malady she discovered doesn't mean she's doing anything wrong, but if Ms. Ferriss's undergraduate honors paper (published on the chemistry department's website) is the best resource a Slashdot post can come up with to support an alleged psychological problem, then this issue is more than controversial.
It seems to me that some of the people who're writing about this issue probably haven't spent enough time on the internet yet.
I'm not sure the choices/options distinction is very useful, but you are right that authors of traditional fiction focus on a sequence of events that make the best story. But the best IF authors don't try to widen their world in order to permit every possible action... instead, they craft "refusal messages" that aren't stark, immersion-killing "You can't do that!" but that instead reveal character, motivation, help flesh out the back story, etc., all the while pushing the player towards that small subset of actions that have been implemented in such a way that when performed they permit the story to advance.
I don't think that the ability to do any and every plausible action will make IF better... IF is a hybrid between story and game, and the more freedom the player has, the less story there can be. But some enjoyable works of IF make very little pretense at having a story. Nick Motfort's "Ad Verbum" is a collection of word puzzles, wrapped into a kind of reverse treasure hunt.
There are other variables, too -- humor, dialog, an interesting world to explore, an engaging PC. All these things can make up for a game that only permits a small subset of possible player actions.
The annual contest hosted by XYZZY News has eight or ten categories "Best Writing," "Best Puzzles," etc., that illustrate the fact that what one IF fan thinks makes for a "good" story may not be another IF player's cup of tea.
At any rate, an IF author who wants to tell a story has to work hard to make the player WANT to choose those avenues that will advance the story. That's not the same thing as brute force coding that attempts to simulate the real world.
I'm an English professor who teaches interactive fiction in my classes whenver I can.
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if
In the 80s, some librarians and middle-school teachers embraced IF as a way to get kids interested in reading. That's fine with me, but I prefer to look at IF as a genre of its own, with its own aesthetics and critial vocabulary.
Lousville Debugger, would you happen to know where I can find pictures of the original well house, slit in stream, grate, and other features described in the game? I'm giving a conference paper next week on "Adventure" and would love to hear from you...
The classic bodice-ripper is "Plundered Hearts" (http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?name=Plunde red+Hearts) though Emily Short recently hosted a "SmoochieComp" (Valentine's day IF authoring competition -- http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/smoochie.htm ) and "SwashComp" (for swashbulcklers -- http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/Swash.html).
No medium is unconstrained, so pointing out that IF is constrained is perhaps missing the point. From a certain perspective, what you call constraints in IF can be seen as freedoms. The IF designer is *not* constrained by needing a team of 3D artists, scriptwriters, mo-cap actors, and voice actors in order to realize a particular vision. Whether the effort required (on behalf of the designer and the player) is worth the aesthetic payoff is a matter of personal taste. It's clear there isn't an audience willing to pay for text adventure games -- I've got no delusions in that area. But that doesn't nullify the cultural value of the genre.
Within the aesthetics of IF, if a puzzle really is random, it's *not* considered a good puzzle, but there are some games that people play only for the puzzles, because the puzzles are devious enough, clever enough, or maddening enough that they keep their interest. Even fans of IF hate gratuitous mazes and "guess-the-verb" problems (which are treated as bugs, not puzzles).
Have you seen some recent IF? Adam Cadre's "Photopia" is the canonical example for "Gosh, look how far IF has come," in that it's a relatively easy game (you might get stuck in a few places, but that's what walkthroughs are for) with a strong storyline; it's not just a good story divided up into chunks, it uses the IF medium to its advantage; when I finished it for the first time, I sat there, stunned, and then immeditely restarted from the beginning to see what kind of power I could wield over the outcome. The degree of power that the author granted me was an important part of the "message" of the story, and it fit perfectly with the medium. The same author's "9:05" plays with the notion of "winning" -- but the ending in which your NPC ends up the best is completely unsatisfying, and the ending in which your NPC ends up in deep trouble is deeply satisfying (in a creepy way). Emily Short's "Galatea" is an NPC portrait; the conversation interface won't win any Loebner prizes, but it's a good attempt to push the boundaries of the "ask X about Y" syntax for conversing with an NPC.
