Text-only video game shows how genre can be beautiful, innovative and complex

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/01/hadean_lands_the_text_only_video_game_shows_how_the_genre_can_be_beautiful.single.html

by ndarilek • 12 years ago

246 85 12 years ago

slate.com

coldtea2• 12 years ago

"Shows"? Infocom and co have proven that 3 decades ago...

freehunter2• 12 years ago

30 years ago, they were beautiful and innovative. So were Atari games and 14.4k modems. Today they're archaic, on par with rolling a hoop with a stick that was popular 100 years ago. There's a reason text adventures don't break the top charts on the App Store. The point of the article is that this doesn't have to be that way, that text adventures can still be relevant.

If they weren't popular 30 years ago, this article wouldn't be talking about them becoming more modern, so really you're just rewording the entire point of the article.

coldtea2• 12 years ago

They weren't "beautiful and innovative" 30 years ago in your sense that they were "modern" then and "archaic" now.

30 years ago they were also "archaic" in technological capability sense.

People played those games well into the era of Amiga and Atari level graphics, and played them for what they were, not because there weren't graphical games available in abundance.

lubujackson• 12 years ago

Since the article can't be bothered to link to the game: http://hadeanlands.com/

tdicola• 12 years ago

Folks interested in interactive fiction (aka text adventures, but that name implies something a little different these days) should definitely check out the annual interactive fiction contest: http://www.ifcomp.org/ The winners are always top notch games, and the format is perfect as most games are built to be completed in an hour or two and have a full hint/walkthrough to help you if you get stuck. Modern IF games rely much less on tricks and traps like the classic Infocom games of days past, so they're much more friendly and entertaining to play.

One of my favorite authors is Ryan Veeder, his games remind me of Infocom's classics but aren't nearly as frustrating to play: http://www.rcveeder.net/blog/interactive-fiction/ Check out Taco Fiction for a great example (and IF comp winner!).

nhaehnle• 12 years ago

As somebody who isn't much into gaming, let alone IF, the game that really drove home the point that IF can be awesome is Violet. You can play it online here: http://pr-if.org/play/violet/

(Of course, as is usual with fiction and culture in general, what we enjoy always reflects on ourselves. There is delicious irony in my having played Violet as a distraction during my own PhD...)

mintplant2• 12 years ago

For those new to IF, I like to recommend Photopia [1] as a second game. It's less traditional in format, but it's a great example of the kind of storytelling that the medium can support. Shrapnel [2] is another game somewhat along these lines, but it takes things in a different direction.

Once you know your way around the command parser, I suggest Anchorhead [3]--especially if you're a Lovecraft fan--for the richness of the atmosphere it creates. Slouching Towards Bedlam [4] is another good entry in the mystery/horror genre, featuring steampunk themes.

More games, plus ratings, collections, and reviews, can be found on IFDB [5].

EDIT: The Act of Misdirection [6] deserves a mention, too. Another horror(-ish?) game, and the one that got me hooked on IF after Zork and Adventure.

[1] http://adamcadre.ac/if/photopia.html

[2] http://iplayif.com/?story=http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-arc...

[3] http://pr-if.org/play/anchorhead/

[4] http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=032krqe6bjn5au78

[5] http://ifdb.tads.org/

[6] http://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2Fi...

mklim• 12 years ago

Aaron Reed and Emily Short are also both worth checking out also, two of my favorites. Blue Lacuna and Sand-dancer are my favorites from Reed (http://aaronareed.net/), and honestly everything from Short (https://emshort.wordpress.com/my-work/) is good, but Alabaster and Galatea are both particularly striking.

Turing_Machine• 12 years ago

Anyone interested in this topic should definitely be following Emily Short's blog. She gives good coverage to the field as a whole, not just her own games.

sanxiyn• 12 years ago

I love Galatea, it's such a classic. They say the author's first work includes seeds for all later works, and I think it is true in this case.

nathell• 12 years ago

Michael Gentry's "Anchorhead" is my favourite game of all time, of all genres (and I used to devote a lot of time to gaming back in high school).

gipp• 12 years ago

Never met anyone else who played this game. It's amazing.

