OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY. > enter building KEVIN ZURAWEL (@KZURAWEL)
of a long-sought link between two of the world's major cave systems, which stretch for 150 miles underground. The discovery was made three months ago by a party of five men and a woman that spent 16 hours, often in water up to their necks, worming seven miles underground to locate the long-suspected connection between the Mammoth Cave and the Flint Ridge Cave systems. “LINK FOUND BETWEEN 2 MAJOR CAVE SYSTEMS”, NYT, DEC. 2, 1972
who is the mother of two daughters, told in an interview of being soaked to the skin, caked with mud "like chocolate frosting" and almost exhausted, when the party inched through Hanson's Lost River and into the Mammoth Cave complex last Sept. 9. During a 21-hour trip on August 30, the 115-pound Mrs. Crowther was able to squeeze through a narrow canyon[.] “LINK FOUND BETWEEN 2 MAJOR CAVE SYSTEMS”, NYT, DEC. 2, 1972
year… One of the regulars was Will Crowther. Where the other dozen players chose names like ‘Zandar’…, Crowther’s was simply ‘Willie’, a stealthy thief.” Hafner & Lyon, p.206 1975
grate to the surface. A low crawl over cobbles leads inward to the West. The grate is open. > go west You are crawling over cobbles in a low passage. There is a dim light at the east end of the passage. There is a small wicker cage discarded nearby. > take cage Ok. > It is now pitch dark. If you proceed you will likely fall into a pit. go west
… here was a thing that gave you the illusion, anyway, that you’d typed in English commands and it did what you said. And of course, behind it all was just a machine doing little things. But it really worked surprisingly well for a mechanical thing. - Will Crowther (1994 interview)
MY CAREER; IT’S FUNNY THAT THE ONE THING I’M REMEMBERED FOR IS ‘ADVENTURE’. Will Crowther (from an interview with his daughter, Sandy) AN UNEXPECTED CLASSIC
be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits branching conversations, lurking, annotation, quoting, reviewing, summarizing, structured responses, exegesis, even fan fic. The breadth, scale and depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything. Graydon Hoare http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
Adventure (s)he must make sense out of the surroundings. Part of this is figuring out his or her own relationship to the entities and objects (s)he encounters. Each time (s)he encounters a new puzzle, it is like an experiment providing another opportunity to confirm, reject, or revise the interpretation. Mary Ann Buckles
can give you a big news story. Are you interested? … What was this, some sort of telemarketing scam? Was it another stalker? I didn’t hear you say anything. Do you want the information? Just say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ … “Okay. I’m listening.” ‘Okay’ is not ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ You must understand before we continue that this is not a person. This is an interactive voice system. It can only understand certain things you say.
QUALITY TOOLS ALLOWED ENTHUSIASTS OF THE GENRE TO DEVELOP NEW HIGH QUALITY GAMES. “Interactive Fiction”, Wikipedia BUILD THE TOOLS, AND DEVELOPERS WILL COME
of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. > abracadabra Good try, but that is an old worn-out magic word.
one task to accomplish at a time 2. Limit the number of choices the user has at any one time 3. Give the user only meaningful choices 4. Make sure the user knows what to do at every moment 5. Focus the user’s attention on the task at hand 6. Use the most efficient manner of user input 7. Make the user aware that the program is waiting 8. Pause, quit, or move on without the user’s response if it doesn’t come soon enough.
COMPLETELY INVOLVED, HAVING SUCH A GOOD TIME. CHUCKLING. SWEARING. THEY WERE JUST SO HAPPY, IT LOOKED LIKE THEY WERE HAVING A GREAT TIME. Mary Ann Buckles (2007 interview) THE FIRST TIME SEEING “ADVENTURE”
involved a trip to the local university computer room, generally after hours, with a bag lunch in tow. The long trek through dimly-lit windowless corridors to the terminal room was practically an adventure in itself, and since you couldn't just go and play whenever you wanted to, the game had plenty of opportunity to grow larger in the imagination in between sessions. Graeme Cree SPAG #8 (Feb. 1996)
Dennis G. Jerz, “Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original ‘Adventure’ in Code and in Kentucky”. Digital Humanities Quarterly, v1n2 (2007) ‣ Mary Ann Buckles, “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame Adventure”. PhD dissertation, UC San Diego (1985) ‣ Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, “Where Wizards Stay Up Late”. Simon & Schuster (1998) ‣ Nick Montfort, “Twisty Little Passages”. MIT Press (2005) ‣ Steven Poole, “Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution”. Arcade Publishing (2000) ‣ http://interconnected.org/home/2015/06/16/conversational_uis ‣ Rick Adams, “The Colossal Cave Adventure Page” http://rickadams.org/adventure/ ‣ Will Crowther Interview (1994) https://archive.org/details/WillCrowtherInterview ‣ Alexa Interactive Adventure Game Tool https://github.com/alexa/interactive-adventure-game-tool