On: Customers don't want chat bots

[dontworryabout]

Wow! “Guess the verb.” That is exactly how text based adventure games worked in 80s. The interface of the future is Zork.

[seanhunter → dontworryabout]

Omg the number of times I went into a mental meltdown with text adventures over that.

I finally have the thing I need

I am in the right place to use the thing such that it will fix whatever problem so I can move onwards

How hard can it be to figure out how to ask the game to use the thing to fulfil its purpose?

Quite fucking hard, it turns out. Quite fucking hard.

[jafo1989 → dontworryabout]

Infocom had a 80s text adventure game called Bureaucracy[1] that captures this modern scenario exactly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)

[pmontra → dontworryabout]

In those years my English was quite basic. I abandoned an adventure in a mine in front of an elevator door because open and every other verb I could think about didn't work. Very frustrating but I lived on and forgot about it. A few years ago I found a walkthrough on some retrogames site. I checked that location and... slide!

[vsnf → dontworryabout]

EverQuest did the same thing, except it was "guess the noun".

> What broach?

> What sword?

The keywords could be so obscure that allegedly, 25 years after release, some quests remain uncompleted by even a single player.