* * * * (Aka the New Zork Times)
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Now That I've Cleared out the New
Issue #14 The Magazine for Interactive Fiction Enthusiasts Now that I’ve cleared out the New Year’s Eve party detritus — the confetti is swept, the empty champagne bottles tucked in with the recyclable trash — I’d like to venture forth with a 1998 proposition, not so much a resolution, for the IF commu- nity: let’s turn the now-yearly IF competition into a biennial event, celebrated every two years perhaps much like the Olympics are now. The benefits are readily apparent: IF programmers could have twice as long to fine-tune their entries, investing more time in thoughtful writing, elegant puzzle design, fleshed-out storylines, and better bug-testing; more aspiring programmers would toss their hats in the ring; while the rest of the IF fans would have more time to enjoy and methodically explore each new competition game — savoring more fully developed, memorable games instead of hurrying through too many games that, while generally well-conceived, were too rushed through development (to meet competition deadlines) to prove really enjoyable. Contents: While many IF fans have more free time than I do — and anyone who’s stayed tuned this long for XYZZYnews’s uneven Top 10 Picks for IF on the Web ................2 publishing schedule knows that I haven’t much to spare — just as many face even heavier demands from their work, family, Letters.......................3 school, and other obligations. So let’s give ourselves a collec- The Effects of tive break...! Many of us took years to finish Zork, Adventure, ‘XYZZY’ in the 1997 Trinity, and the other classic text adventures. -
The New Zork Times Dark – Carry a Lamp VOL
“All the Grues New Zork Area Weather: That Fit, We Print” The New Zork Times Dark – carry a lamp VOL. 3. .No. 1 WINTER 1984 INTERNATIONAL EDITION SORCERER HAS THE MAGIC TOUCH InfoNews Roundup New Game! Hint Booklets Sorcerer, the second in the In December, Infocom's long- Enchanter series of adventures in the awaited direct mail operation got mystic arts, is now available. The underway. Many of the functions game was written by Steve formerly provided by the Zork Users Meretzky, whose hilarious science Group were taken over by Infocom. fiction game, Planetfall, was named Maps and InvisiClues hint booklets by InfoWorld as the Best Adventure were produced for all 10 of Game of 1983. In Sorcerer, you are a Infocom's products. The games member of the prestigious Circle of themselves were also made available Enchanters, a position that you primarily as a service to those of you achieved in recognition of your in remote geographical areas and to success in defeating the Warlock those who own the less common Krill in Enchanter. computer systems. When the game starts, you realize Orders are processed by the that Belboz, the Eldest of the Circle, Creative Fulfillment division of the and the most powerful Enchanter in DM Group, one of the most the land, has disappeared. Perhaps he respected firms in direct mail. Their has just taken a vacation, but it facilities are in the New York metro- wouldn't be like him to leave without politan area, which explains the letting you know. You remember strange addresses and phone num- that he has been experimenting with bers you'll see on the order forms. -
The New Zork Times by Brief but Savage Downpour
® “All the Gnus Weather: Thic fog, followed That Fit, We Print” The New Zork Times by brief but savage downpour. VOL. 4. .No. 2 —SUMMER 1985— INTERFERON EDITION New Release: A Mind Forever Voyaging A Mind Forever Voyaging, the first were to be introduced. While you're advanced-level Science Fiction story busy exploring the future, the scien- from Infocom, is for true text- tists and programmers who created adventure buffs. Why? Because it you are honing and perfecting the has more locations to visit (several simulation's parameters. Thus, as the hundred), more things to do, more story progresses, you can travel responses, and a large vocabulary further and further in time, watching (1800+ words) than any of our previ- Rockvil prosper as the Plan ously released products. succeeds, or perish as it fails. Only The story takes place in 21st- you can tell on what course the century Rockvil, South Dakota. The country sets itself by adopting the United States of North America has Plan. fallen prey to incredibly high unem- While there are several puzzles to ployment and crime rates. Political keep players on their toes, designer indiffererence, perhaps caused by Steve Meretzky (author of Planetfall backward educational systems or and Sorcerer, and co-author of The diminishing national resources, has Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) Items from Dr. Perleman’s desk are contained in every A Mind Forever swept the nation. Exploiting this op- concentrated more on immersing the Voyaging package. portunity, Senator Richard Ryder has player in a vast, highly detailed, develop (sic) the Plan for a Renewed realistic world; a vision of the National Purpose, stressing patriot- destiny of mankind. -
