
Revisiting 'Zork': What We Lost in the Transition to Visual Games - JamesLowell
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/06/revisiting-zork-what-we-lost-in-the-transition-to-visual-games/241074/
======
rsbrown
This article brings to mind what I dislike about the modern game industry.

First off, what is a game? Let's consider two broad types of games:
competitive games and puzzle games. Competitive games (like chess) feature
more than one player and the outcome of the game is unknown (both in terms of
the winner and the final game state). Puzzle games (generally speaking) don't
have a strong competitive element and the final outcome is known (i.e., a lone
player solves the puzzle).

I contend that first-person shooters (in single player mode) are nothing more
than big puzzle games. This isn't bad per se, but the problem lies in how
these games have evolved.

Rather than make the "puzzles" in FPS games more challenging and innovative
(i.e., focus on gameplay), the major game studios have instead focused on
increasing the audio-visuals and cinematic attributes of their products. As a
result, gameplay has consistently been minimized in favor of eye candy.

No better example comes to mind than the recent smash hit, L.A. Noire. The
extent to which the producers of this game clearly wish they were making
movies comes off as obsequious. The tiny sliver of game mechanics they did
include is mind-numbingly repetitive and utterly without challenge.

These things are no longer "games", they're shitty movies.

~~~
localtalent
Interactive Fiction as a genre is significantly less accessible than FPS. Not
only due to the medium of text, which is inherently less flashy and instantly
compelling than 3D environments, but due to the nature of the puzzles.

Taking the rose-colored glasses off, a large part of the adventure gaming
genre (including point-and-clicks) relied on obscure object interactions or
guessing the right command to proceed. Freeing a bird to drive away a snake in
Colossal Cave Adventure is not necessarily intuitive.

For some people, including myself, this is fun. But it's not an easy,
thoughtless, escapist form of entertainment - which is where the modern FPS
comes in.

~~~
colomon
I feel that both forms are missing the mark for my taste. Essentially, they
represent two of the classic failures in crafting a good ("pencil and paper")
role-playing game: This game is all fighting and This game is all puzzles. The
really fun games are the ones that have a cool environment (like text
adventures) and let you make interesting choices.

I know there have been some efforts to do that sort of thing with a text-
adventure-y environment (Storytron?) but don't know of anyone who has really
gotten it right yet.

------
JonnieCache
Someone should make a satirical text adventure about doing startups, where you
wander around the valley trying to get funding and so on.

    
    
        >LOOK
        
        You are in a brand new air conditioned Palo Alto office.
        Empty packets of ramen litter the floor. There are two desks,
        each with brand new macbooks on them.
        
        >SIT DOWN
        
        There are no chairs. What are you, some kind of loser?
    
        >PIVOT
    
        You are bought by a google.
    

And so on. I know suggesting things for other people to do is bad form, "do it
yourself!" goes the familiar cry. Unfortunately I don't have the requisite
insider knowledge to make it funny.

~~~
wazoox
This really is a marvellous idea! It could be totally hilarious.

~~~
jonhendry
It would be pretty easy, too, using Inform 7.

~~~
se1sm
They have a nice history of IF coding here: <http://inform7.com/if/>

------
hugh3
Zork really isn't the best example, just the first (and even then it was just
an adaptation of _Adventure_ ). The Infocom adventures got far more
sophisticated in every way over the following few years, in terms of prose,
setting, gameplay and atmosphere.

I credit adventure games with teaching me to touch type. To this day I can
still type "inventory" far faster than any other nine-letter word.

~~~
StavrosK
Can you give an example of one of the later, better games?

~~~
mquander
If you don't mind moderately difficult games (my personal preference) I
strongly recommend taking a look at the blurbs for these few tremendously good
games and seeing if they appeal to you:

Adam Cadre - _Varicella_ <http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=ywwlr3tpxnktjasd>

Jon Ingold - _Make It Good_
<http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=jdrbw1htq4ah8q57>

Andrew Plotkin - _Spider And Web_
<http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=2xyccw3pe0uovfad>

~~~
pfedor
OTOH if you want to start with something easier, but still with puzzles,
_Bronze_ by Emily Short is a good one.