I recommend that you take a look at recent winners of the XYZZY Awards -- games are selected on the basis of puzzles, NPCs, setting, writing, and a half dozen other specific categories. The rethinking that you call for is already underway.
http://www.wurb.com/if/award/3
(The 2003 XYZZYs will be announced this Saturday.)
Given the external constraints forced upon early game designers, in the form of cruel memory restrictions, blocky graphics, atrocious sound, and 30 or so competing platforms, the text genre was actually freeing -- it was easily portable, for one thing; for another, typing into a command line interface that may or may not understand what you wanted to do was a common activity -- that was pretty much how you used a computer.
The term "interactive fiction" historically emphaiszed that an text adventure game was a form of story in which you participated; while the stories weren't always compelling, and while narrative is only one of many components of contemporary commercial games, if the story is good, an IF player won't mind giving up some freedom in order to see the narrative play itself out the way the designer intended it.
Modern game design techniques wouldn't exist -- that is, they wouldn't be modern -- if they didn't have older techniques to build off of (and, when appropriate, reject).
That's a good one... Scott Adams tells this story about "SCR* BEAR"... I've posted an.mp3 of him telling this story at an academic panel a couple years ago...
Well, I got a fan letter in that just had my whole company rolling in the aisles. It said:
We got to that bear on the ledge. We tried giving it the honey and he ate it up and boy that was a treasure and that was no good. So we reloaded the saved game and we went back to that bear. We pushed that bear, we prodded that bear, we tickled that bear, we have gotten so upset with that bear we could get nowhere.
Now the following is rated PG-13 so if you don't want to hear it, please close your ears. Ok. Continuing..
So we finally said "Screw the bear!!" And the game replied, "The bear is so startled he falls off the ledge!"
I have used Dragan Naturally Speaking to play interactive fiction. I first fed in a transcript of a complete game session, to give the speech-recognition software an edge. It worked fairly well, though getting the software to read only the new text that appears on the screen (rather than starting from the top) would involve some changes to the game interpreter. A few years ago, Scott Adams updated his classic gaming engine with a scrolling feature that would probably lend itself well to screen readers.
If you're serious about looking into games for the visually impaired, try http://www.audysseymagazine.org/
For an audience that is more familiar with literature than computer games, I use "interactive fiction," emphasizing that the game uses blocks of prose to describe events and things, but that it reacts to your input. For an audience familiar with computers, "text adventure" or "adventure game" is usually enough.
Some contemporary offerings aren't "adventures" -- they are character studies, one-room mysteries, flashbacks, or puzzle-based wordplay. To call them all "adventures" is limiting. Calling it "text-parser-based interactive fiction" is probalby more accurate, but unwieldy. A good deal of classic commercial games included both a text parser and graphics, so "text" isn't always the defining factor.
Some academics use the term "interactive fiction" to describe literary hypertext. And some "interactive fiction" is actually very linear, giving only the illusion of player agency. So even the "preferred" term is imperfect.
I'm not aware of any fan or designer of IF who would be upset if someone said, "Hey, is that an adventure game you're playing?" Take "politcally correct" in the Slashdot article as a lighthearted poke, nothing serious.
If you post your comment on rec.arts.int-fiction, I'm sure you'll get a good response. The number one feature where AI would be useful would be in improving the parser's recognition of typed commands. People are so used to text-messaging each other that the parser's frequent "I didn't understand that" gets in the way of their immersion in the game, to an extent that wasn't a problem back when all computer users were used to the command-line interface.
Meanwhile, Stephen Granade's brief article on why IF doesn't need AI will be a good start.
"Too bad that they seemed to have forgotten to invite a few developers."
While I don't know anything about the papers that weren't accepted, I'm sure that if developers had submitted paper proposals that fit the goals of the conference organizers, those developers would have been invited to present their papers at the conference.
"Perhaps the academics would be better served by going to the Game Developers Conference two weeks later and learn a thing or to."
1) If a scientist who studies the mating habits has never actually mated with a rhinoceros, does that discount all of his or her research? 2) I agree that there is much to learn at a game developer's conference, but such conferences tend to look forward, at what might be; some scholarship has to look backwards, at what actually happened, and what did not. 3) I think the world is big enough for game developers to develop new games (and methods and terminology and communities) and for game studiers to study those games and their effect on culture at large (using their own methods and terminology and commiunities).