To sell it a little for the uninitiated: You inherit a distant, eccentric relative's old property in a sleepy, foggy seaside Maine town, and are thrust into a Lovecraftian murder mystery. Awesome.

te• 12 years ago

Until I can find my old Infocom Masterpieces CD, which free-to-play IF should I use to introduce my 10-yr-old son to the genre?

leeoniya• 12 years ago

was expecting an article about ADOM :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Domains_of_Mystery

guard-of-terra• 12 years ago

And I was expecting an article about Dungeon Crawl. Blows everything else out of the water for many years now.

Also playable by ssh.

elwin• 12 years ago

DCSS is a remarkable open source project. The game's design is focused and coherent, avoiding "feature creep". Yet the devs are open to community suggestions and stay on good terms with the players. I can't think of any other project that so well harnesses the creativity of random internet people.

erikb3• 12 years ago

it's an ASCII rogue-like, not a text-only game. You could say it's a character only game. ;)

zem3• 12 years ago

one thing the review didn't mention was just how beautifully atmospheric the game was. the writing is spare, but very evocative; from a purely science fiction/fantasy point of view this is a great experience even before you take the puzzles into account.

nsxwolf2• 12 years ago

I always preferred the less pretentious sounding term "text adventure".

zem3• 12 years ago

while i like the term "text adventure" simply because that's what i grew up with, the broader term "interactive fiction" has genuinely provided room for people to experiment with the genre. it's not just a matter of "same thing, different label slapped on it"; if i say "design a text adventure" and "design a work of interactive fiction" the latter immediately suggests a lot more possibilities.

Karunamon3• 12 years ago

The Inform 7 docs go into this a little bit - a "text adventure" has aspects commonly associated with a game.. a player, a score, a win and lose condition, puzzles to solve, and so forth.

A work of "interactive fiction" need not necessarily be a game with the usual things that go along with that.

robotkilla3• 12 years ago

IF sounds broader. Text adventure makes me think of:

  You are standing in a room, obvious exits are to the north.

  What would you like to do?  > look north

Whereas IF leaves room for things like Choose Your Own Adventure books.

pekk• 12 years ago

It is a more descriptive term, too, because the mechanics are almost always still the same as "adventure games" (where you find objects and apply them in puzzly ways to move to the next area, etc.)

zem3• 12 years ago

if you don't mind horror games, check out "the uncle who works for nintendo" from this year's ifcomp. i'd class that one very clearly as "interactive fiction" but not a "text adventure"

http://kotaku.com/play-this-a-horror-game-about-that-uncle-w...

sjackso• 12 years ago

Oh cool, he finally finished it! Hadean Lands was kickstarted five years ago [1], receiving $31337. (Read that number carefully; this article rounds to $30k and completely misses the fun.) At the time, it was astonishing to many people that a piece of interactive fiction could pull in five figures of crowdfunding.

Andrew Plotkin has been releasing really excellent games for years; Spider and Web was my introduction to interactive fiction. (Talk about getting thrown in the deep end of the genre...)

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zarf/hadean-lands-inter...

EDIT: The game's author has, for some years, been posting Hadean Lands design and progress notes at the Gameshelf blog: http://gameshelf.jmac.org/author/author6b0d4/

Kronopath3• 12 years ago

Spider and Web is a work of genius. But I'll warn you: if you have any interest at all in playing it, stop reading about it. Go in knowing as little as possible, and just work your way through. You'll do fine.

