Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky
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III. Here Be Dragons: the (Pre)History of the Adventure Game
III. Here Be Dragons: the (pre)history of the adventure game The past is like a broken mirror, as you piece it together you cut yourself. Your image keeps shifting and you change with it. MAX PAYNE 2: THE FALL OF MAX PAYNE At the end of the Middle Ages, Europe’s thousand year sleep – or perhaps thousand year germination – between antiquity and the Renaissance, wondrous things were happening. High culture, long dormant, began to stir again. The spirit of adventure grew once more in the human breast. Great cathedrals rose, the spirit captured in stone, embodiments of the human quest for understanding. But there were other cathedrals, cathedrals of the mind, that also embodied that quest for the unknown. They were maps, like the fantastic, and often fanciful, Mappa Mundi – the map of everything, of the known world, whose edges both beckoned us towards the unknown, and cautioned us with their marginalia – “Here be dragons.” (Bradbury & Seymour, 1997, p. 1357)1 At the start of the twenty-first century, the exploration of our own planet has been more or less completed2. When we want to experience the thrill, enchantment and dangers of past voyages of discovery we now have to rely on books, films and theme parks. Or we play a game on our computer, preferably an adventure game, as the experience these games create is very close to what the original adventurers must have felt. In games of this genre, especially the older type adventure games, the gamer also enters an unknown labyrinthine space which she has to map step by step, unaware of the dragons that might be lurking in its dark recesses. -
The Post Infocom Text Adventure Collection
The Post Infocom Text Adventure Collection Many of us played and loved the text adventures produced by Infocom in the 1980’s. They were rich in story and puzzles, and contained some excellent writing. In the years since Infocom’s demise in 1989, there have been a lot of good games produced using the Z-Machine - the game format that Infocom was using. This gives us a chance to make these modern-day games run on the computers of the 80’s, like the Commodore 64. I decided to create a collection of Z-machine games for the C64, and this is it. All in all, it’s 31 games, released in 1993-2015. Each game has been put into its own directory, in which is also an empty disk for game saves and a file called AUTOSWAP.LST to make life easier for people using the SD2IEC diskdrive substitute. If you haven’t played text adventures before, or feel that you never got the hang of it, you should read the chapter How to play a text adventure. If you want more of a background on Infocom and the game format they used, you should read the chapter about The Zork Machine at the end of this document. There is also a chapter about the process of porting Z-machine games to the C64 and, finally, a chapter about writing your own games. I created this documentation as a PDF, so that you could easily print it out and keep it nearby if you’re enjoying the collection on a real C64. -
Download Twisty Little Passages: an Approach to Interactive Fiction
TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES: AN APPROACH TO INTERACTIVE FICTION DOWNLOAD FREE BOOK Nick Montfort | 302 pages | 01 Apr 2005 | MIT Press Ltd | 9780262633185 | English | Cambridge, Mass., United States Slashdot Top Deals I got about a quarter of the way into this and had to stop. In Montfort's words, Infocomwhich was founded June 22, by Lebling, Blank, Anderson, and seven other MIT alumni, "began work on the foundation of IF while the plot of ground that it was to be built upon had not been completely surveyed. Slashdot Apparel is back! Genre fiction is a type of literature, and trying to actually seperate one from the other is a fool's errand. I think what you may be getting at is the fact that writing a compelling IF world is literally NP hard. Hitchhiker's Guide project, which began in February and was slated ambitiously to be completed by the following Christmas. Friend Reviews. Instead, what this book really is is a very comprehensive history of the form. There's really not that much meat there; Montfort goes into a detailed history and categorization of riddles that isn't all that relevant to IF. Played them, loved them, but goddam that transparent crystal 3D mze was a killer. Nick Montfort. Montfort then discusses Adventure Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction its precursors including the I Ching and Dungeons and Dragonsand follows this with an examination of mainframe text games developed in response, focusing on the most influential work of that era, Zork. The reviewer's memory of Monty Python's a little weak. -
Wild Kratts®: Ocean Adventure! Now Open!
