“Get Ye Flask”
… and it say…
“You can’t get ye flask!”
… and you just have to sit there and imagine why on earth you can’t get ye flask…
– StrongBad, 2004
Text Adventures! … or Text-Based Adventure Games… or Interactive Fiction… or just IF… whatever you call them, I’ve got a weird history with the genre. For younger gamers, who may not even be aware that these are a thing, they are games where the interface is entirely text based, usually looking a little like some kind of terminal window. The player enters instructions on what they want to do, and the game responds with some kind of descriptive text. For those of us who played these many years ago (or still do) then there’s a particular set of instructions, ‘style’, or conventions to the genre that you learn: For example, you can move between areas using compass directions, use key verbs like look to describe what’s around you, ‘i‘ to show your inventory, examine item to hone in on something specific in the scene…. heck, there’s a whole load of them, but you get the idea…
It’s a genre that sits in that interesting space of “It just made sense at the time” and “in hindsight it was basically a work around for the contemporary technical limitations“, which always makes me wonder what aspects of games that are current will be perceived as a ‘workaround’ in the future? For text-adventures, their backdrop was a home console market that could manage some blocky shapes moving around the screen, or early computing that were mostly text only blasted at the user through a green and black screen. Released in 1977, ‘ZORK’ probably represents one of the best known examples, but it’s not a game that I’ve ever played. Short descriptive paragraphs or scenes, characters, and objects served to power the most powerful graphics engine of all… Human Imagination…
… oh yes, I actually went there…
Continue reading “‘In the StackZ’ – ACT I of my text adventure can be played now!… or more interestingly “Why I Decided to Write a Text Adventure””