If you want a very good game with almost no puzzles, then definitely
_Photopia_.

~~~
mquander
Another game with moderately easy puzzles that might appeal to the HN
demographic is Dan Schmidt - _For A Change_. The setting is an abstract,
somewhat pastoral landscape full of things whose descriptions are alien but
extremely evocative. The theme of the puzzles is imagining and understanding
things about the world of the game. I found it rather entrancing.

<http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=t61i5akczyblx2zd>

Anyway, there are so many really must-play IF works from the last decade that
the recommendations could go on forever.

------
dsr_
We didn't lose anything -- interactive fiction games are still being produced,
and you can play them on your android or iphone these days, too.
<http://ifarchive.org/> and <http://xyzzyawards.org/> are good places to
start.

~~~
billybob
If someone wanted to write an interactive text game like these and put it on
the web, are there any frameworks available? If not, a lot of the work would
be on figuring out how to parse the player's input, how to map out the
possible paths through the game, etc, instead of writing the story.

~~~
wccrawford
I actually started working on a Ruby IF framework, with the intent that it
could also be used to create MUDs and IF-ish games that had combat, so they
can be played like an RPG.

I haven't gotten far yet, sadly. You are correct about the player's input
being an issue, and the mapping has some issues to resolve, but the biggest
problem is actually the interactions between objects or the player and
objects.

For instance, the 'push' command is going to mean something different to every
entity. Some won't respond (default response) but others might move or react.

I actually implemented that once in C# in such a way that it confused most of
the other developers and they quit. I offered to scrap my code, but that was
kind of the end of the project. -sigh-

~~~
Stwerner
Have the ruby thing on github by any chance? Id love to check it out. I've
been toying with the idea of writing a mud in ruby, and giving it a graphical
web frontend to make it more accessible to new players.

~~~
wccrawford
Not Github. Back then I was using RubyForge.

Fair Warning: I think I as far as I got was logging in. I don't remember if I
got any commands working at all.

<http://rubyforge.org/projects/textualize/>

I will probably move it to GitHub soon as I've been thinking about working on
it again.

~~~
Stwerner
Cool, I have one from a while ago that I got about that far as well. I was
thinking about working through the Mud Game Programming book to get a working
foundation going, but send me an email (in profile) once you start working on
it again.

------
roc
Let's also not forget the mechanics of these games tended to be maddening at
times. Knowing what you wanted to do and having to guess at the nouns and
verbs the designer expected was beyond frustrating.

I'm all for fond remembrance. But the problems of text-based games weren't
limited to comparing poorly to graphics. Some of them were inherent; implicit
companions of the desirable parts of such "written" games.

~~~
dlo
Are there any NLP guys here? Can we improve this situation with modern
technology?

~~~
davidst
Yes, depending on your expectations.

With a LOT of effort it would be entirely possible to build something like
SHRDLU that could handle a specific game:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU>

Caution: Don't be misled by the impressive-looking conversation transcript.
With no disrespect meant to Terry Winograd and the ground-breaking work he did
it was- like every natural language demonstration since the dawn of computing-
fragile, prone to odd mistakes and the transcripts were usually generated by
someone already acclimated to the idiosyncrasies the system to make it look
its best.

You could build something that recognized a richer grammar and even engaged in
limited conversational discourse. It would be good enough that a person might
briefly forget they were dealing with a system of limited capabilities until,
inevitably, it would break down and remind them they are not conversing with a
human.

The risk is those failures could be sufficiently frequent and severe as to
make it worthless. The user might be better off with something less ambitious,
more predictable and less frustrating. Then again, that wouldn't do anything
to push the state of the art, so it should be worth the risk to try it.

------
shawndumas
<http://www.getlamp.com/>

~~~
mgkimsal
Awesome documentary on the history of interactive fiction - big focus on the
early days up through infocom (actually, I just realized I never finished
watching it!)

------
smackfu
For everyone person who loved text adventures, another nine people gave up in
the first room.

~~~
widget
This may be true, but it doesn't really address the point of the article. The
argument is that modern games could take a lesson from text adventure games in
engaging the players' imaginations.

