
Eaten by a Grue: podcast on Infocom games, text adventures and interactive fiction - csixty4
http://monsterfeet.com/grue/
======
FreezerburnV
If you're into good old text adventures, you might be interested in an
upcoming book that (as far as I'm aware) is fairly unique in that it's written
as a text adventure. Not a choose your own adventure book, but as if the main
character is literally in a text adventure, with prompts on what to do and
everything: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31374622-post-high-
schoo...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31374622-post-high-school-
reality-quest) It's coming out June 2017.

Disclaimer: I'm married to the author, so I might be biased :P To be fair
though, I read a very early copy, and thought it was solid. It's only gotten
much, much better since what I read. The head of the small press publishing it
has compared it to Microserfs.

~~~
zem
sounds really interesting, if more akin to a litrpg than to microserfs. i'll
definitely read this when it comes out. is there an announce mailing list?

~~~
FreezerburnV
She apparently has a mailing list on her website:
[http://www.megedenbooks.com/](http://www.megedenbooks.com/) She just told me
that she basically never uses it, so if you sign up for it, you won't be
getting any spam. But she said she'll make sure she sends out something
announcing the release of the book and/or a reminder some small period in
advance.

You can also put it on your "want to read" list on Good Reads (linked in my
OP) and should get information about release via that. The Amazon page (also
available via the Good Reads page) also seems to have a way to get information
about release.

Sorry if I seem like I'm dumping a bunch of information, just trying to convey
what my wife told me about how to get what you're looking for/be helpful/give
as many options as possible for people to get information depending on what
they're comfortable with :)

~~~
zem
thanks, i signed up for the mailing list :)

------
chongli
Alright, time to get this off my chest:

I've been around this culture for a long time. I was on Slashdot, Digg,
Reddit, and now HN. I've ascended in NetHack more than 10 times (and beaten a
bunch of other Roguelikes as well). I've heard about the Infocom games
repeatedly over the years.

I've tried to play Zork several times and I just don't get it. Every single
time I end up in the maze of twisty little passages and I give up. What am I
supposed to do? I tried dropping various objects as breadcrumbs and mapping
the damn thing on graph paper... well, it turns out to be non-Euclidean. WTF
is that? Is this tedious, bizarre exercise supposed to be fun? Will somebody
help me _get it_?

~~~
rsaarelm
The fun used to be that you needed to figure out the object dropping thing and
then the thing that you need to think about the rooms as an abstract graph
instead of something that makes spatial sense. (Zork started off as a
mainframe game whose audience was pretty much all computer scientists, so they
would've been expected to know about graph data structures.)

Once you know the trick, the rest is annoying busywork, and adding a maze has
been considered bad design in most text adventures made after the Zork era.

The generally annoying thing about text adventures is that if you hit a puzzle
you don't get, your progress can grind into total halt. There's no alternative
strategies or just getting lucky like there is in roguelikes. And there are
plenty of badly designed games where after having the puzzle explained, you'll
go "how was I supposed to figure out THAT?" (Zork 2 has a couple infamous
puzzles like this.) If you want to get text adventures, you might want to just
use hints when needed to get through a few so you'll get a sense of what the
games consider appropriate hints and puzzles.

~~~
chongli
Yeah, I'm aware of graph data structures. I tried creating a map like that
too. It ended up a big mess of nodes with all of these edges intersecting each
other and looping back around. I might have made a mistake or two and that
screwed up the graph even more! It drove me crazy with how tedious it was.

I guess I reached a point where I said "this is just _too complex_ , it can't
be the right solution, there's got to be a smarter way to do this". So to find
out that there isn't a smarter way just makes me think it's a terrible puzzle
design.

~~~
CPLX
I solved it with a pencil and paper when I was 12 years old or so, and I'm
pretty sure lots of other people did too.

I agree it's a little tedious by modern standards but it's really not that
complicated. If I recall correctly you can represent the entire thing with
about 5-10 boxes connected by a couple lines between them plus a bunch of
little loops where the player remains in the same place.

