Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech
Speaker 1: are you? It's time for a tech Stuff Tidbits episode.
Speaker 1: And if you follow news and announcements about video games,
Speaker 1: you've had a really busy week. This week, the Summer
Speaker 1: Game Fest kicked off a ton of streams that contained
Speaker 1: trailers for dozens of upcoming titles, ranging from quirky independent
Speaker 1: games to new entries and established franchises. And that kind
Speaker 1: of inspired me. I started thinking about some of the
Speaker 1: computer games I really loved when I was a little kid. Now, y'all,
Speaker 1: I was born in the nineteen seventies. That means I
Speaker 1: grew up around the same time as the personal computer, right,
Speaker 1: because that became a thing in the seventies, And some
Speaker 1: of the games I played on our old Apple to
Speaker 1: e didn't have any sound or any graphics. All the
Speaker 1: imagery in the game existed only in text descriptions and
Speaker 1: my imagination. So I am today talking about text based
Speaker 1: computer games. Now, if you've ever enjoyed a Choose your
Speaker 1: Own Adventure style book and I don't even know if
Speaker 1: those are still a thing now. I may still be
Speaker 1: dating myself, but if you've ever read one of those,
Speaker 1: you have a sense of what a text based computer
Speaker 1: game is like. The player of the game reads a
Speaker 1: description of an environment, which may or may not include
Speaker 1: hints of dangerous things that surround the player. The player
Speaker 1: then types in a command. That command could be to
Speaker 1: walk in a specific direction, which will take you to
Speaker 1: a new location, assuming you can actually go that way.
Speaker 1: Or it might involve picking up something in the room
Speaker 1: or taking a closer look at some or it might
Speaker 1: involve trying to talk or battle someone or something in
Speaker 1: the area, or maybe to hide from something. The tricky
Speaker 1: thing is the player will always come up with more
Speaker 1: options than the programmer considered or anticipated when they made
Speaker 1: the game, and that makes text based adventures sort of
Speaker 1: a puzzle that's on a meta level. The puzzle ends
Speaker 1: up being what did the programmer have in mind at
Speaker 1: this point in the game, Because you can get stuck
Speaker 1: in these games. You could start to use what you
Speaker 1: think is every single potential option, but it's just that
Speaker 1: you haven't fallen on the one that the programmer had
Speaker 1: in mind. Thinking outside the box won't necessarily help you.
Speaker 1: The game can't accommodate creative answers that programmers didn't think about.
Speaker 1: So with the old text based adventures, the programmer would
Speaker 1: have to lay out what is possible through code, and
Speaker 1: the code was pretty primitive, and the player would type
Speaker 1: in a command and the game would have to determine
Speaker 1: if the command made sense or not. If the command
Speaker 1: did make sense, well, then the player would get a result.
Speaker 1: That result might not be a positive one. It might
Speaker 1: end up being a you can't do that, because even
Speaker 1: though the command makes sense, something else has to happen first.
Speaker 1: For example, if a door is locked, if the command
Speaker 1: didn't make sense at all, if the programmer had not
Speaker 1: thought to include that in the limited vocabulary of the game, well,
Speaker 1: the game would then have to tell the player that
Speaker 1: what they tried didn't work. And there were a lot
Speaker 1: of different ways that various text based games would inform
Speaker 1: players that what they were trying was a non starter.
Speaker 1: You might get something like I don't understand what you're
Speaker 1: trying to do, or that won't work, or I don't
Speaker 1: think that helped, or I don't know what blank means,
Speaker 1: blank being whatever command you typed in that the game
Speaker 1: just can't handle. Those were pretty typical responses. Not all
Speaker 1: of them were used in every single game, but almost
Speaker 1: pretty much every text based game had some variation of that. Now,
Speaker 1: it might help if we think of a hypothetical example.
Speaker 1: So let's say you've created a text based game in
Speaker 1: which the player starts in a room, and this room's
Speaker 1: just got It's a regular square room. There's a locked
Speaker 1: door to the north, there's a hallway to the west,
Speaker 1: there's a window to the south, and the east wall
Speaker 1: is blank. And maybe you've created some flavored text for
Speaker 1: the room, saying that the floor is stone and the
Speaker 1: walls are wood, and they are covered in healing wall paper,
Speaker 1: and a dim chandelier hangs from the ceiling. You know,
Speaker 1: you give it some more text than just there's a
Speaker 1: door to the north and a hallway to the west
Speaker 1: and a window to the south. You want to create
Speaker 1: a mood, and that mood will depend upon the style
Speaker 1: of game you're making, right, So, if you're making a
Speaker 1: horror game, you wanted to be super creepy and atmospheric.