Academics are certainly behind in examining computer gaming, but surely you agree that it's better to light one candle than curse the darkness.... or be eaten by grues.
Immunology is the study of the complex and sophisticated immune system. The immune system is a network of cells and organs that work together to defend the body against attacks by "foreign" invaders or germs. The body provides an excellent environment for germs. When they do break into a system, it is the immune system's job to keep them out or to seek and destroy them.
Now, see this definition, from the amazingly acronym'd AAAAI, where the I stands for "immunology":
Immunology is the study of the complex and sophisticated immune system. The immune system is a network of cells and organs that work together to defend the body against attacks by "foreign" invaders or germs. Our body is susceptible to invasion from germs. When the germs do break into the body, it is the immune system's job to keep them out or to seek and destroy them.
In 1979, someone named Kevin MacKenzie suggested the symbol -) for "tongue in cheek". It's not a "smiley", of course, but it serves the same function. I've archived the exchange that included the post: http://www.uwec.edu/jerzdg/English309/emoticon.txt
The 1920 Czech play, _Rossum's Universal Robots_ features the creation of Robots that take over the world. It's the source of what has become a science-fiction cliche.
Oddly enough, the Robots in the original play were biological.
On DS9, Jake Sisko's was sometimes shown writing stories and articles on a PADD. I seem to remember a scene in which his father has picked up a PADD, and is commenting on Jake's writing.
I noticed that Jake was dragging a stylus across the screen of the prop, as if he was highlighting text, and then writing in a little square space on the surface of the PADD, much like I do when I work with my palm computer. (So was the science fiction technology imitating real life in this case?)
Ray Bradbury's stories predicted VR and the decadent state of TV news. E.M. Forster, writing almost a hundred years ago, imagined a world in which people stayed at home in ergonomic pods, communicating remotely with a vast community of strangers.
Ray Bradybury's short story, "The Veldt," is about parents who worry that their children are spending too much time in a holodeck-style entertainment room. (OK, the holodeck is still science fiction, but Bradbury aptly defines the anti-videogames suburban hysteria that crops up in the media from time to time.)
His 1953 novel _Fahrenheit 451_ features interactive talk shows and soap operas, projected on wall-sized TV screens. It describe the protagonist's wife obsessing about upgrading her equipment (buying an attachment that will make it look like characters in the TV shows are speaking her name, thus including her in the experience). He also predicted O.J.-style helocopter chases. From a Salon interview with Bradbury:
One "Fahrenheit 451" prediction was the technological evolution, and moral devolution, of television news. In the novel, a fireman protagonist accused of hiding illegal books is pursued by a carnivorous news media seeking to satiate the blood lust of home viewers. As the fireman flees down the street, chased by helicopters, he sees himself through his neighbors' windows, running on their television screens.
The day after news helicopters pursued O.J. Simpson fleeing in a Ford Bronco, a New York Times columnist noted that the chase was the "real-life fulfillment" of "Fahrenheit 451."
I'm saving the best for last...
E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" describes a future civilization in which all but the lowest classes associate with each other chiefly via long-distance communications devices, rather than in person. In this passage, a woman has just spent three minutes disconnected from the network in order to speak privately to her son. She logs back on (so to speak), and is assaulted by a flood of incoming messages.
Vashanti's next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one"s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? - say this day month.
To most of these questions she replied with irritation - a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one-that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and primæval as were the methods of I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she yet felt (she said) that study of them might repay the musicians of today: they had freshness; they had, above all, ideas. Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately. Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.
Slashdot Mirror
For about 10 years, I have been teaching Inform to students (mostly English majors) in courses that combine writing with media production. I start them off with HTML and CSS (just to get them familiar with the level of accuracy required of any kind of coding). I've also taught Flash, but this fall I will probably drop it to make more room for Scratch.
The point is not to make these English majors into professional programmers, but rather to familiarize them with fundamental processes such as iteration, versioning, scaling, beta-testing. To someone who has never written a computer program, even very simple concepts such as if-then statements and variables can be completely baffling. I notice that students who play old-school text adventure games are at first very unforgiving about the limitations of the parser, but after they've programmed their own short games, and watched their beta-testers come up with reasonable vocabulary words that they expected the programmer to have implemented, students are more ready to appreciate when a text-adventure author has done a good job anticipating the user's actions. This is a lesson that, I hope, translates to their encounters with other interfaces, making them more willing to take beta-testing seriously, in the future, when they might be writing the copy for team that includes programmers.