------
cschmidt
My favorite text adventure was Pirate's Cove, on my trusty Vic 20. You can
still play it, with an emulator

<http://www.c64gg.com/Adams_Scott_DL.html>

although that version seems to have some simple graphics, which is just wrong.

There's more information on the Scott Adams games here
[http://www.lysator.liu.se/adventure/Adventure_International/...](http://www.lysator.liu.se/adventure/Adventure_International/Classic.html)

Good times....

~~~
frobozz
Here's Scott Adams' site: <http://www.msadams.com/>

You can download Windows versions of all the SAGA adventures there (apart from
the Marvel ones, I think), and he has links to web-playable versions.

------
gnosis
Infocom was just the tip of the interactive fiction iceberg.

There's still a vibrant interactive fiction gaming scene. It has thrived
despite Infocom's demise.

Many interactive fiction games continue to be developed, played, entered in
competitions, and reviewed.

Here are some links to get you started:

<http://www.wurb.com/if/genre>

<http://www.ifreviews.org>

<http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive.html>

[http://ifdb.tads.org/search?browse&list&sortby=new](http://ifdb.tads.org/search?browse&list&sortby=new)

~~~
gnosis
Relatively recently the IF community has experienced a bit of a renaissance
because of the release of Inform 7, which allows you to program games in the
most natural sounding English I've ever seen in a programming language. Here's
a sample:

\---

    
    
      "Cave Entrance"
    
      The Cobble Crawl is a room. "You are crawling over cobbles in a low
      passage. There is a dim light at the east end of the passage."
    
      A wicker cage is here. "There is a small wicker cage discarded
      nearby."
    
      The Debris Room is west of the Crawl. "You are in a debris room
      filled with stuff washed in from the surface. A low wide passage
      with cobbles becomes plugged with mud and debris here, but an
      awkward canyon leads upward and west. A note on the wall says,
      'Magic word XYZZY'."
    
      The black rod is here. "A three foot black rod with a rusty star
      on one end lies nearby."
    
      Above the Debris Room is the Sloping E/W Canyon. West of the Canyon
      is the Orange River Chamber.
    

\---

As you can see, it reads just like regular English, and it's very easy to
understand what's going on here.

Here's a more complete example:

<http://inform7.com/learn/man/ex74.html#e74>

And here are some full, playable games (with source):

<http://www.hpiweb.com/newmedia/>

<http://inform7.com/learn/complete-examples/>

A couple of quick tutorials:

<http://www.brasslantern.org/writers/howto/i7tutorial.html>

[http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Beginners_Guide_to_Interactive_...](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Beginners_Guide_to_Interactive_Fiction_with_Inform_7/Getting_Started_with_Inform_7)

The full manual:

<http://inform7.com/learn/manuals/>

Wikipedia article:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Inform_7>

~~~
jonhendry
You can even do a form of map reduce.

------
kingmanaz
Great article.

Ultima 7 was a graphical game that had a similar effect on me. The graphics
were somewhat abstract and generic and left a lot for the imagination to fill
in. The writing was wonderful and put flesh on the world. Playing the game was
like reading a novel.

It seems like game makers need to focus less on graphics and more on music and
writing.

~~~
MetallicCloud
Ultima 6 and 7 were awesome games. I haven't had a chance to play it, but they
have done remakes of 5 and 6 with better graphics.

u6project.com/

------
lylejohnson
I still remember bicycling over to the "L" building on Auburn's campus to play
ADVENT and DND and DUNGEON on their PDP-11 (or whatever model of minicomputer
it was at the time). Thanks to the OP for sharing this article. Now I have to
will myself to do some actual work today instead of playing old IF games
online.

~~~
Hoff
telnet gein.vistech.net

Login: games / pressplay

    
    
         A  ADVENTURE        The original Collosal Cave adventure
         B  BLIND            Escape the unseen maze
         C  BUNNY            Destroy the man-eating bunny rabbits
         D  CATCH            Navigate a star-field
         E  CHICKEN          Chicken hunt
         F  CONNECT4         Connect 4 in a row
         G  CROSSFIRE        Evade and attack within the grid
         H  DALEKS           Terminate... Terminate...
         I  DEFENDER         Defend the planet from the invaders
         J  DESTROYER        Destroy the aliens
         K  DIG              Dig Dug
         L  DOOR             Watch out for the monster in the maze
         M  EMPIRE           The original single player Empire
         N  GRANNY           Road Rage!
         O  MOLE             Hunt the moles
         P  TETRIS           Manipulate the falling blocks