Speaker 1: If it's an adventure game, maybe it's mysterious that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. So you don't necessarily go bonkers with this description.
Speaker 1: You don't want to write a full novel, but you
Speaker 1: want it to be interesting enough so that the player
Speaker 1: gets a sense of where they are and the style
Speaker 1: of game they're playing. So you try then to anticipate
Speaker 1: the sort of actions that your players are going to
Speaker 1: try when they start in this position. You want to
Speaker 1: anticipate enough of them so that you know for the
Speaker 1: vast majority of commands that are typed in, because that's
Speaker 1: how you interact with a tech based game. You have
Speaker 1: a prompt where you type in your commands. You want
Speaker 1: those commands to get some sort of response and not
Speaker 1: just go straight to the default. I don't know what
Speaker 1: you're doing if you can help it, because you want
Speaker 1: to hook those players in and have them have a
Speaker 1: good experience. So you probably have thought about what the
Speaker 1: game should say if the player tries to open the
Speaker 1: lock door, so maybe it responds with the locked door
Speaker 1: won't budge, or maybe despite your valiant efforts, the door
Speaker 1: remains locked. Maybe you also anticipate that some players will
Speaker 1: try to look out that window on the south wall,
Speaker 1: so you write something like the view outside the window
Speaker 1: is of an unremarkable lawn, A bit overgrown or something
Speaker 1: to that effect. Players can then choose to go to
Speaker 1: the west, which is walking into the hallway that will
Speaker 1: take them into a new setting, or maybe they want
Speaker 1: to search the room. Maybe you write it so that
Speaker 1: that action searching the room uncovers a key that fits
Speaker 1: the door to the north, though I would argue that
Speaker 1: would be a bit too easy, that you probably should
Speaker 1: put the key somewhere else so that there's a little
Speaker 1: more gameplay there. But more likely you just decide that
Speaker 1: the flavor text is really just flavor. So let's say
Speaker 1: that your character searches the room and the response is
Speaker 1: you find nothing useful, or something to that effect. The
Speaker 1: point is the responses that the player sees all come
Speaker 1: from the programmer. I know that should be obvious, but
Speaker 1: it's something that we have to keep in mind. Like
Speaker 1: every time we play a game, unless it's a weird glitch,
Speaker 1: the response we get when we do something was put
Speaker 1: there on purpose, right, Someone had to think about that
Speaker 1: and build it into the game. So with text based adventures,
Speaker 1: everything you encounter has to have been put there intentionally
Speaker 1: or else there's a problem with the code. It could
Speaker 1: be that there was an error somewhere that breaks something.
Speaker 1: So if the programmer anticipates a specific action, they can
Speaker 1: write up a response that's appropriate or funny or whatever.
Speaker 1: But for everything else, the game is just going to
Speaker 1: present a standard default response like I don't know how
Speaker 1: to do that, or whatever it may be. Anyone who
Speaker 1: has ever run a role playing game as a game master,
Speaker 1: you know what that is. It's physically impossible to anticipate
Speaker 1: everything players will do when you have a human who's
Speaker 1: acting as game master. Humans have the potential to run
Speaker 1: with wild player ideas, even if they had not planned
Speaker 1: for such a thing in the past. I used to
Speaker 1: as a teenager write adventures for my group of friends
Speaker 1: to play in games of Dungeons and Dragons. I'm sure
Speaker 1: this comes as a shock to none of you. I
Speaker 1: didn't write professionally. These were just for my friends to play,
Speaker 1: and I would come up with these ideas and I
Speaker 1: would spend hours and hours and hours. I would remember,
Speaker 1: I'd get up early on a Saturday morning and just
Speaker 1: spend hours crafting adventures and dungeons, and I would have
Speaker 1: this whole kind of sequence playing out in my head
Speaker 1: of how this was going to go. But invariably at
Speaker 1: some point, a player or a couple of players would
Speaker 1: come up with something that should certainly work. I just
Speaker 1: hadn't thought about it, and then I had to figure
Speaker 1: out what to do. And some of my favorite gaming
Speaker 1: sessions involved going completely off script because whatever the players
Speaker 1: had suggested was viable and we should do it, even
Speaker 1: though I had not anticipated it when I was crafting
Speaker 1: the adventure. Now some game masters are far less comfortable
Speaker 1: winging it. Nothing wrong with that. It's an intimidating thing
Speaker 1: to try and keep track of everything if you're making
Speaker 1: stuff up on the fly, and so these game masters
Speaker 1: will sometimes hit a couple of tough choices, and neither
Speaker 1: of them are great. One of them would be to
Speaker 1: attempt to force the players toward a specific path, which
Speaker 1: makes them feel that they have no agency and that's
Speaker 1: not much fun. Or it involves outright denying them their ideas,
Speaker 1: and that often can also create a less satisfying playing experience. Well. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: text based games fall more into that restrictive style of play.