You can even play it for free online, so you have no excuse: http://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/tangle/

I just impulsively picked up the Hadean Lands bundle after reading this article too. I look forward to playing it.

zaroth• 12 years ago

I spent far too long just reading along with this walkthrough (http://www.allthingsjacq.com/intfic_clubfloyd_20080904.html) this game would drive me insane ;-)

erikb3• 12 years ago

I had a long and favorable look at IF/text adventures and have to say, nope it's not that big a thing some people make it. Yes, focussing on content instead of big explosions is what increases depth and the kind of beauty I also like. But the IF world is wrong that it must be pure text. A game like Dwarf Fortress for example can tell a lot of its story without text. You see your dwarfs moving towards the goblins, nobody needs to explicitly write it down for you and prompt you for an interaction. Shadow Run Returns is a X-Com like tactics game, but it also has a lot of text adventure influence with all its heavy dialogue with different choices etc. And by adding these other elements together with text based story and depth, you get something more deep and more efficient.

Text is not a game. It's a feature. Depth is not a game. It's a feature. A puzzle or labyrinth is not a game. It's a feature. Make games by smartly combining (multiple!) features!

djur• 12 years ago

I don't think most members of the IF community would argue that IF is the only way to tell a story through a computer. It's just one particular approach with its own advantages and disadvantages.

And IF need not be pure text. Text with graphical accompaniment has been part of the genre almost since its inception, just like books can have illustrations.

dfan4• 12 years ago

No one in the IF world would claim that games "must be pure text".

erikb3• 12 years ago

Not literally, yes. But would you consider Shadowrun Returns or Faster Than Light a success for the IF world? I think most IF world people don't. And that's why I conclude that they have a very specific definition of what counts as IF and what doesn't. We could discuss about the details what exactly is part of IF and what isn't. But that's not the point anyway. The point is, that IF people can be proud because text heavy games are quite successful, but maybe they shouldn't think so purist.

vacri2• 12 years ago

The excerpt of gameplay suggests that it suffers from the same problem as the original text games: having to figure out the exact syntax the designer wants to hear. In the 'recall the brass tarnish ritual', there are five steps, but only three are performed, one of which doesn't match up with the relevant step ('Speak a word of essential nature' => 'say the sealing word').

I'm happy for other people to enjoy this kind of game, but the above is why they're not my cup of tea.

mquander• 12 years ago

As it happens, the author of the article just inexplicably cut out the transcript of doing the middle two steps, which are indeed necessary for the player to perform the ritual.

It's possible that it would still be too fiddly for you, but modern parser-based text adventures have gotten a lot better since the Infocom days in this way. Probably the biggest reason is that games like Hadean Lands have dozens of beta testers play through it doing whatever their heart desires and providing feedback on puzzles and potential parser holes prior to an official release.

vacri2• 12 years ago

That's good to know - it's not the fiddliness (though done poorly, it would irritate), it's knowing what you want to do and then having to figure out how to get the program to understand it. Thanks for the info.

mcphage• 12 years ago

Modern IF games run ins much more powerful and flexible parser than older ones, and thus are s lot more forgiving about entry. For instance, "speak a word of essential nature" can be stated "speak a word of essential nature", obviously, but also "speak essential word", "say essential word", "speak word of nature", and a whole lot of other combinations.

aepearson2• 12 years ago

Man, I used to LOVE Zork (all of them)...I still have my hand-drawn maps of every single area. Took me months to make them.

robotkilla3• 12 years ago

I used to play Pirate Adventure all the time when i was like 8 or 9 - that game got me into programming in the first place.

aepearson2• 12 years ago

Same here (but with Zork)... Zork lead to Hypercard... Hypercard lead to a career as a programmer. Pretty cool when you think about it.

wuliwong• 12 years ago

I will definitely check this out. I recently played A Dark Room (http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/) on ios. It was really great. The game was also really beautiful and just text. I have been wanting to create a game for some time and playing a Dark Room makes me feel that it is possible as my expertise is in algorithms and web development but I know nothing about animation. I'm excited to try out Hadean Lands.

hamitron• 12 years ago

I played MUDs for many years. I miss those days.