Summer/Fall 2019 News and Events for Members, Donors, and Friends WILD KRATTS®: OCEAN ADVENTURE! NOW OPEN! The Strong Unearths Rare Atari Footage through Digital Preservation Efforts While digitizing U-Matic tapes (an analog videocassette format) in The Strong’s Atari Coin-Op Division collection, museum curators and library staff recently discovered a wide range of never-before-seen footage—including video of Atari’s offices and manufacturing lines, its arcade cabinet construction practices, and company-wide staff celebrations. The footage also includes gameplay of many of Atari’s popular titles, as well as video concepts for games never released. The video collection offers an unprecedented look at the inner-workings of Atari at its height at a time that it helped to lay the groundwork for the modern video game industry. The museum’s digitization efforts are made possible, in part, by a grant from the Rochester Regional Library Council. Screenshot from unearthed Atari footage. Fairy Magic Storybook Summer Through October 31 Weekdays, July 8–August 30 • 11 a.m.–3 p.m. Take a magical stroll through Spend the summer with your favorite storybook characters! Listen to Dancing Wings Butterfly story readings at 2 p.m., take pictures with featured characters, and Garden. Listen to enchanting enjoy activities based on their stories. music as you walk among hundreds of butterflies and July 8–12: How Do Dinosaurs…? whimsical flowers, including Meet the Dinosaur from Jane Yolen’s popular series, orchids and begonias, and recreate story scenes with toy dinosaurs, and make check out fairy house doors a dinosaur headband and feet. -
Jay Simon 3/18/2002 STS 145 Case Study Zork: a Study of Early
Jay Simon 3/18/2002 STS 145 Case Study Zork: A Study of Early Interactive Fiction I: Introduction If you are a fan of interactive fiction, or have any interest in text-based games from the early 1980’s, then you are no doubt familiar with a fascinating series known as Zork. For the other 97 percent of the population, the original Zork games are text-based adventures in which the player is given a setting, and types in a command in standard English. The command is processed, and sometimes changes the state of the game. This results in a new situation that is then communicated to the user, restarting the cycle. This type of adventure game is classified as belonging to a genre called “interactive fiction”. Zork is exceptional in that the early Zork games are by far the most popular early interactive fiction titles ever released. It is interesting to examine why these games sold so well, while most other interactive fiction games could not sell for free in the 1980’s. As we will see, this is a result of many different technological and stylistic aspects of Zork that separate it from the rest of the genre. Zork is a unique artifact in gaming history. II: MIT and Infocom – The Prehistory of Zork Zork was not a modern project developed under a strict timeline by a designated team of programmers, but credit is given to two MIT phenoms named Marc Blank and Dave Lebling. Its history can be traced all the way back to the invention of a medium-sized machine called the PDP-10, in the 1960’s. -
A Chronicle of Map Interfaces in Games
Maps, Navigation and Transportation: Find a way DIS ’20, July 6–10, 2020, Eindhoven, Netherlands Paper to Pixels: A Chronicle of Map Interfaces in Games Z O. Toups,1,3 Nicolas LaLone,4 Katta Spiel,5 Bill Hamilton2,3 1Play & Interactive Experiences for Learning Lab / 2Participatory Live Experiences Laboratory 3Computer Science Department, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, USA 4Bridge Lab, Department of Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis, College of Information Science and Technology, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA 5e-Media Research Lab, KU Leuven, BE & Centre for Teacher Education, University of Vienna, AT [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ABSTRACT More than physical navigation, maps navigate the complex Game map interfaces provide an alternative perspective on and dynamic world of human culture. Maps on news media the worlds players inhabit. Compared to navigation applica- show political and socio-economic divides. Maps can show us tions popular in day-to-day life, game maps have different where people like ice cream over frozen yogurt or can be used affordances to match players’ situated goals. To contextualize by sports commentators showing us where specific athletes and understand these differences and how they developed, we have placed a ball or puck over time. present a historical chronicle of game map interfaces. Starting Despite that ubiquity, maps in and of themselves are generally from how games came to involve maps, we trace how maps static, a relic of the paper to which they owe their creation. are first separate from the game, becoming more and more There is so much more that maps can provide users given the integrated into play until converging in smartphone-style inter- growing ubiquity of computation and the increasing digital faces. -
Chapter 1 Introduction
