7 ms·

The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

136 points by cfmcdonald 9mo ago

reactordev 9mo ago
Some fantastic text adventures can still be had online. There are MUDs (my favorite), Roguelikes, Sims, and even cyberpunk adventures. A half dozen Star Wars ones as well. This was peak 1986. A few years later and we’d be jumping a little pixel plumber on cathode ray tubes. Can’t wait for the next part…
ktallett 9mo ago
Text adventures whilst sometimes infuriating, if played as they are meant to be back when released with a piece of graph paper to help map out where you have been and where you go, there is still some magic about them that isn't had with graphical games. Every room becomes exciting which just isn't the case even in my favourite games such as Fallout New Vegas. Oh more bottle caps again in a drawer but I can begin to tell what rooms will be essential to look in and which won't buy the middle of the game. There is none of that in text games, you just have to explore and get truly lost, another thing that is much harder to do nowadays.
glimshe 9mo ago
One of my dream games is a truly open world text adventure. I got a glimpse of it by having ChatGPT run this game, but it started hallucinating and misremembering after a few rounds. It has to be perfect to avoid breaking the immersion, but I'd pay $100 for such a game even without graphics.
- hackshack 9mo ago
  You're on to something. I tried this too, a few months ago, with offline Ollama/Magistral on Mac. "You're a dungeonmaster for a single player adventure game, with me as the player..." It lost track of things almost immediately. But the foundation was there. Maybe if we had a MUD-tuned model... If it has an approximate way to track state, and a "pre-caching" method where it can internally generate an entire town all at once, room by room, so hallucinations are rarer... actually starts to sound like a traditional DM's method of world building for a campaign. Maybe something like an LLM-assisted Inform (interactive fiction engine). https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ Side note: been playing Aesir, then the Aesir 2 MUD since 1994. It's still up!
  - c22 9mo ago
    Maybe you could ask an LLM to build a campaign then ask another one to run it.
- TylerLives 9mo ago
  Instead of relying on the model's memory alone, you could have it read/write to a file.
- alisonatwork 9mo ago
  Isn't this what MUDs are? I tried a few in the early days of the internet and even back then they were like much bigger and more dynamic versions of text adventures of the 80s. For me I bounced off the idea that I had to role-play with other humans - I thought it was far more interesting to chat with other humans about real-world topics - but if you are looking for a large, text-based role-play experience then it's probably worth trying out a few. There might even be some that can be soloed these days, there are so many. I think the challenge of trying to make an "endless" game using an LLM is the same challenge that all procgen games face - they are boring for people who are seeking a well-paced narrative. There are players who enjoy the mechanics of looting/crafting/trading/etc who will gladly play games where the story is incidental or emergent, but if you're specifically looking for something with a bit more narrative depth, I'm not sure procgen will ever work. Even if there is a system that tries to project coherent storylines onto the generated world, you still need the player to do things that fit into a storyline (and not break the world in such a way that it undermines the storyline!), otherwise the pacing will be off. But if the system forces the player into a storyline, then it breaks the illusion that the world was ever truly open. So you can't have it both ways - either there is a narrative arc that the player submits to, or the player is building their own narrative inside a sandbox. AAA games try to have it both ways, of course, but it's always pretty clear when you are walking through procgen locations and leafing through stacks of irrelevant lore vs when you are playing a bespoke storyline mission that meaningfully progresses the state of the world.
  - shevy-java 9mo ago