blakeja• 12 years ago

Glad to see someone post this. I laughed when I saw this article and some of the comments here. I laugh at most games which think they are "complex" or "challenging", whatever. Go play a MUD, one of the hard ones, get back to me.

tunesmith2• 12 years ago

MUDs were ridiculously fun. In college I was starting an LPMud of my own and somehow stumbled into using lex/yacc to alter the room and dialogue descriptions depending on point of view. For instance, a character would leave town to visit a cursed place, and then when they came back to town, they'd find it completely abandoned and threatening. But meanwhile, the other players in the town would experience the character speaking in with bizarrely altered words and speech patterns since the character was possessed. (I did this by taking the Swedish Chef filter and altering it.) But then the university admins found it and deleted it. Argh.

I had a friend whose character figured out how to put on a hockey mask, take out a chainsaw, and then hack off your limbs and give your limbs back to you - this was by coding from within the game, sort of.

zarify• 12 years ago

One of the really nice things I found about MUDs was how surprisingly accessible they were for creating your own content. I taught myself to program on an LPMUD, and the multi user nature of MUDs taught me a fair bit about optimising code, even for simple class abilities for characters, since they were typically run on underpowered boxes that people had brought in and dumped on a university network, and when players find out that some times can make the server chug for everyone else by using abilities, they will and encourage others to do so as well :)

Uni taught me a lot about the theory of the things that I'd learned in practice previously through MUDs.

nfoz• 12 years ago

Kids these days still play MUDs. They're called MMOs.

WoW is just a skin on top of a MUD; but said MUD skins are nothing new either.

foobarian2• 12 years ago

A lpMUD I used to play is still up and running 25 years later. At this point though it's just a chat room with spells for the admin staff.

NateG• 12 years ago

I cut my teeth on games like Zork when I was a kid and never looked back. Text based games have always captured my interest and I often tell my friends that there is no better graphics engine than your imagination. Many of the games I made in my spare time were text based in nature like old school professional wrestling sims, adventures games, etc and there is a surprisingly high number of people in the world who still enjoy them (young and old) as is evidenced by this article and my latest game (shameless plug in 3, 2, 1: Pit of War [1]). I don't believe I've ever spent money on a mobile game because its awesome 3D graphics, but I have spent money on a mostly text based game with an awesome story, or something like Gemini Rue with its retro style graphics and intriguing story and will happily do so again. Story is key for these types of games and I believe they leave a much longer lasting impression, at least for me anyway. My game that I mentioned above is more of a strategy pvp arena fighting game so there isn't the story element there yet (it is planned for 2015), however, I often get emails from my players telling me how much they enjoy the fact it is text based and they're happy to support continued development. Don't be afraid to try this genre out if you are small team or just one person. You won't get fawned over by the press but you'll have the ability to create a rich, fun and detailed world and with some creatively placed still images and an engaging story or game mechanics many people out there will pay you for your efforts if that is one of your goals. Be attentive to your player base, be good to them and they will reward you in spades for keeping one of their favorite genres alive that the mainstream have all but called dead and buried many times over.

[1] http://www.pitofwar.com

johnchristopher• 12 years ago

I am a bit surprised text-only video games or interactive fictions don't bring back the narratology vs ludology debate from ~10 years ago.

jameshart2• 12 years ago

On the subject of IF, programming language geeks should all check out Inform 7 - Graham Nelson's programming tool for creating text-based games that run on the Infocom Z-machine (and other related formats). There are a large number of truly astonishing things about the language, compiler and development environment. For example:

- the text editor supports elastic tabstops

- its documentation is embedded right into the development environment, beautifully complete and well written, and filled with great little examples

- compilation error messages are delightfuly detailed, specific, and useful. But if the same error is repeated, the compiler usually tells you "again, this doesn't make sense" rather than hitting you with a wall of repetition.