I. Introduction This is it. This is your story. It all begins here... Auron (FINAL FANTASY X) Compared to film and especially to books, computer games are a very young medium. The first computer game SPACEWAR! dates from 1962. It was programmed to run on a DEC PDP-11. As these computers were quite costly2, it was not until the commercial breakthrough of the integrated circuit (IC) at the beginning of the 1970s that commercial computer games became a viable option3. At first, they could only be found in Arcade halls, but by the early 1980s they had also found their way into our homes. Nowadays, of course, we cannot imagine a world without computer games, a fact that made Nicholson Baker recently write: “I’d never held a video-game controller until last fall. Which is a pretty sad admission, as if I’d said in 1966 that I’d never watched ‘Bonanza’ or heard a song by the Rolling Stones” (2010, p. 53). Between the early 1980s and today, computer games have come a long way. If we look back at game history we can see that the original two categories of computer games — i.e. visual action based games that stem from SPACEWAR!, and maze-like story games that started with the 1975-76 game THE COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE — grew into a multitude of games and game genres. In the beginning the maze-like story games seemed to remediate literature (as interactive fiction or electronic novels), particularly since they only consisted of text. When graphics were added (especially full motion video), their descendants were seen as a remediation of film (interactive cinema)4. -
Subterranean Space As Videogame Place | Electronic Book Review
electronic home about policies and submissions log in tags book share: facebook google+ pinterest twitter review writing under constraint first person technocapitalism writing (post)feminism electropoetics internet nation end construction critical ecologies webarts image + narrative music/sound/noise critical ecologies fictions present search Vibrant Wreckage: Salvation and New View full-screen This essay appears in these Materialism in Moby-Dick and Ambient gatherings: Parking Lot by Dale Enggass Cave Gave Game: Subterranean Space as 2018-05-29 Videogame Place Digital and Natural Ecologies by Dennis Jerz and David Thomas A Strange Metapaper on Computing 2015-10-06 Natural Language by Manuel Portela and Ana Marques daJerz and Thomas identify our fascination with Silva natural cave spaces, and then chart that 2018-05-07 fascination as it descends into digital realms, all in order to illustrate the importance of “the cave” as a metaphor for how we interact with our environment. Beyond Ecological Crisis: Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems by Hannes Bergthaller 2018-04-01 Note: This essay is a part of a “gathering” on the topic of digital and natural ecologies. Thirteen Ways of Looking at ElectronicIn the popular conception of game development, fantastic videogame spaces Literature, or, A Print Essai on Tone in Electronic Literature, 1.0 are whimsically spun from the intangible thread of computer code. Like by Mario Aquilina and Ivan Callus literary authors, videogame developers take on the roles of dreamers of new 2018-02-04 places and inventors of new worlds. This popular notion remains at odds with the relatively small number of formal game spaces typically found in Thinking With the Planet: a Review of Tvideogames.he In his chapter “Space in the Video Game” Mark J.P. -
IF Theory Reader
IF Theory Reader edited by Kevin Jackson-Mead J. Robinson Wheeler > Transcript On Press Boston, MA All authors of articles in this book retain their own copyrights. Neither the editors nor the publisher make any copyright claims. Version 1, March 2011. Version 2, April 2011. Please send corrections to [email protected]. Contents Preface Crimes Against Mimesis 1 Roger S. G. Sorolla Theory Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction 25 Nick Montfort Characterizing, If Not Defining, Interactive Fiction 59 Andrew Plotkin not that you may remember time: Interactive Fiction, Stream-of-Consciousness Writing, and Free Will 67 Mark Silcox 2 Brief Dada Angels 89 Ryan Stevens, writing as Rybread Celsius Object Relations 91 Graham Nelson IF as Argument 101 Duncan Stevens The Success of Genre in Interactive Fiction 111 Neil Yorke-Smith Parser at the Threshold: Lovecraftian Horror in Interactive Fiction 129 Michael Gentry Distinguishing Between Game Design and Analysis: One View 135 Gareth Rees Natural Language, Semantic Analysis, and Interactive Fiction 141 Graham Nelson Afterword: Five Years Later 189 Graham Nelson Craft Challenges of a Broad Geography 203 Emily Short Thinking Into the Box: On the Use and Deployment of Puzzles 229 Jon Ingold PC Personality and Motivations 249 Duncan Stevens Landscape and Character in IF 261 Paul O’Brian Hint Development for IF 279 Lucian Smith Descriptions Constructed 291 Stephen Granade Mapping the Tale: Scene Description in IF 299 J. Robinson Wheeler Repetition of Text in Interactive Fiction 317 Jason Dyer NPC Dialogue Writing 325 Robb Sherwin NPC Conversation Systems 331 Emily Short History 10 Years of IF: 1994–2004 359 Duncan Stevens The Evolution of Short Works: From Sprawling Cave Crawls to Tiny Experiments 369 Stephen Granade History of Italian IF 379 Francesco Cordella Racontons une histoire ensemble: History and Characteristics of French IF 389 Hugo Labrande Preface This is a book for which people in the interactive fiction community have been waiting for quite some time. -