Speaker 1: For the most part, they might be very well designed,
Speaker 1: but they are still quite constrained. So game designers have
Speaker 1: to come up with lots of clever puzzles and interesting
Speaker 1: text to keep players engaged and eager to see the
Speaker 1: adventure through to the end. And again, sometimes the puzzle
Speaker 1: is trying to make yourself think like the programmer was
Speaker 1: thinking when they made the game in the first place.
Speaker 1: It's not so much how can I get this door open?
Speaker 1: It's how would so and so have designed this so
Speaker 1: that I have to figure out a way to open
Speaker 1: this door? And it still becomes like a puzzle game,
Speaker 1: but it also becomes something like a psychological assessment of
Speaker 1: the person that wrote the game. It's a pretty interesting
Speaker 1: style of play. But all of this had to get
Speaker 1: started somewhere, right, So what was the first text based adventure? Well,
Speaker 1: we're going to find out, but first let's take a
Speaker 1: quick break, all right, So who created the first text
Speaker 1: based adventure and what was it? Well, the game was
Speaker 1: called Colossal Cave Adventure and it was created by Will
Speaker 1: Crowther in the mid nineteen seventies. And this wasn't just
Speaker 1: some hobbyist dipping his toe in programming. In the early
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, Crowther worked for Bolt, Baroneck and Newman, also
Speaker 1: known as BBN. Now you might not be familiar with
Speaker 1: that company name, but BBN played a crucial role in
Speaker 1: the development of technologies that underpin the Internet, and indeed,
Speaker 1: Crowther himself was part of a small team working on arpaet,
Speaker 1: which was sort of a predecessor to the Internet. It's
Speaker 1: where a lot of the protocols and actual technologies that
Speaker 1: allow the Internet to work were first developed. So here
Speaker 1: you have this pioneer of network computing plugging away at
Speaker 1: a major Department of Defense project, trying to design the
Speaker 1: tech that would allow computers to send data across vast networks.
Speaker 1: And in his spare time, he would game, and he
Speaker 1: would go spelunking, that is, he would go cave exploring.
Speaker 1: As for games, he was a tabletop D and D
Speaker 1: player Dungeons and Dragons, So that game first published in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four, and Crowther became a fan pretty early on. Now,
Speaker 1: Crowther was married with kids, but his marriage was falling
Speaker 1: apart and he and his wife initiated a divorce. So
Speaker 1: in an effort to create something that would let him
Speaker 1: connect with his kids and make something fun for them
Speaker 1: and allow him to find ways to spend time with them,
Speaker 1: Crowther brought together his knowledge of programming, his love of
Speaker 1: exploration and caving and some elements of dungeons and dragons
Speaker 1: to put together the Colossal Cave adventure game. So he
Speaker 1: chose a text based approach to make the game less
Speaker 1: intimidating to people who weren't familiar with computers. Remember this
Speaker 1: is before the personal computer age. Computers were pretty scarce
Speaker 1: for you know, most people never even encountered one. If
Speaker 1: they did, it was because they either worked in a
Speaker 1: research facility or they worked at a big company that
Speaker 1: happened to have like a mainframe computer as part of
Speaker 1: its assets. But most people never even touched one. So
Speaker 1: how do you make a computer game approachable? That's why
Speaker 1: Crowther said, Let's make it a text based game. Players
Speaker 1: could type in commands in natural language and the program
Speaker 1: would check for words that matched viable options and then
Speaker 1: send a result to the player and update the story
Speaker 1: in the process. So Crowther's method was to allow for
Speaker 1: two word commands, so you could type something like go
Speaker 1: north or look huddle. It was primitive, but it was
Speaker 1: easy to understand. You quickly got the rules. You knew
Speaker 1: you couldn't say look under the rock. You couldn't do that.