- many of the language's tools are for creating new language syntaxes for you to write your program with, rather than for the player to use in the game. You can create your own nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions to use in your descriptions of the world.

- Its relationships system is very powerful, and includes first-class support for performing operations on the graphs defined by relationships. For example, rooms are related by adjacency, and you can enquire what room is 'the next step via the adjacency relation' from one room towards another to have characters navigate towards a goal - but equally you can create our own relationships and perform similar operations on those.

- in spite of the syntactic restrictions of trying to 'read like English', it surfaces surprisingly rich functional and generics syntaxes; there's a real, grown-up programming language in there.

It is definitely worth a weekend play, if you're looking for a completely different kind of language for a change.

Karunamon3• 12 years ago

To give an example of the language. Let's say you want a room where the player is eaten by a grue if they linger too long:

    A room has a number called grue counter. The grue counter of a room is usually 0.
    A room can be grue infested. A room is usually not grue infested.

    Every turn while the player is in a grue infested room:
        Increase the grue counter of the location by one.

    The dungeon is a room. "You stand in a basic medieval dungeon." The dungeon is grue infested.

    The first time the player enters the dungeon:
        try looking;
        say "It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."
    
    Grue lunch is a scene. Grue lunch begins when the grue counter of the dungeon is greater than 10.
    When grue lunch begins:
        	say "A large, smelly, foul tempered creature resembling a cross between a troll and an orc lumbers out from one of the open passageways. It sniffs the air, catches your scent, and looses a mighty roar! Before you are able to do anything else, it quickly lunges forward, chomping down on your head with a sickening [bold type]*crunch*"	;
	end the story saying "You have been eaten by a grue."

This is the actual syntax, and it is surprisingly readable. Getting used to what the parser wants you to say can be tricky sometimes - just because the language is english like doesn't mean you can write your code in completely free-form english, but it's damn close!

Once you've gotten your head around a few of the foibles, it's a lot less like writing a program and a lot more like just writing a book. In any case, agreed heartily with parent, it's a lot of fun to play around with!

JabavuAdams2• 12 years ago

Wow! I was trying to create something like this for knowledge representation, last week. Ended up reading some of the CLIPS manual, then deciding to roll my own, as usual.

Wow. Programming is so faddish! I know this, but it's still surprising. What other problems that we're struggling with have been basically solved, in some currently unpopular corner?

mintplant2• 12 years ago

Emily Short's Inform implementation of extensible "computers" makes for a good read. (Note that anything in [square brackets] is a comment and not interpreted, except when between double quotes, where it's like string interpolation.)

http://inform7.com/extensions/Emily%20Short/Computers/source...

I especially like the section that implements "search engines", building off of the terms defined in the chapters leading up to it.

http://inform7.com/extensions/Emily%20Short/Computers/source...

Michael Callaghan's fixed-point math extension is less prose-like but worth a peek. It shows how some of the more traditional programming language features can be translated to Inform (eg. explicit loops with ranges as repeat with X running from 1 to 7).

http://inform7.com/extensions/Michael%20Callaghan/Fixed%20Po...

klibertp• 12 years ago

I'm not sure I appreciate the syntax. Most hackers have a thing for brevity: a subconcious craving for the code as terse as possible without sacrificing readability (this, of course, is problematic in very many ways...). I would probably like using something like Racket's Scribble better: on the surface it's just as human-readable, but you're only one '@' sign away from a real Lisp beneath.

Apofis• 12 years ago

Why can we not write applications this way? Are there any languages that allow you to use more natural language to describe your application? I've heard of Behavior-driven development, is this what it is?

gwern• 12 years ago

   There are a large number of truly astonishing things about the language, compiler and development environment. For example:

    - the text editor supports elastic tabstops

Spoken like a true programmer. :)

jameshart2• 12 years ago

Priorities :)

dfan4• 12 years ago

Hadean Lands (the subject of the article) is written in it.