~~~
adrianN
Global Thermonuclear War

------
cageface
This is exactly why I tend to prefer books to theatre, and theatre to film.
Filling in the details engages my imagination in a way that the polished,
finished surfaces of contemporary games and films do not.

~~~
eru
There are still lots of contemporary indie games and films.

------
onan_barbarian
I miss the Infocom games. One of the most enjoyable parts of them was the
feeling that you were engaging with an actual person and their own
personality, sense of humor, etc. The programmer and author of these games
were often one and the same; at the least, they weren't a huge team of people
writing off a spec.

I love many modern games but the better they get, the more they seem to be
strangled by their own content pipeline; the requirement to produce AAA-level
graphics, sound, writing, advertising means the scale of these things is very
large and the appetite for risk is low.

All that being said, many of the Infocom games were stupidly obscure and
irritating and relied on you doing something almost completely arbitrary at
some given point to make things work. But they were just so good in so many
ways that this was forgivable. All of the Zorks, the Enchanter series,
Suspended, Starcross, Deadline... the list goes on and on.

It's worth noting that Infocom themselves moved into a dodgy neither fish nor
fowl territory towards the end with added graphics and some pretty mediocre
titles.

Almost 30 years on, I can't work on a house using a ladder and not think "It's
too bad that the ladder analysis department closes at noon".

~~~
starwed
You should really look at modern IF, which retain all the good things you
mention but have a more modern/humane approach to the actual game play.

Lost Pig is a short, interesting one: <http://pr-if.org/play/lostpig/>

~~~
chalst
I have very positive memories of playing Graham Nelson's _Curses_. Nelson
implemented the Inform language so that he could write _Curses_ , making it a
landmark game in modern IF games.

The game is like the best of the Infocom games in how it builds up a world in
terms of initially confusing parallels that start to fit together like jigsaw
pieces; it's achievement is that it does this in a more sophisticated and
rewarding way, to my taste at least. It takes as much time to complete as the
bigger of the Zork games.

You can play it online at:

<http://z-machine.appspot.com/game/curses/>

------
smutticus
I built a VoiceXML interface for Zork back in 1999. It was meant as a demo
application for a VoiceXML interpreter that Cicso was trying to push and I was
a test engineer on. It had automatic speech recognition and text to speech. So
you could say "Go South" and then hear "You are standing in a forest. There is
a bucket." Or whatever.

I thought it was really neat but it never made it past demo stage. I wrote a
kind of lazy socket engine in PHP and then used phpzork.com for all my data.
It was crude and you couldn't complete the entire game on the phone because I
didn't have time to encode all possible actions for the ASR engine. But you
could move around and grab a few things. All via telephone ;)

I just checked and it looks like phpzork.com is no longer. Pity, as it was a
great way to enjoy Zork 10 years ago.

~~~
se1sm
Great idea: you could have started a 1-800-ADVNTUR service ;) not to mention
it would be tempting to be able to play adventure games in the car, while, er,
not driving to strange and exotic places. I'd also love to hear what that
sounds like - thinking of the voice acting in some adventure games I've played
where you could do worse than replace the recorded drawl with TTS and cut down
on the floppies..
<http://www.adventuregamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29027>

------
saddino
You can play zork in your browser here: <http://thcnet.net/zork/index.php>

------
minikomi
Any suggestions for Infocom games? Just missed them I'm afraid - cut my teeth
on nethack and commander keen.

~~~
lylejohnson
It's hard to go wrong with any of them, really. You should play through the
original Zork trilogy. I really liked their mystery titles, especially
"Deadline"; I seem to recall that you had a lot more interaction with the
other characters in the game (i.e. the suspects). The "Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy" game was pretty good, too; even though I'd already read the books,
some of the puzzles were tricky to figure out. I think I still have my "Don't
Panic!" button that came in the box with that one.