    > chat with other humans about real-world topics You can do this with regard to a MUD too, but typically out of character and not every MUD would allow OOC chatting within the game world, as that is disruptive to those players who seek immersion. It seems to me as if you may not have found a good roleplaying MUD back when you played MUDs. You may be missing out on that experience. I retired from playing MUDs about 11 years ago permanently, but the in-world roleplay was the only thing that was interesting to me since it was the creation of a unique storyline potentially involving many other playercharacters.
    - 9mo ago
- mynjin 9mo ago
  Would Avalon count? https://www.avalon-rpg.com/intro/mud https://www.avalon-rpg.com/intro/mud
  - glimshe 9mo ago
    I've never played Avalon but it looks like a better text adventure. I'm not talking about hardcoded or randomized worlds, but truly reactive worlds. In my experiment with ChatGPT, I was walking around in a museum (that was the scenario) and decided to flirt with a woman who happened to be there. The flirting was something I decided to do on the spot with no prompting from the AI. The woman had just been part of the room description up to that point. But it reacted to this new situation in a semi-realistic way, essentially creating a new "adventure" on the spot. I met her on the next day, brought a gift (and so did she), but then it started hallucinating... :(
- thom 9mo ago
  Would D&D not work for you?
  - glimshe 9mo ago
    It did for a long time, but depending on busy friends makes it so I can't play this whenever I want. My "dream" game is a single-player game I can play as many times I want without having to rely on others.
itomato 9mo ago
I wonder how a book of type-in AI prompts would do…
- nottorp 9mo ago
  ... with generative "AI" being nondeterministic, it will be a different experience for every "player". Sometimes it will even match what the prompt author intended.
  - itomato 9mo ago
    Yes, the fun of variability between LLMs is part of the appeal. Typing isn’t even required any more, but as a book of templates, there are more possibilities than the average LLM user can conceive of in the moment.
griffzhowl 9mo ago
There was a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, with writing from Douglas Adams. It's entertaining, but insane what you have to figure out to get the babel fish... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...
- stevekemp 9mo ago
  There's a good three-part writeup starting here, covering Douglas and the game: https://www.filfre.net/2013/11/douglas-adams/ https://www.filfre.net/2013/11/douglas-adams/ For my money the "best" adventure game was and is The Hobbit, but that may well be because it's the first one I was haunted by. Similar two-part writeup starts here : https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/ https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/
  - glimshe 9mo ago
    The Hobbit had randomness and emergent gameplay in ways that even Infocom didn't quite reproduce. A classic.
WillAdams 9mo ago
For a fascinating insight into "The Colossal Cave Adventure" see the Literate Program version of the source: http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf
cmos 9mo ago
I loved this game. I want to make it into a mud.
shevy-java 9mo ago
I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g. King's Quest and what not, but in the 1980s or so that was novel and creative. Today the games tend to have powerful 3D engines, but the creativity was lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new to the table, for instance) and of course the graphics and sounds are great, but something is gone now. In part this may be me getting older, but in part I also think that the whole computer game segment got much more boring over time.
- shmerl 9mo ago
  People play such games today too.
- JKCalhoun 9mo ago
  When the first-person shooter arrived, somehow we collectively decided that's what all games should now be. I think we've learned that creativity comes from constraints. Early computing platforms certainly were replete with that.
  - Apocryphon 9mo ago