It's a really cool language that is likely to change your thinking in a few ways.

syllogism• 12 years ago

I happened to play Violet earlier today --- I hadn't played a text adventure since I was a kid. This was really good.

http://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2Fi...

nsxwolf2• 12 years ago

Because of this article I discovered "Mind Forever Voyaging" which I started playing on my lunch break. I'm pretty floored that a text adventure like this was around in 1985.

mgkimsal• 12 years ago

In case you haven't seen it, check out the GET LAMP documentary: http://www.getlamp.com

petercooper• 12 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU

dfabulich• 12 years ago

If you enjoy this type of game, you might enjoy attending an interactive fiction meetup. At meetups, we play IF games, talk about them, and meet with other IF authors. Andrew Plotkin (author of Hadean Lands) regularly appears at the Boston meetup.

* http://pr-if.org/ Boston

* http://www.meetup.com/sf-bay-area-interactive-fiction/ Bay Area

* http://www.meetup.com/Oxford-and-London-Interactive-Fiction-... Oxford and London

robotkilla3• 12 years ago

Any in Chicago? These games got me into programming when i was pretty young (scott adams style games that is - maybe I have IF entangled with text adventure?). Would love to meet up with some people who are into this stuff still - i've been playing around with some concepts recently for my own text adventure games.

hackuser• 12 years ago

For those interested in more: Interactive fiction (IF) is one kind in a larger genre, e-lit, or electronic literature. I've recently started exploring it. Here are some links, but a warning that much in the descriptions, reviews, etc. is written for technical experts -- in the humanities. (If you want to complain, first look at your own documentation. Now you know how end-users feel. ;) )

* Beginners overview of e-lit at ELO (see below) [http://directory.eliterature.org/node/3706]: Overview, includes links to more, a decent starting point but a bit technical.

* Electronic Literature Collection by ELO [http://collection.eliterature.org/]: Collections of leading e-lit works, AFAICT. A pretty good place to start reading. The works themselves are less technical than the descriptions, reviews, etc. of them.

* Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) [http://eliterature.org/]: The most comprehensive resource, but maybe not the best starting place. They also have a large database of e-lit, [http://directory.eliterature.org/]

* Electronic Literature Knowledge Base (ELMCIP) [http://elmcip.net/knowledgebase]: "cross-referenced, contextualized information about authors, creative works, critical writing, and practices."

* Electronic Poetry Center [http://epc.buffalo.edu/]: Community center with very broad collection, also curated collection(s?), author info, links, festival info.

apricot• 12 years ago

Always upvote Andrew Plotkin.

sehugg• 12 years ago

I think the genre is due for a revival. Another to look at is inkle's 80 Days. It has some simple illustrations, but is mostly a choose-your-own-adventure style interaction with focus on conversation. Very well done.

dfan4• 12 years ago

Heck, the revival has already happened (at least compared to a decade ago). There was a long article in the New York Times the other month about Twine, for example.

jqgatsby• 12 years ago

I still remember the riddle on the cliff in Beyond Zork: My tines be long, My tines be short, My tines end ere my first report. What am I?

I got stuck on the game because I couldn't answer it. Spent months and then years thinking about it. Then one day the answer came to me, but by then we didn't have a Commodore 64 anymore.

Then in the 90s they rereleased the games as part of Return To Zork. I eagerly raced back to the cliff to proudly intone my answer! A portal was revealed, and I ran inside to claim my reward...and was promptly killed by a giant slug.

Good times! Btw, I'm sure many people on this list could reply with the answer to this riddle. I would invite you not to, to give others an opportunity to noodle on it if they wish.

tunesmith2• 12 years ago

FWIW, the article links to another article about Emily Short and Versu that isn't quite true anymore. They apparently worked out an agreement with Linden Labs, and Blood and Laurels is now available on the App Store for $2.99 - I bought it last night but haven't had a chance to play it yet.

Text-only video game shows how genre can be beautiful, innovative and complex

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