~~~
JonnieCache
h2g2 is difficult to the point where it seems like a parody of the genre. Some
of it makes stuff like monkey island seem trivial, and I find it hard not to
assume that the whole thing was a big joke on the part of Douglas Adams.

~~~
sp332
Yeah, H2G2 is really, really funny and pretty much impossible. Spend some time
fumbling around in each room (there really are some funny responses you should
see!) and then refer to a walkthrough to advance to the next room. Save often
- although even saving often won't help if you don't get the screwdriver in
the first room. It really is a player-hostile game.

~~~
JonnieCache
It's all very well saying "fumble around in each room" but most of the time
you only have a half dozen moves before you die.

There are _so many_ things that you have to do in order not to render the game
unfinishable further down the line, and they're thrown in _so quickly_ and _so
covertly_ that I cannot believe it isn't satire.

I mean, if you take it as anything apart from satire it's just unforgivably
bad game design.

Adams was involved in writing it, and he was definitely into computers. He was
the first person in the UK to own an apple machine. He would have almost
certainly played zork/dungeon and such games, and therefore being Adams he
would not have been able to resist parodying their ridiculous nature.

~~~
tjr
Douglas Adams was also involved with writing the Infocom title _Bureaucracy_ ,
which was similarly odd in game play, though not as fiendishly difficult.

------
technomancy
"Visual" vs textual games is a bit of a false dichotomy though; in particular
the Marathon series does a great job of blending action and intelligent,
literary story: <http://marathon.bungie.org/story/shakespeare.html> The first
Deus Ex also had plenty of literature in it, sampling heavily from The Man who
was Thursday and other classics.

------
palebluedot
I remember as kid, playing the Zork series and exchanging hints with my 4th
grade teacher. Great game, and that made it all the more fun.

I think the game that had the biggest impact on me, though, was a game for the
Apple ][ called "Odyssey"... I remember many hours lost to that game:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_The_Compleat_Apventure>

------
orenmazor
I miss these games.

------
danssig
If you want games with no/low graphics and lots of depth there are still MUDs
out there. Or for war, empire is still out there.

------
InclinedPlane
Get ye flask

<http://www.homestarrunner.com/dman3.html>

------
Sniffnoy
Tangential question - has the original unsplit version of Zork ever been
rereleased anywhere?

~~~
jonhendry
MIT Zork is bundled in with the iPhone/iPad Frotz interpreter, so it's
probably in IFDB.

~~~
Sniffnoy
Indeed it is, thank you!

------
malkia
You can be eaten by a Grue in the Black Ops Terminal Interrogation Room :)

------
fedd
i foresee an article 'what we lost in the transition from keyboards to audio-
visual interfaces'.

------
kingkawn
sassa frassa kids these days

------
kahawe
What I miss in modern games is... really fun, great jump n runs and fun
adventures like "Monkey Island" seem to be a dieing or already dead genre.

It is all about MMOs, RTS, role playing, shooters and sports games nowadays.

~~~
daeken
For what it's worth, Monkey Island on the iPad is _amazing_. Seriously the way
it's meant to be played. I just introduced my girlfriend to the series on the
iPad the other day.

Tablets seem to be bringing adventure games back a bit -- they were
effectively dead for the longest time.

~~~
StavrosK
I had the realization the other day that the SCUMM games and Heroes of Might
and Magic (an amazing game) would play very very well on an iPad.

What a pity, I have an iPad 2 in front of me and I can't play the games.
Thanks, Apple. I can't wait to get rid of it for a Galaxy tab.

~~~
tsunamifury
Um... ever heard of ScummVM? They have a wonderful iPad edition.

~~~
StavrosK
How can I install it on an iPad 2?

~~~
lazerwalker
It's only available if you jailbreak your iPad. If it's not available by
default in Cydia, there's a repository you can add to download it. The
controls don't always feel 100% right, but it does work like a charm.

Alternatively, the new-fangled remakes of the first two Monkey Island games
are available for sale on the App Store proper.

~~~
kahawe
If I understand it correctly, ScummVM itself is not allowed to run on iOS
because it loads content (the games) after being installed, right?

What if one made a stripped version that just comes with one game and no
loading? but then you would have to find a way of bundling those games
legally...

~~~
StavrosK
I believe they have done that for Flight of the Amazon Queen on the app store.