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. -
Reading and Acting While Blindfolded: the Need for Semantics in Text Game Agents
Reading and Acting while Blindfolded: The Need for Semantics in Text Game Agents Shunyu Yaoy∗ Karthik Narasimhany Matthew Hausknechtz yPrinceton University zMicrosoft Research {shunyuy, karthikn}@princeton.edu [email protected] Abstract et al., 2020), open-domain question answering systems (Ammanabrolu et al., 2020), knowledge Text-based games simulate worlds and inter- act with players using natural language. Re- graphs (Ammanabrolu and Hausknecht, 2020; Am- cent work has used them as a testbed for manabrolu et al., 2020; Adhikari et al., 2020), and autonomous language-understanding agents, reading comprehension systems (Guo et al., 2020). with the motivation being that understanding Meanwhile, most of these models operate un- the meanings of words or semantics is a key der the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, component of how humans understand, reason, where the agent explores the same environment and act in these worlds. However, it remains in repeated episodes, learning a value function or unclear to what extent artificial agents utilize semantic understanding of the text. To this policy to maximize game score. From this per- end, we perform experiments to systematically spective, text games are just special instances of reduce the amount of semantic information a partially observable Markov decision process available to a learning agent. Surprisingly, we (POMDP) (S; T; A; O; R; γ), where players issue find that an agent is capable of achieving high text actions a 2 A, receive text observations o 2 O scores even in the complete absence of lan- and scalar rewards r = R(s; a), and the under- guage semantics, indicating that the currently lying game state s 2 S is updated by transition popular experimental setup and models may 0 be poorly designed to understand and leverage s = T (s; a). -
Zork • Manual Cover C M Y K August 1993
It was once believed that evil magic had been defeated and cast from the lands forever…that a once great underground empire had collapsed, never to rise again. This was foolish, wishful thinking…prayers of the innocent and naive. Evil magic can not die…it waits. Waits for the precise moment in time to regroup and return to claim its dominance. In the dark recesses of every shadow… In the heart of every terrifying nightmare… In the echo of every painful shriek… These are the way stations for the dark An Epic Adventure elements! in the And now is the moment of their return… Great ™ Underground Empire ™ ™ An Activision™ Company An Activision Company 28849 The Disc Company Return To Zork • Manual Cover C M Y K August 1993 25% 75% 100% 50% 50% 25% 75% 100% 50% 50% 25% 75% 100% 50% 50% 25% 75% 100% 50% 50% 25% 75% 100% 50% 50% 25% 75% 100% 50% 50% 25% 75% 100% 50% 50% 25% 75% 100% 50% 50% 2% 97% 2% 97% 2% 97% 2% 97% 2% 97% 2% 97% 2% 97% 2% 97% 3% 95% 3% 95% 3% 95% 3% 95% 3% 95% 3% 95% 3% 95% 3% 95% 4% 93% 4% 93% 4% 93% 4% 93% 4% 93% 4% 93% 4% 93% 4% 93% C+M+Y K C+Y C C+M M M+Y Y 3x80% 3x50% 50% K 50% C, 41% M, 41% Y C+M+Y K C+Y C C+M M M+Y Y 3x80% 3x50% 50% K 50% C, 41% M, 41% Y Manual 6/9/99 12:17 PM Page 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS HOW TO PLAY RETURN TO ZORK .........................................................¤ Navigating through the Empire of Zork .............................................¤ Using your Inventory.........................................................................› Action Interface.................................................................................‡ -
Z-Machine and Descendants