It's a succinct area of the map. Perhaps you should try again with a fresh
perspective.

------
ChicagoDave
To understand Interactive Fiction, you have to travel back to the 70's when
computers took up a large room, paper terminals ruled, and the primary
programming language was COBOL.

In those days, there were no graphics. None. There was no animation. Apple and
IBM had not created microcomputers yet. There was no Amiga or Commodore.

At this time, in the mid to late 70's, high school students were just getting
access to paper terminals that "dialed in" over coupler modems. Taking a
programming class was an elective and few did.

There also wasn't any D&D or role playing games. None of this existed.

So along comes these two free games on these school mainframes; Adventure and
Dungeon (later split into three commercial Zork games).

They had the audacity of allowing you, the player, to type anything you
wanted, and the computer would respond, at that time, very intelligently. By
today's standards it may seem simple, but back then, it was the equivalent of
playing Assassin's Creed today.

This seemingly "open world" gaming changed everything about computers. It
inspired everything that came after, including video games and still is the
foundation of much of the standard game play of today.

Now. Zork was old school "IF". It was hard, illogical at times, and on a
fairness scale probably as high as it gets. But puzzles are puzzles. If you
like easy puzzles or puzzles that give you a cheat sheet, then are you really
being challenged or are you just looking for entertainment?

I prefer a challenge because that _is_ what entertains me.

So first realizing that the Thief in Zork will steal all your possessions
(whether you drop them or not), then realizing you have to kill him, then
realizing he's the only one that can open the egg, then realizing that he's
really hard to kill in certain situations, then realizing you can use the
DIAGNOSE command to warn you when you're about to die so you can run away and
get better.

To me, that's not boring at all. That is essentially the same kind of
challenging puzzle you'll find in any of today's video games.

It's just that the "graphics" are in your head. Not on a screen.

~~~
mrob
Adventure was first released in 1976. Dungeons and Dragons was first published
in 1974. Adventure is clearly influenced by D&D.

~~~
ChicagoDave
If you believe the accounts of Crowther and Woods, they knew nothing of D&D
and there were maybe a few thousand original poorly made copies of D&D at the
time. Only "wargamers" knew about it until the 80's.

From a historical perspective, even though D&D was published in 1974, its
influence didn't kick in until years later.

~~~
mrob
Source on that? This article claims Crowther did play D&D, based on personal
email from a co-worker (M. F. Kraley):
[http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009...](http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009.html#p20)

------
GoatOfAplomb
There are still a lot of MUDs out there, which I'd consider to be multi-player
extensions of games like Zork. Some still draw 500+ paying accounts logged in
at peak times, and have characters that are 25+ years old, like Gemstone IV
(play.net/gs4).

I tend to explain it as "World of Warcraft without graphics", but "rapid-paced
AD&D" is a fair approximation, too. The medium gives the people running the
show a lot of flexibility in how they guide collaborative stories - no need to
wait on art assets!

------
smcameron
Lot of good infocom stuff here:
[https://archive.org/details/infocomcabinet](https://archive.org/details/infocomcabinet)
and also interesting stuff on
[http://www.filfre.net/sitemap/](http://www.filfre.net/sitemap/)

------
jimmaswell
I used to play a lot of text adventures when the iPod Touch first came out. It
was a surprisingly nice platform for them with the iPod Touch on-screen
keyboard. The app was named Frotz.

~~~
JoeDaDude
Yes, Frotz is the de facto standard for playing text adventures. It is
available for almost every platform. I used a version of Frotz on the Nintendo
DS.

------
forgottenacc57
The Infocom parser is still smarter than Siri.

An Infocom adventure would have known how to handle "Siri, continue playing
podcast".

------
jimjimjim
I've played a lot of adventure games, the Zorks, Hitchhikers guide,
Planetfall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos and also the magnetic scrolls games
like The Pawn and Guild of Thieves.

but for some reason my favorite zork game isn't a text adventure, it's Zork
Grand Inquisitor. Humor, actors, acceptable graphics. man I love that game.