I agree that the lack of information and agency helps the player bond with the PC. Don't forget, though, the effect of Breen delivering his propaganda speech, and the little vignettes like the woman waiting for her husband, or the guy babbling in the train station. Those are atoms of narrative that do advance the story, chiefly by setting the scene, thereby providing a context for the action that follows.
Breen's narrative doesn't so much tell the story as give us a story to work against, but it does play an important part in establishing the ethos of the world your'e about to explore.
Regarding older text games:
They would not however be computer games as there isn't generally an AI involved. I'm not sure if there are any, at least of the older generation, that do include a computer player.
Huh? Will Crowther's original Adventure (c. 1975) included dwarves that wandered through the maze and initiated combat. Don Woods expanded Adventure and released it (1977) in a form that included a pirate whose behavior was a little more complex. The thief of Dungeon/Zork (1977) is more complex still. They most definitely interacted with the player and moved through the shared environment, using instructions in the form of code executed by a computer. The command line parser definitely required a computer to work.
You can see the source code for Crowther's original Adventure discussed here:
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/14/011230&from=rss
Early text games were often played on printer terminals, so the "glass teletype" is not really the defining factor here. I remember going through reams and reams of paper in the computer room in the early/mid 80s.
Someone in another thread noted that kids who haven't yet had Algebra may not be ready for complex programming. I agree. If you're not actually planning to prepare these kids for life as code monkeys, and you're just trying to introduce them to procedural thinking, I'd suggest MIT's Scratch.
http://scratch.mit.edu/
It's sort of like Flash for kids, with a modular interface so that kids never see an error message. If you try to put a number in a slot where the syntax demands an operator, the number will just bounce out of the line -- it won't fit. All the elements have shapes that plug in only a certain way. The Scratch website has screencast tutorials (with cute kids narrating them) and a community for sharing creations.
Unlike Mindstorms, Scratch is free.
I've taught my own son when he was 9 and 10, using Just BASIC (we created a simple Choose Your Own Adventure story) and Scratch (he created a catch-and-avoid game).
I have also taught college English majors the fundamentals of computer programming, using Inform 7 (a relatively new developing environment for creating classic text-adventure games).
I should think that most kids in your target age group would get very excited by making their own mods, which could be a gateway into teaching them actual coding.
That was the Crowther-Woods version that used to be on the Unix distribution, not Crowther's original, which as far as I know never left Woods's student account (until now).
This is actually a good question, and you're not alone. The interest is historical and cultural.
Crowther and Woods are fortunately both still with us, but this quote from T.S. Eliot applies: "Some one said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know."
Crowther's original has often been inaccurately described as a simulation, and Woods has been credited with turning a realistic textual map into a game. So for one thing, analyzing this code lets us correct a widely circulated error. It proves that Crowther's original already was a game, with magic, simple puzzles, basic combat, and humor.
Modern day literary historians often analyze differences between an author's hand-written manuscript and the published book. Their goal isn't to learn how to write better, cheaper, or faster books... I have nothing against the kind of research that does aim to create better, cheaper, or faster processes, and I am grateful that the world is full of people who put their creative energies into technological innovation.
Colossal Cave Adventure was something new -- a huge leap, in terms of concept and technical design, from Hunt the Wumpus or ELIZA and other similar programs. Computer games and digital culture in general are starting to draw serious attention from scholars who want to study and preserve digital artifacts so that future historians will be able to study them (which is no easy feat, given the rate at which storage media become obsolete or degrade).
Imagine if the original of the Mona Lisa were lost, and we could only study it through "Mona and Fred Lisa," a more popular painting that was made by someone who expanded on DaVinci's original vision? Or if none of Henry Ford's Model T's existed -- anywhere -- and our knowledge of the history of Ford's automotive assembly line depended on other models? We would have an incomplete picture of the history that led us to where we are.
Crowther used the tools that were available to him at the time, and understanding his achievement (and fully appreciating our progress since then) requires understanding the constraints under which he worked his creative magic.