    Adventure games became FPS as early as 1992 (only one year before DOOM, so maybe I'm not making much of a point here) with the coming of Ultima Underworld.
    - ido 9mo ago
      Wasn't UU an RPG rather than an adventure game?
      - rsanheim 9mo ago
        It was really a blending of multiple genres. Was really ground breaking by for its time.
      - Apocryphon 9mo ago
        That’s a fair point. I suppose if I wanted to focus on the first person perspective I could have mentioned Myst coming out the same year as DOOM, though I doubt it was even the first FP adventure game.
jgalt212 9mo ago
> Play was central to the formation of personal computer culture. In his book, Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, Steven Johnson applies this thesis to pretty much all the things. Enjoyable book, but the thesis probably does not hold up too much scrutiny.
anthk 9mo ago
For Spanish speakers there, there's "Aventura.z5" at IFDB, you can play it with a Frotz interpreter. It's 99% close to the original modulo some odd wordplay. The backstory and all it's the same, with the Mammoth Cave descriptions with the slaves and the like.
christkv 9mo ago
I think the most annoying thing of a lot of modern games is the whole crafting thing that is bolted onto everything. But there are some real gems out there for old school gamers. I loved Baldurs Gate 3, Divinity 2, Expedition 33 and Disco Elysium for example as really fun and interesting CRPG's. It's just that the cost of taking a risk these days is to high for studios and most kids are playing "free" games for most of their time. So even though the market is big it feels like the "growth" is mostly in the "free" games part of the market which is terrible.
turkishmonky 9mo ago
I fondly remember playing games typed out from books and magazines when I was younger - although I usually tricked my little brother into typing out the game so we could both play it. Jokes on me though, since now he can type at over 100 wpm (and uses dvorak)
sizzzzlerz 9mo ago
I'd just begun my first professional engineering job after college. The company I was working for had a mainframe computer on which there was a copy of Adventure. When I discovered the game, there were a number of late nights playing it. One night, long after everyone had gone home, I was playing in my office with the lights off. The only light was from the green phosphorous monitor I was using. All of a sudden, I stumbled into the breath-taking view room with its erupting volcano. The words describing the scene filled the screen with descriptive prose that simply glowed in the dark room. The effect was mesmerizing. Forty-seven years later, I've never forgotten that.
xtiansimon 9mo ago
Interesting. I recently investigated text based adventure games in Python as a possible tool to teach and evaluate outdoor wilderness safety knowledge and awareness (backpacking and overnight camping) for wilderness therapy. While doing the research I recalled a friend showing me a text adventure game on his i386 PC. I could not understand the appeal. The possibilities the game suggested were vast, but the effective actions were unattainable--I was not able to see even the most basic level of progress before I became bored. Now, outlining the wilderness safety "game", its obvious to me some understanding of software and programming would have made the game accessible. Then maybe a key in a room would be better understood as a metaphor of the code. In other words, a game at text level can be an attempt to model a complicated problem in an interactive program. If you can write a game where the final product is convincing (suspend disbelief), then maybe the game's model can be useful for other things. In my case instruction and evaluation of basic domain knowledge. And this level of programming awareness is useful in not getting bored (or experiencing cognitive gap between what a text implies and what the game can deliver).
g023 9mo ago
Something about the modern day fails to match the feelings of when MUDs were in their prime. With text you can describe so much more than a picture can paint. You can visualize a smell, a taste, or a feeling in text, but it doesn't translate well when you have graphics painting your imagination for you.