Glk! A universal user interface for IF! Andrew Plotkin — BangBangCon ’17 Glk! A universal user interface! for interactive fiction! Relatively universal, anyhow. Universal-ish. # 1 Glk! A universal user interface for IF! Andrew Plotkin — BangBangCon ’17 Andrew Plotkin [email protected] http://zarfhome.com/ https://github.com/erkyrath @zarfeblong on Twitter Glk, Glulx, Hadean Lands, System’s Twilight, Spider and Web, Capture the Flag with Stuff, Shade, this t-shirt I’m wearing, Seltani, The Dreamhold, Branches and Twigs and Thorns, quite a lot of adventure game reviews, Praser 5, Boodler, A Change in the Weather, an imperfect diagram of the Soul Reaver timeline, Dual Transform, Draco Concordans, and you know how that game Mafia is also called Werewolf? Ok, funny story there — # 2 Glk! A universal user interface for IF! Andrew Plotkin — BangBangCon ’17 Zork 1 (Infocom) # 3 GrueFacts™: A grue can eat doughnuts indefinitely. Glk! A universal user interface for IF! Andrew Plotkin — BangBangCon ’17 Z-machine and descendants 1979: Z-machine design 1980: Z-machine version 3 (Zork 1) 1985: Z-machine version 4 (A Mind Forever Voyaging) 1987: ITF (first open-source Z-interpreter) 1988: Z-machine version 6 (Zork Zero) 1989: Infocom shuts down 1993: Inform (Curses) 1994: Inform 5 1996: Inform 6 1997: Glk spec 1999: Glulx spec 2006: Inform 7 2008: Parchment (first Javascript Z-interpreter) # 4 GrueFacts™: The first grue to swim around the world was named Amelia Nosewig. Glk! A universal user interface for IF! Andrew Plotkin — BangBangCon ’17 XZip (Curses, Graham Nelson) # 5 GrueFacts™: Grues live an average of 67 years, after which they retire to Iceland. -
Z-Machine Interpreters in the 1980S, Infocom Published About Three
By Hugo Labrande Issue #5 : Z-Machine interpreters In the 1980s, Infocom published about three dozen of text adventures on most platforms of the era, from the TRS-80 to the Atari ST. Their method to spend minimal time on portability was to create a virtual machine, the Z-Machine, and compile their games into bytecode that could be read by the Z-Machine. All was needed was some software that could read this bytecode and execute it on a target machine: an interpreter. To ensure that all interpreters behaved coherently, Infocom actually wrote specifications for the Z-Machine (version 3, 4, and 5 for text-only, and 6 for graphical adventures), which specified how the interpreter should behave; this was to make sure that the people tasked with writing a new interpreter would follow the same rules as the other ones. This specification was then reverse-engineered by amateurs as early as the end of the 1980s (Barry Boone on the TI-99/4A, the InfoTaskForce in Australia, etc.). In the 1990s, people added some features and fixed a few inconsistencies, and created version 8, which was basically the same as version 5 but allowed larger file sizes. This gave the Z-Machine standards, which are available online: http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point1/index.html This means that if you’d like to implement a Z-Machine interpreter, all you need to do is follow this specification. Over the years, literally hundreds of Z-Machine interpreters have been written, for sometimes very exotic platforms. They sometimes have their own quirks, can fall out of fashion, or get forgotten; I cannot begin to retrace all the Z-Machine interpreters that have been written. -
The Status Line
Meet Mike’s Important Dream Date Reader Poll See page 7 The Status Line See page 6 Volume VI Number 1 Formerly The New Zork Times Winter/Spring 1987 Douglas Adams' Bureaucracy Not very long ago, Douglas Adams It's a sad story, one that's replayed (who is, as everyone knows, the best- every day for millions of people selling author of that zany interactive worldwide. Of course, it's not always story The Hitchhiker's Guide to the a bank at fault. Sometimes it's the Galaxy™) moved from one apartment postal service, or the telephone com- in London to another. He dutifully pany, or an airline, or the govern- notified everyone of his new address, ment. All of us, at one time or including his bank. In fact, he person- another, feel persecuted by a bureauc- ally went to the bank and filled out a racy. What can be done? change-of-address form. Only Douglas Adams would exact Soon after, Douglas found that he such sweet revenge. He retaliated by was unable to use his credit card. He writing Bureaucracy™, a hilarious discovered that the card had been interactive journey through masses of invalidated by the bank. Apparently, red tape. the bank had sent a new card to his You begin Bureaucracy in your old address. spiffy new apartment. You're going to For weeks, Douglas tried to get the Paris this very afternoon for a combi- bank to acknowledge his change-of- nation training seminar and vacation, address form. He talked to bank offi- so you'll need to leave as soon as you cials, and filled out new forms, and get the money order your boss has applied for another credit card, but mailed you. -
Id4t Ntw Lnrli Wimta See Page 3