------
dandandans
You can play Zork in Slack with Slork:
[https://github.com/devshane/slork](https://github.com/devshane/slork)

It's a Zork wrapper written in Elixir.

------
DonHopkins
Here's a cool Zork map visualization project:

"Exploring the original Zork source code with Graphviz and an interactive d3
map, using JavaScript and an extension of Peter Norvig's Python Lisp parser to
handle MDL."

Source: [https://github.com/bburns/Lantern](https://github.com/bburns/Lantern)

Demo: [http://owlsign.org/Lantern/](http://owlsign.org/Lantern/)

------
lylejohnson
Didn't see a link here, so I'll drop one for "Get Lamp", a documentary about
text adventures.

[http://www.getlamp.com](http://www.getlamp.com)

------
DonHopkins
The original Zork source code in MDL which is available here:
[http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/](http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-
mdl/)

It's also here on github: [https://github.com/itafroma/zork-
mdl](https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl)

It is fascinating to read, and really beautiful code, quite understandable
even if you don't know MDL, and practically a form of literature.

I played the original Zork on MIT-DM and also the Infocom versions of course.
Reading the source code is like seeing the behind-the-scenes underground rooms
and passages at Disneyland!

While I was playing Zork, I found a bug. First some context: when you're
battling the troll, you can give things to him, and he eats them! Sometimes he
drops his axe, and you can pick it up and kill him with it. He blocks the
exits until you kill him.

So I tried "give axe to troll," and he ate his own axe, then cowered in
terror: "The troll, disarmed, cowers in terror, pleading for his life in the
guttural tongue of the trolls." Not satisfied with that, I tried "give troll
to troll", and he devoured himself: "The troll, who is remarkably coordinated,
catches the troll and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully
eats it."

...Except that I still could not get out of the exit, because every time I
tried, it said "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture."

I figured there must be a troll flag that wasn't getting cleared when the
troll devoured itself. And sure enough, I found it in the code, and it's
called "TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG"!

Here is an excerpt of the MDL troll code, where you can see the bug, where it
should clear the troll flag when the troll devours itself, but doesn't (well
that's how I would fix it!):

[https://github.com/itafroma/zork-
mdl/blob/be079a4ed234071222...](https://github.com/itafroma/zork-
mdl/blob/be079a4ed234071222e991d0da0f9e8c7f96d125/act1.mud#L1337)

    
    
                   <COND (<VERB? "THROW" "GIVE">
                          <COND (<VERB? "THROW">
                                 <TELL
        "The troll, who is remarkably coordinated, catches the " 1 <ODESC2 <PRSO>>>)
                                (<TELL
        "The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the gift">)>
                          <COND (<==? <PRSO> <SFIND-OBJ "KNIFE">>
                                 <TELL
        "and being for the moment sated, throws it back.  Fortunately, the
        troll has poor control, and the knife falls to the floor.  He does
        not look pleased." ,LONG-TELL1>
                                 <TRO .T ,FIGHTBIT>)
                                (<TELL
        "and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it.">
                          <REMOVE-OBJECT <PRSO>>)>)
                         (<VERB? "TAKE" "MOVE">
                          <TELL
        "The troll spits in your face, saying \"Better luck next time.\"">)
                         (<VERB? "MUNG">
                          <TELL
        "The troll laughs at your puny gesture.">)>)
                  (<AND ,TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG
                        <VERB? "HELLO">>
                   <TELL "Unfortunately, the troll can't hear you.">)>>
    

The troll bugs are also in Zork I! Here's a newspaper article from January 8
1985 about "Infocom Glitches Bug Game Players"!

[http://articles.sun-
sentinel.com/1985-01-18/features/8501020...](http://articles.sun-
sentinel.com/1985-01-18/features/8501020995_1_typing-troll-adventure-games)

And here's another article from March 29, 1985: "Zork I Fuddles Mental Health
With Choices":

[http://articles.sun-
sentinel.com/1985-03-29/features/8501120...](http://articles.sun-
sentinel.com/1985-03-29/features/8501120597_1_trap-door-computer-games-troll)

