Articles
 by Jeff Strand |
The Seriously Whacked Point of View “The Evolution of the Adventure Game, Part One” |
In this series of anywhere
from two to seventy-eight articles (I dont plan ahead very well)
I will be tracing the evolution of the computer adventure game.
Now, you may be thinking,
Wow, hes only on his second column and hes already doing research!
What a stud muffin! Therefore, I must offer the legal disclaimer
that this column is based purely on my own flawed recollections and
is not meant to be complete, accurate, typed well, or even in English.
This is not to say that youre not allowed to criticize me, but please
use the following guidelines:
UNACCEPTABLE CRITICISM:
You reprehensible wanker, how could you not say anything about Hunt
the Wumpus? My friend Bob and I spent 67% of the year 1973 hunting
that Wumpus, and this one time Bob was so tired from playing that
he fell asleep at the computer so my friend Chuck and I took off his
shirt and shaved his armpits and the next day Bob was walking all
over going Hey, who shaved my armpits? and we blamed it on this
one guy who always ate soap and Bob told the guy that he looked
like a Wumpus and the guy cried and you really need to write better
columns or at least not forget Hunt the Wumpus next time.
ACCEPTABLE CRITICISM:
Dear Mr. Strand, youre a doofus.
Just think of this as a
history lesson where youre encouraged to doodle and fling spitballs
at the teacher. So, lets proceed…
In the beginning, adventure
games were text-only. This gave players an unparalleled ability to
use their imaginations to fully immerse themselves in the game designers
world, and they could pretend that all of the characters were naked.
The first parsers could only understand two words at a time (much
like my college roommate), but they soon became more sophisticated.
Nevertheless, gameplay often resembled the following:
>TAKE
ROPE
Rope:
Taken.
>TIE
ROPE TO TREE
You
don’t see a tie here.
>FASTEN
ROPE TO TREE
I
don’t know the word “fasten.”
>USE
ROPE ON TREE
How
do you want to use the rope?
>WITH
TREE
What
do you want to do with the tree?
>PUT
ROPE ON IT
I
don’t know the word “put.”
>USE
ROPE WITH TREE
You’re
not holding the tree.
…and so on. Game designers were also much more heartless in the
early days, so characters died often and without warning:
You are
in a square room. Possible exits are north and south.
>GO
NORTH
Dragon
Room
The fierce Dragon of Kalackas
sinks its fangs into your flesh, causing you to shriek with agony
as you are slowly devoured and flame from the dragons nostrils cooks
your face. You have failed in your quest. Your kingdom is destroyed
and all of your people starve to death. Then the world blows up,
and there is no afterlife.
Play again? (Y/N)
It wasn’t
long before graphics were added. While the text parser remained and
players did not actually interact with the visuals, graphics added
a whole new dimension to game play.
>TAKE
KNIFE
No
knife here!
>TAKE
SWORD
No
sword here!
>TAKE
BLADE
No
blade here!
>TAKE
POINTY THING IN THE LOWER RIGHT CORNER OF THE SCREEN
No
pointy here!
>YOU
DON’T HAVE A CLUE WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT, DO YOU?
I
do not know the word “don’t.”
This
is an example of one of the most important elements of playing text
adventure games: talking back to the game. It was required. There
is not a player alive who did not at some point turn abusive and desperately
hope that there was a little man inside of their computer actually
reading the responses.
>TAKE
STAIRS
The
stairs are too heavy to carry.
>I
MEANT WALK UP THE STAIRS, YOU STUPID COMPUTER
Please
rephrase that.
>YOU
CAN JUST KISS MY EVER-EXPANDING BUTT
Please
rephrase that.
>EAT
$#!% AND DIE
There is
nothing to eat here.
Yes, every gamer resorted
to profanity. And the designers, well aware of this phenomenon, often
had responses prepared. The finest was probably Zork Zero,
where your character had RPG-style statistics, and swearing at the
computer reduced your intelligence points.
Now, Im not saying that
early adventure games were nothing but frustration. Okay, they were…but
often it was a good frustration, since the text parser allowed
designers to create much more challenging puzzles than a point-and-click
system allows. If a puzzle called for you to tickle the drunken elf,
you couldnt just right-click on the elf and have your character magically
realize that a hearty tickling was in order; you actually had to figure
it out for yourself.
>TICKLE DRUNKEN ELF
The
elf giggles with delight and drops the coin.
>TAKE
COIN
The coin burns through your
hand, and your shrieks echo throughout the antechamber like a cursed
chorus of lonely souls in torment. The elf cuts your head off and
plays Quidditch with it.
***
You have died ***
Your score is 3 out of a
possible 7500. This gives you the rank of total wiener.
Play
again? (Y/N)
I should
probably point out that all-text adventure games are still being made
by fans to this day (Friday, January 4, 2002), although now you have
to call them Interactive Fiction, which sounds like the work of pretentious
snots but is actually an accurate description. Instead of puzzles
designed to make you slam your head against the nearest jagged object,
text adventures today generally focus on storytelling and characters
and wimpy stuff like that. If you try to hand over a game where the
entire plot is to find twenty treasures, the Interactive Fiction community
will take you out back and spank you with tire irons.
Just
a second, let me check my e-mail…
Dear
Mr. Strand, I would like to point out that the term Interactive Fiction
was actually used by Infocom way back in 1984. And Floyd the Robot
from Planetfall is the best character ever. Youre a doofus.
Yes,
I am.
Well, it looks like Ive
run out of room and/or motivation for this installment. Ill be back
in two weeks, but in the meantime, if you have any fond, amusing,
and/or frustrating memories of the old text-parser adventure games,
send em to [email protected] and I may
use them to pad out a future column. Seeya!