"All the Grues The History·of Zork-Part II That Fit, We Print" ID4t Ntw lnrli Wimta See Page 3 VOL. 4 ... No. 2 SPRING 1985 INTERMOLECULAR EDITION Wishbringer™: The Story of Your Dreams Festeron's not a bad place to live. ·Evil One. The Magick Shoppe It's a little seaside town with a owner's beloved cat has been kid picturesque church, a charming napped, and the ransom is an old-fashioned movie theater and a enchanted stone called sparkling bay. There's that Wishbringer . famous tourist attraction, When you leave the Magick Pleasure Wharf, and the Free Shoppe, after agreeing to help its Public Library with its collection proprietress find her cat, the of historic artifacts. There's even charming world of Festeron has a miniature lighthouse. disappeared, familiar people and The only thing Festeron places gone or twisted into doesn't have is a couple of sinister forms. Goldfish have dragons or princesses to spice turned into piranhas, trolls guard things up. But that's okay. You bridges, grues lurk in caves, and spend a lot of time daydreaming, your little post office has become creating a Magick world that you a fortress-like tower. Overseeing can' visit whenever you want. this skewed environment is the The only problem is your boss, Evil One and her omnipresent Mr. Crisp, who always shows up henchmen, the Boot Patrol. when you're just about to polish As you venture through the Included in evezy Wishbringer package are a sealed envelope containing the off the dragon. grotesque realm of the Evil One, ransom note and a glowing Wishbringer stone. -
The New Zork Times Ask Duffy — P
“All the Grues ® Puzzle — pp. 7 & 8 That Fit, We Print” Sports — p. 6 The New Zork Times Ask Duffy — p. 5 VOL. 3. .No. 3 SUMMER 1984 INTERGALLACTIC EDITION YOU’RE ABOUT TO GET YOURSELF INTO VERY DEEP TROUBLE INFOCOM INTRODUCES ™ CUTTHROATS Nights on Hardscrabble Island are lonely and cold when the lighthouse barely pierces the gloom. You sit on your bed, thinking of better times and far-off places. A knock on your door stirs you, and Hevlin, a shipmate you haven't seen for years staggers in. "I'm in trouble," he says. "I had a few too many at The Shanty. I was looking for Red, but he wasn't around, and I started talking about.... Here," he says, handing you a slim volume that you recognize as a shipwreck book written years ago by the Historical Society. You smile. Every diver on the island has looked for those wrecks, without even an old boot to show for it. You open the door, hoping the drunken fool will leave. "I know what you're thinking'," Hevlin scowls, "but look!" He points to the familiar map, and you see new locations marked for two of the wrecks. "Keep it for me," he says. "Just for tonight. It'll be safe here with you. Don't let--." He stops and broods for a moment. "I've got to go find Red!" And with that, Hevlin leaves. You put the book in your dresser and think about following Hevlin. Then you hear a scuffle outside. You look through your window and see two men struggling. -
Spellbreaker™ Is Here!
11 All the Gnus Weather: State of the That Fit, We Print" atmosphere VOL. IV. .. No. 4 - FALL 1985 - INTERFLUVIAL EDITION SPELLBREAKER™ IS HERE! The Exciting Conclusion to the Enchanter® Trilogy In a world founded on magic, master has been turned into an sorcerers rule the land, creating amphibian! All, that is, but the spells needed to do everything yourself . and a shadowy cloak from making bread to taming ed figure who slips quietly out wild animals. Your position as a the door. leader of the Circle of Enchanters Thus begins Spellbreaker,. ·the has earned you respect from all riveting conclusion to lnfocom's others :in the kingdom. Enchanter series (including En But now a crisis has fallen. chanter and Sorcerer'") and the Magic itself seems to be failing. final chapter in the story of a Spells go strangely awry or cease magician's rise from novice to to work altogether. The populace mage. is becoming restive, and rum Spellbreaker was written by blings are heard concerning Dave Lebling, co-author of the Enchanters. A great conclave is held, con Marathon: p. 2 vening all the guildmasters in the land. One by one, they step for Zork® trilogy and Enchanter and A Froboz.z. Magic Magic Equipment Catalog, an Enchanter's Guild pin, and six ward, describing the devastating author of StGicrosSE' and Suspect'!' Enchanter trading cards are included in eveiy Spellbreaker package. effects of the diminished magic. According to Lebling, "You don't Beer tastes like grue bathwater, have to have played the other breaker also contains technical while crackerjacks will find their pastries are thick and greasy, games in our fantasy series in innovations, such as allowing skills tested by the most huntsmen are unable to control order to enjoy this one, although you to add some words to the challenging puzzles ever con wild beasts.