136 points by cfmcdonald 9mo ago

Some fantastic text adventures can still be had online. There are MUDs (my favorite), Roguelikes, Sims, and even cyberpunk adventures. A half dozen Star Wars ones as well. This was peak 1986. A few years later and we’d be jumping a little pixel plumber on cathode ray tubes. Can’t wait for the next part…

ktallett 9mo ago

Text adventures whilst sometimes infuriating, if played as they are meant to be back when released with a piece of graph paper to help map out where you have been and where you go, there is still some magic about them that isn't had with graphical games. Every room becomes exciting which just isn't the case even in my favourite games such as Fallout New Vegas. Oh more bottle caps again in a drawer but I can begin to tell what rooms will be essential to look in and which won't buy the middle of the game. There is none of that in text games, you just have to explore and get truly lost, another thing that is much harder to do nowadays.

glimshe 9mo ago

One of my dream games is a truly open world text adventure. I got a glimpse of it by having ChatGPT run this game, but it started hallucinating and misremembering after a few rounds. It has to be perfect to avoid breaking the immersion, but I'd pay $100 for such a game even without graphics.

hackshack 9mo ago
You're on to something. I tried this too, a few months ago, with offline Ollama/Magistral on Mac. "You're a dungeonmaster for a single player adventure game, with me as the player..." It lost track of things almost immediately. But the foundation was there. Maybe if we had a MUD-tuned model... If it has an approximate way to track state, and a "pre-caching" method where it can internally generate an entire town all at once, room by room, so hallucinations are rarer... actually starts to sound like a traditional DM's method of world building for a campaign. Maybe something like an LLM-assisted Inform (interactive fiction engine). https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ Side note: been playing Aesir, then the Aesir 2 MUD since 1994. It's still up!
- c22 9mo ago
  Maybe you could ask an LLM to build a campaign then ask another one to run it.
TylerLives 9mo ago
Instead of relying on the model's memory alone, you could have it read/write to a file.
alisonatwork 9mo ago
Isn't this what MUDs are? I tried a few in the early days of the internet and even back then they were like much bigger and more dynamic versions of text adventures of the 80s. For me I bounced off the idea that I had to role-play with other humans - I thought it was far more interesting to chat with other humans about real-world topics - but if you are looking for a large, text-based role-play experience then it's probably worth trying out a few. There might even be some that can be soloed these days, there are so many. I think the challenge of trying to make an "endless" game using an LLM is the same challenge that all procgen games face - they are boring for people who are seeking a well-paced narrative. There are players who enjoy the mechanics of looting/crafting/trading/etc who will gladly play games where the story is incidental or emergent, but if you're specifically looking for something with a bit more narrative depth, I'm not sure procgen will ever work. Even if there is a system that tries to project coherent storylines onto the generated world, you still need the player to do things that fit into a storyline (and not break the world in such a way that it undermines the storyline!), otherwise the pacing will be off. But if the system forces the player into a storyline, then it breaks the illusion that the world was ever truly open. So you can't have it both ways - either there is a narrative arc that the player submits to, or the player is building their own narrative inside a sandbox. AAA games try to have it both ways, of course, but it's always pretty clear when you are walking through procgen locations and leafing through stacks of irrelevant lore vs when you are playing a bespoke storyline mission that meaningfully progresses the state of the world.
- shevy-java 9mo ago
  > chat with other humans about real-world topics You can do this with regard to a MUD too, but typically out of character and not every MUD would allow OOC chatting within the game world, as that is disruptive to those players who seek immersion. It seems to me as if you may not have found a good roleplaying MUD back when you played MUDs. You may be missing out on that experience. I retired from playing MUDs about 11 years ago permanently, but the in-world roleplay was the only thing that was interesting to me since it was the creation of a unique storyline potentially involving many other playercharacters.
  - 9mo ago
mynjin 9mo ago
Would Avalon count? https://www.avalon-rpg.com/intro/mud https://www.avalon-rpg.com/intro/mud
- glimshe 9mo ago
  I've never played Avalon but it looks like a better text adventure. I'm not talking about hardcoded or randomized worlds, but truly reactive worlds. In my experiment with ChatGPT, I was walking around in a museum (that was the scenario) and decided to flirt with a woman who happened to be there. The flirting was something I decided to do on the spot with no prompting from the AI. The woman had just been part of the room description up to that point. But it reacted to this new situation in a semi-realistic way, essentially creating a new "adventure" on the spot. I met her on the next day, brought a gift (and so did she), but then it started hallucinating... :(
thom 9mo ago
Would D&D not work for you?
- glimshe 9mo ago
  It did for a long time, but depending on busy friends makes it so I can't play this whenever I want. My "dream" game is a single-player game I can play as many times I want without having to rely on others.

itomato 9mo ago

I wonder how a book of type-in AI prompts would do…

nottorp 9mo ago
... with generative "AI" being nondeterministic, it will be a different experience for every "player". Sometimes it will even match what the prompt author intended.
- itomato 9mo ago
  Yes, the fun of variability between LLMs is part of the appeal. Typing isn’t even required any more, but as a book of templates, there are more possibilities than the average LLM user can conceive of in the moment.

griffzhowl 9mo ago

There was a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, with writing from Douglas Adams. It's entertaining, but insane what you have to figure out to get the babel fish... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...

stevekemp 9mo ago
There's a good three-part writeup starting here, covering Douglas and the game: https://www.filfre.net/2013/11/douglas-adams/ https://www.filfre.net/2013/11/douglas-adams/ For my money the "best" adventure game was and is The Hobbit, but that may well be because it's the first one I was haunted by. Similar two-part writeup starts here : https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/ https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/
- glimshe 9mo ago
  The Hobbit had randomness and emergent gameplay in ways that even Infocom didn't quite reproduce. A classic.