Crowther also had adult playtesters, including his sister (who asked for a cheat code, leading to the invention of "XYZZY") and his colleagues at BBN. One of the vocabulary words it recognizes is "f*ck". Woods added the scoring and reincarnation system, a timer, and the game's conclusion. But Crowther's version had treasures, simple puzzles, basic combat, and magic (the crystal bridge, teleportation). Crowther's version was definitely a game. It's all in the Digital Humanities Quarterly article.
Crowther's original was a game, and you can play it for yourself. Matthew Russoto tweaked the recovered source code so that it will compile under g77.
... and David Kinder published a Windows executable.
d v_crowther_win.zip
e s/default/dhq/vol/001/2/000009.html
0 009.html
http://www.russotto.net/~russotto/ADVENT/
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/unprocessed/a
That file will move eventually... you will probably be able to find it from here:
http://www.wurb.com/if/person/2
There are also photos of the inside of the real Colossal Cave, including photos of what's left of the famous brick building (just a foundation, sadly) the famous rock with a Y2 on it, and even a rusty axe head and an iron rod.
http://brain.lis.uiuc.edu:2323/opencms/export/sit
or
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/00
Nothing against Jennifer Ferris, the author of the Virginia Tech "article," but she was an undergraduate student in an honors seminar. Note the URL. Hardly a credible source. Several years ago I e-mailed her professor to try to get in touch with her, but never got a response.
l ) does a very good job tracing the origin of the term "Internet Addition Disorder," which explains the term originated with a joke post (http://web.urz.uni-heidelberg.de/Netzdienste/anle itung/wwwtips/8/addict.html) by psychologist Ivan Goldberg, who was trying to point out that it's too easy to call anthing an addiction. According to the Nurseweek article: "I don't think Internet addiction disorder exists any more than tennis addictive disorder, bingo addictive disorder, and TV addictive disorder exist. People can overdo anything. To call it a disorder is an error," Goldberg said.
~ ksy/ )
This 1997 Nurseweek/Healthweek article (http://www.nurseweek.com/features/97-8/iadct.htm
One of the earliest proponents of Internet Addiction Disorder is Dr. Kimberly Young, whose website, netaddiction.com, will be happy to sell you books and tapes to cure you of this malady. Until recently, her academic home page at http://www.pitt.edu/~ksy/ used to forward people directly to netaddiction.com. (Now it gives an error message, but you can see for yourself what the Wayback Machine has in its archives. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.pitt.edu/
Now, just becuase Dr. Goldberg made a joke about Internet Addiction Disorder doesn't mean that such a thing doesn't exist, and just because Dr. Young wants to sell books and tapes about the malady she discovered doesn't mean she's doing anything wrong, but if Ms. Ferriss's undergraduate honors paper (published on the chemistry department's website) is the best resource a Slashdot post can come up with to support an alleged psychological problem, then this issue is more than controversial.
It seems to me that some of the people who're writing about this issue probably haven't spent enough time on the internet yet.
I'm not sure the choices/options distinction is very useful, but you are right that authors of traditional fiction focus on a sequence of events that make the best story. But the best IF authors don't try to widen their world in order to permit every possible action... instead, they craft "refusal messages" that aren't stark, immersion-killing "You can't do that!" but that instead reveal character, motivation, help flesh out the back story, etc., all the while pushing the player towards that small subset of actions that have been implemented in such a way that when performed they permit the story to advance.
I don't think that the ability to do any and every plausible action will make IF better... IF is a hybrid between story and game, and the more freedom the player has, the less story there can be. But some enjoyable works of IF make very little pretense at having a story. Nick Motfort's "Ad Verbum" is a collection of word puzzles, wrapped into a kind of reverse treasure hunt.
There are other variables, too -- humor, dialog, an interesting world to explore, an engaging PC. All these things can make up for a game that only permits a small subset of possible player actions.
The annual contest hosted by XYZZY News has eight or ten categories "Best Writing," "Best Puzzles," etc., that illustrate the fact that what one IF fan thinks makes for a "good" story may not be another IF player's cup of tea.
At any rate, an IF author who wants to tell a story has to work hard to make the player WANT to choose those avenues that will advance the story. That's not the same thing as brute force coding that attempts to simulate the real world.
I'm an English professor who teaches interactive fiction in my classes whenver I can.
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if
In the 80s, some librarians and middle-school teachers embraced IF as a way to get kids interested in reading. That's fine with me, but I prefer to look at IF as a genre of its own, with its own aesthetics and critial vocabulary.