Creating Video Games for the Visually Impaired Anthony Russo, Neal
Creating Video Games for the Visually Impaired Anthony Russo, Neal Sacks, & Steven Vandal WPI IQP MBJ 0007 Professor Brian Moriarty April 12, 2012 Introduction The video game industry has expanded rapidly in recent years, growing from a 9.5 billion dollar industry in 2007 to a 25.1 billion dollar industry in 2010. This growth is due to the common interest that almost all Americans now hold in games, as a seventy-two percent of all americans play video games on a regular basis (ESA). However, because games rely heavily on impressive graphics and are primarily an immersive visual experience, very few games are made with the blind or the visually impaired in mind. In the 1970s when video games first emerged, it was virtually impossible to create a game that did not involve some sort of visuals. This is mainly due to a lack of technology, as almost all computers, games, and electronic speakers and displays could only output crude, pixilated visuals and rough, synthesized sound. However, technology has steadily improved to the point where games that do not need visuals are a possibility. Games for the visually impaired are an untapped industry, especially with the technology that exists today. By conducting interviews with the visually impaired we discovered what types of games the visual impaired prefer, what they would enjoy to play, and what ideas they have for developing these games. The History of Video Games for the Visually Impaired There are many games that can be played by the visually impaired. Interactive fiction and other text-based games have been popular for a long time, though to a lesser extent in recent years. -
The Best Websites for Downloading and Playing Classic and New Text Adventure Games
The Best Websites for Downloading and Playing Classic and New Text Adventure Games Before computers could handle graphical games, there were text adventure games. The games are interactive stories, so playing a text adventure game is like being part of a book in which you affect the story. Text adventure games are also referred to as “interactive fiction.” Interactive Fiction (IF) is actually a more accurate term for text adventure games, because these games can cover any topics, such as romances or comedies, not just adventures. They can also simulate real life. Even though computers can now handle intensely graphical games, playing text adventure games can still be fun. It’s like reading a good book and getting lost in the universe of the story, except you become the hero or heroine and affect the ending of the story. We’ve collected some links to websites where you can download classic and new text adventure games or play them online. There are also some free tools available for creating your own text adventure games. We even found a documentary about the evolution of computer adventure games and some articles about the art and craft of developing the original text adventure games. Web-Adventures Web-Adventures[1] allows you to play classic text adventure games online for free in your browser. You don’t need to install any applets or plugins or enable JavaScript. You can even play some of these games in a browser on mobile devices. The very first text adventure game from the late 1970’s, Colossal Cave Adventure, is available on this site. -
Pirate Or Hackers Bible More Like Guidelines...= a = Abbrev: /*-Breev
Pirate or Hackers Bible More like guidelines.... = A = abbrev: /*-breev'/, /*-brev'/ n. Common abbreviation for `abbreviation'. ABEND: [ABnormal END] /ah'bend/, /*-bend'/ n. Abnormal termination (of software); {crash}; {lossage}. Derives from an error message on the IBM 360; used jokingly by hackers but seriously mainly by {code grinder}s. Usually capitalized, but may appear as `abend'. Hackers will try to persuade you that ABEND is called `abend' because it is what system operators do to the machine late on Friday when they want to call it a day, and hence is from the German `Abend' = `Evening'. accumulator: n. 1. Archaic term for a register. On-line use of it as a synonym for `register' is a fairly reliable indication that the user has been around for quite a while and/or that the architecture under discussion is quite old. The term in full is almost never used of microprocessor registers, for example, though symbolic names for arithmetic registers beginning in `A' derive from historical use of the term `accumulator' (and not, actually, from `arithmetic'). Confusingly, though, an `A' register name prefix may also stand for `address', as for example on the Motorola 680x0 family. 2. A register being used for arithmetic or logic (as opposed to addressing or a loop index), especially one being used to accumulate a sum or count of many items. This use is in context of a particular routine or stretch of code. "The FOOBAZ routine uses A3 as an accumulator." 3. One's in-basket (esp. among old-timers who might use sense 1). "You want this reviewed? Sure, just put it in the accumulator." (See {stack}.) ACK: /ak/ interj.