WillAdams 9mo ago

For a fascinating insight into "The Colossal Cave Adventure" see the Literate Program version of the source: http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf

cmos 9mo ago

I loved this game. I want to make it into a mud.

shevy-java 9mo ago

I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g. King's Quest and what not, but in the 1980s or so that was novel and creative. Today the games tend to have powerful 3D engines, but the creativity was lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new to the table, for instance) and of course the graphics and sounds are great, but something is gone now. In part this may be me getting older, but in part I also think that the whole computer game segment got much more boring over time.

shmerl 9mo ago
People play such games today too.
JKCalhoun 9mo ago
When the first-person shooter arrived, somehow we collectively decided that's what all games should now be. I think we've learned that creativity comes from constraints. Early computing platforms certainly were replete with that.
- Apocryphon 9mo ago
  Adventure games became FPS as early as 1992 (only one year before DOOM, so maybe I'm not making much of a point here) with the coming of Ultima Underworld.
  - ido 9mo ago
    Wasn't UU an RPG rather than an adventure game?
    - rsanheim 9mo ago
      It was really a blending of multiple genres. Was really ground breaking by for its time.
    - Apocryphon 9mo ago
      That’s a fair point. I suppose if I wanted to focus on the first person perspective I could have mentioned Myst coming out the same year as DOOM, though I doubt it was even the first FP adventure game.

jgalt212 9mo ago

> Play was central to the formation of personal computer culture. In his book, Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, Steven Johnson applies this thesis to pretty much all the things. Enjoyable book, but the thesis probably does not hold up too much scrutiny.

anthk 9mo ago

For Spanish speakers there, there's "Aventura.z5" at IFDB, you can play it with a Frotz interpreter. It's 99% close to the original modulo some odd wordplay. The backstory and all it's the same, with the Mammoth Cave descriptions with the slaves and the like.

christkv 9mo ago

I think the most annoying thing of a lot of modern games is the whole crafting thing that is bolted onto everything. But there are some real gems out there for old school gamers. I loved Baldurs Gate 3, Divinity 2, Expedition 33 and Disco Elysium for example as really fun and interesting CRPG's. It's just that the cost of taking a risk these days is to high for studios and most kids are playing "free" games for most of their time. So even though the market is big it feels like the "growth" is mostly in the "free" games part of the market which is terrible.

turkishmonky 9mo ago

I fondly remember playing games typed out from books and magazines when I was younger - although I usually tricked my little brother into typing out the game so we could both play it. Jokes on me though, since now he can type at over 100 wpm (and uses dvorak)

sizzzzlerz 9mo ago

I'd just begun my first professional engineering job after college. The company I was working for had a mainframe computer on which there was a copy of Adventure. When I discovered the game, there were a number of late nights playing it. One night, long after everyone had gone home, I was playing in my office with the lights off. The only light was from the green phosphorous monitor I was using. All of a sudden, I stumbled into the breath-taking view room with its erupting volcano. The words describing the scene filled the screen with descriptive prose that simply glowed in the dark room. The effect was mesmerizing. Forty-seven years later, I've never forgotten that.

xtiansimon 9mo ago

Interesting. I recently investigated text based adventure games in Python as a possible tool to teach and evaluate outdoor wilderness safety knowledge and awareness (backpacking and overnight camping) for wilderness therapy. While doing the research I recalled a friend showing me a text adventure game on his i386 PC. I could not understand the appeal. The possibilities the game suggested were vast, but the effective actions were unattainable--I was not able to see even the most basic level of progress before I became bored. Now, outlining the wilderness safety "game", its obvious to me some understanding of software and programming would have made the game accessible. Then maybe a key in a room would be better understood as a metaphor of the code. In other words, a game at text level can be an attempt to model a complicated problem in an interactive program. If you can write a game where the final product is convincing (suspend disbelief), then maybe the game's model can be useful for other things. In my case instruction and evaluation of basic domain knowledge. And this level of programming awareness is useful in not getting bored (or experiencing cognitive gap between what a text implies and what the game can deliver).

g023 9mo ago

Something about the modern day fails to match the feelings of when MUDs were in their prime. With text you can describe so much more than a picture can paint. You can visualize a smell, a taste, or a feeling in text, but it doesn't translate well when you have graphics painting your imagination for you.