Speaker 1: You could say look rock and maybe get more information,
Speaker 1: but you had to keep it to those two word commands,
Speaker 1: and reportedly his kids really found the game interesting and
Speaker 1: fun to play. Crowther would actually release his game over arpinnet,
Speaker 1: which I think makes it the first shareware text based
Speaker 1: adventure game. It wasn't long before computer scientists at places
Speaker 1: like Stanford got in touch with Crowther and asked permission
Speaker 1: to further develop and enhance the game, and Crowther agreed.
Speaker 1: They thought that was great fun, and so over time
Speaker 1: versions of the game popped up that could be played
Speaker 1: on different types of computers. Because remember, at this time,
Speaker 1: people are using all sorts of different proprietary computers, each
Speaker 1: working under its own computer language and computer like operating system.
Speaker 1: So it would require recreating the game in many ways
Speaker 1: in order for it to run on other machines, and
Speaker 1: that's exactly what various folks were doing. Originally these were
Speaker 1: big ol' honk and computer's house and research labs in
Speaker 1: university computer centers, but as the personal computer age dawned,
Speaker 1: we started to see versions for those machines as well,
Speaker 1: and often the game's title would simply be shortened down
Speaker 1: to adventure. A few years ago, a guy named Eric S.
Speaker 1: Raymond uploaded the code for Colossal Cave Adventure with permission
Speaker 1: to get lab and now developers from all over the
Speaker 1: world can access the code and enhance it and look
Speaker 1: for ways to clean it up. And this is very
Speaker 1: similar to what the early programmers were doing in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. It's still happening today in many ways. It's
Speaker 1: carrying on the trend that Crowther inspired. Now, there have
Speaker 1: been tons of text based adventures over the years. I
Speaker 1: remember playing the Zorich series extensively, which ultimately expanded beyond
Speaker 1: text based adventures, but that's how they started. Then there
Speaker 1: was the amazing text game of the Hitchhiger's Guide to
Speaker 1: the Galaxy that includes some logic defying puzzles creating an
Speaker 1: improvable ability drive as a heck of a thing in
Speaker 1: that game. But I did play it, and I ultimately
Speaker 1: beat that game, but not without I think I ended
Speaker 1: up having to consult tip lines or hints or something
Speaker 1: multiple times. I just could not suss my way through
Speaker 1: that game throughout the entire arc of the story. It
Speaker 1: is great, though some games had very cheeky titles. I
Speaker 1: will never forget the title The Leather Goddess of Phobos.
Speaker 1: I never played it. I understand it was not quite
Speaker 1: as salacious as the title would have you believe, but
Speaker 1: I wouldn't know because I never I never got the
Speaker 1: guts to play that one. I remember playing The Hobbit
Speaker 1: and The Fellowship of the Ring, both in text. For them,
Speaker 1: they had like very primitive graphics associated with it, but
Speaker 1: they were like still images, kind of like a picture book.
Speaker 1: There are dozens of great titles from the seventies and
Speaker 1: eighties out there. A lot of them are available for
Speaker 1: you to play via the internet. You can find links
Speaker 1: to web based versions of these text adventures if you
Speaker 1: want to play them. And they're also new text based
Speaker 1: adventures coming out even in recent years. So one I've
Speaker 1: heard of I have not yet played, is called Nighthouse.
Speaker 1: It came out in twenty sixteen, and others have come
Speaker 1: out since then, as well as visual novels. I think
Speaker 1: visual novels, which is now a popular genre of computer game,
Speaker 1: I think they owe a lot of their DNA to
Speaker 1: the old text based adventures. So hats off to Will Crowther,
Speaker 1: a creator of the text based adventure game and say
Speaker 1: you you better turn on a light, it's getting dark.
Speaker 1: You are likely to be eaten by a group. Hope
Speaker 1: you're all well. I will talk to you again really soon.
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