Lousville Debugger, would you happen to know where I can find pictures of the original well house, slit in stream, grate, and other features described in the game? I'm giving a conference paper next week on "Adventure" and would love to hear from you...
The classic bodice-ripper is "Plundered Hearts" (http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?name=Plunde red+Hearts) though Emily Short recently hosted a "SmoochieComp" (Valentine's day IF authoring competition -- http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/smoochie.htm ) and "SwashComp" (for swashbulcklers -- http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/Swash.html).
No medium is unconstrained, so pointing out that IF is constrained is perhaps missing the point. From a certain perspective, what you call constraints in IF can be seen as freedoms. The IF designer is *not* constrained by needing a team of 3D artists, scriptwriters, mo-cap actors, and voice actors in order to realize a particular vision. Whether the effort required (on behalf of the designer and the player) is worth the aesthetic payoff is a matter of personal taste. It's clear there isn't an audience willing to pay for text adventure games -- I've got no delusions in that area. But that doesn't nullify the cultural value of the genre.
Within the aesthetics of IF, if a puzzle really is random, it's *not* considered a good puzzle, but there are some games that people play only for the puzzles, because the puzzles are devious enough, clever enough, or maddening enough that they keep their interest. Even fans of IF hate gratuitous mazes and "guess-the-verb" problems (which are treated as bugs, not puzzles).
Have you seen some recent IF? Adam Cadre's "Photopia" is the canonical example for "Gosh, look how far IF has come," in that it's a relatively easy game (you might get stuck in a few places, but that's what walkthroughs are for) with a strong storyline; it's not just a good story divided up into chunks, it uses the IF medium to its advantage; when I finished it for the first time, I sat there, stunned, and then immeditely restarted from the beginning to see what kind of power I could wield over the outcome. The degree of power that the author granted me was an important part of the "message" of the story, and it fit perfectly with the medium. The same author's "9:05" plays with the notion of "winning" -- but the ending in which your NPC ends up the best is completely unsatisfying, and the ending in which your NPC ends up in deep trouble is deeply satisfying (in a creepy way). Emily Short's "Galatea" is an NPC portrait; the conversation interface won't win any Loebner prizes, but it's a good attempt to push the boundaries of the "ask X about Y" syntax for conversing with an NPC.
I recommend that you take a look at recent winners of the XYZZY Awards -- games are selected on the basis of puzzles, NPCs, setting, writing, and a half dozen other specific categories. The rethinking that you call for is already underway.
http://www.wurb.com/if/award/3
(The 2003 XYZZYs will be announced this Saturday.)
Given the external constraints forced upon early game designers, in the form of cruel memory restrictions, blocky graphics, atrocious sound, and 30 or so competing platforms, the text genre was actually freeing -- it was easily portable, for one thing; for another, typing into a command line interface that may or may not understand what you wanted to do was a common activity -- that was pretty much how you used a computer.
The term "interactive fiction" historically emphaiszed that an text adventure game was a form of story in which you participated; while the stories weren't always compelling, and while narrative is only one of many components of contemporary commercial games, if the story is good, an IF player won't mind giving up some freedom in order to see the narrative play itself out the way the designer intended it.
Modern game design techniques wouldn't exist -- that is, they wouldn't be modern -- if they didn't have older techniques to build off of (and, when appropriate, reject).
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/adams/audio/bear.m
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/adams
I have used Dragan Naturally Speaking to play interactive fiction. I first fed in a transcript of a complete game session, to give the speech-recognition software an edge. It worked fairly well, though getting the software to read only the new text that appears on the screen (rather than starting from the top) would involve some changes to the game interpreter. A few years ago, Scott Adams updated his classic gaming engine with a scrolling feature that would probably lend itself well to screen readers.
If you're serious about looking into games for the visually impaired, try http://www.audysseymagazine.org/
For an audience that is more familiar with literature than computer games, I use "interactive fiction," emphasizing that the game uses blocks of prose to describe events and things, but that it reacts to your input. For an audience familiar with computers, "text adventure" or "adventure game" is usually enough.
Some contemporary offerings aren't "adventures" -- they are character studies, one-room mysteries, flashbacks, or puzzle-based wordplay. To call them all "adventures" is limiting. Calling it "text-parser-based interactive fiction" is probalby more accurate, but unwieldy. A good deal of classic commercial games included both a text parser and graphics, so "text" isn't always the defining factor.
Some academics use the term "interactive fiction" to describe literary hypertext. And some "interactive fiction" is actually very linear, giving only the illusion of player agency. So even the "preferred" term is imperfect.
I'm not aware of any fan or designer of IF who would be upset if someone said, "Hey, is that an adventure game you're playing?" Take "politcally correct" in the Slashdot article as a lighthearted poke, nothing serious.
If you post your comment on rec.arts.int-fiction, I'm sure you'll get a good response. The number one feature where AI would be useful would be in improving the parser's recognition of typed commands. People are so used to text-messaging each other that the parser's frequent "I didn't understand that" gets in the way of their immersion in the game, to an extent that wasn't a problem back when all computer users were used to the command-line interface.
Meanwhile, Stephen Granade's brief article on why IF doesn't need AI will be a good start.
http://brasslantern.org/editorials/ai.html
"Too bad that they seemed to have forgotten to invite a few developers."
While I don't know anything about the papers that weren't accepted, I'm sure that if developers had submitted paper proposals that fit the goals of the conference organizers, those developers would have been invited to present their papers at the conference.
"Perhaps the academics would be better served by going to the Game Developers Conference two weeks later and learn a thing or to."
1) If a scientist who studies the mating habits has never actually mated with a rhinoceros, does that discount all of his or her research?
2) I agree that there is much to learn at a game developer's conference, but such conferences tend to look forward, at what might be; some scholarship has to look backwards, at what actually happened, and what did not.
3) I think the world is big enough for game developers to develop new games (and methods and terminology and communities) and for game studiers to study those games and their effect on culture at large (using their own methods and terminology and commiunities).
Academics are certainly behind in examining computer gaming, but surely you agree that it's better to light one candle than curse the darkness.... or be eaten by grues.
Dennis G. Jerz
Jerz's Literacy Weblog
In 1979, someone named Kevin MacKenzie suggested the symbol -) for "tongue in cheek". It's not a "smiley", of course, but it serves the same function. I've archived the exchange that included the post: http://www.uwec.edu/jerzdg/English309/emoticon.txt
The 1920 Czech play, _Rossum's Universal Robots_ features the creation of Robots that take over the world. It's the source of what has become a science-fiction cliche.
Oddly enough, the Robots in the original play were biological.
http://www.uwec.edu/jerzdg/RUR/index.html
On DS9, Jake Sisko's was sometimes shown writing stories and articles on a PADD. I seem to remember a scene in which his father has picked up a PADD, and is commenting on Jake's writing.
I noticed that Jake was dragging a stylus across the screen of the prop, as if he was highlighting text, and then writing in a little square space on the surface of the PADD, much like I do when I work with my palm computer. (So was the science fiction technology imitating real life in this case?)
Ray Bradybury's short story, "The Veldt," is about parents who worry that their children are spending too much time in a holodeck-style entertainment room. (OK, the holodeck is still science fiction, but Bradbury aptly defines the anti-videogames suburban hysteria that crops up in the media from time to time.)
His 1953 novel _Fahrenheit 451_ features interactive talk shows and soap operas, projected on wall-sized TV screens. It describe the protagonist's wife obsessing about upgrading her equipment (buying an attachment that will make it look like characters in the TV shows are speaking her name, thus including her in the experience). He also predicted O.J.-style helocopter chases. From a Salon interview with Bradbury:
The day after news helicopters pursued O.J. Simpson fleeing in a Ford Bronco, a New York Times columnist noted that the chase was the "real-life fulfillment" of "Fahrenheit 451."
I'm saving the best for last...
E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" describes a future civilization in which all but the lowest classes associate with each other chiefly via long-distance communications devices, rather than in person. In this passage, a woman has just spent three minutes disconnected from the network in order to speak privately to her son. She logs back on (so to speak), and is assaulted by a flood of incoming messages.
To most of these questions she replied with irritation - a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one-that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and primæval as were the methods of I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she yet felt (she said) that study of them might repay the musicians of today: they had freshness; they had, above all, ideas. Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately. Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.
Bear in mind, Forster was writing in 1909! Here's one online copy of the text:
http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/forster.h