Perspective on Text Adventures
==============================

<!--
Copyright (c) 2017 Chris Pressey, Cat's Eye Technologies.

SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-ND-4.0
-->

*   publication-date: 22 Aug 2017

I'm writing this in order to reduce the number of tangents I go off on in
the [Text Adventures of Note](Text%20Adventures%20of%20Note.md) and
[Classic Text Adventures](Classic%20Text%20Adventures.md) articles.
This is more of a memoir (or something) than a curational list.
At any rate, expect it to be a bit rambly.

I grew up in the 80's.  I had a Commodore 64.  I really liked video games.
I wanted to write my own video games, but BASIC was too slow.  So when I
wrote my own games, they were often text adventures.

I say "text adventure" here because that's what they were called at the time,
before Infocom began labelling its wares "interactive fiction".

But even nowadays I generally avoid the term "interactive fiction".
I still call them "text adventures".  Probably mainly because it
doesn't carry the connotations that "fiction" does.  There isn't an
assumption that they have any plot beyond perhaps "collect all the treasures",
nor any character development or other narrative elements.

It is a more basic form.  It involves a computer giving a player some
text, being a description of some kind of imagined environment, and
then the player giving the computer some text, being a description of
what the player would like to do in this environment.  With this cycle
repeating until some end goal is reached.

The word "adventure" also connotes that there is some kind of space
being explored, that the player _moves around_ in this imagined environment
(in virtue).  This is not a strong connotation, but the activity in
most text adventures does span a variety of discrete locations.

I don't even usually call text adventures "games", but that's for
reasons that probably aren't relevant here.  One can make a strong argument
that a text adventure is a kind of game, but it's also not necessary to
look at them that way.

The requirement that the player communicates their intentions
in a textual form disqualifies things like "Choose Your Own Adventure" books
(or the modern equivalent, vanilla Twine games) from being text adventures,
even though one could argue that they are a form of "interactive fiction",
at least if one takes that term on its face value.

But one typically does not; interactive fiction is its own thing.
I would define interactive fiction as the subset of text adventuredom which
is assumed to have narrative elements (such as plot and character development
and so forth) in order to be more like conventional, non-interactive fiction;
to be more like a story.

But this property doesn't interest me greatly, and in fact I often feel that
it detracts from the somewhat dreamlike effect that a narrative-lacking,
unmotivated, and slightly incoherent world can have.

This definition I've given also does not exclude text adventures or
interactive fiction from having graphics.  When the graphical content consists
of still pictures (possibly with minor animations only loosely connected to
the gameplay), I do not consider this to be much different from a book with
illustrations.  The exchange between computer and player is still primarily
text-based.

I don't remember which text adventure I played first.  It was either
[Zork I][] or [African Adventure: In Search of Dr. Livingston][].  It was
likely the former.  I think I had known about text adventures before playing
one; possibly I had read about them in a magazine.

These two adventures were both very influential on me, but of particular influence
was the Usborne book [Write your own Adventure Programs for your Microcomputer][].
It was probably also partly responsible for setting me off in the direction of
programming languages, because, among other things regarding text adventures, it
describes how to write a simple one-or-two-word command parser.

And, once again on the point of nomenclature, I'd like to note that this book was
frustratingly difficult to find again in adulthood, because I was convinced
that it had the term "text adventure" in its title, when it in fact does not;
it has the term "adventure program" which is not something anyone, as far as I
know, ever calls them.

That isn't the only idiosyncratic thing about this book.  It claims
unequivocally that the territory through which the player
travels in the game must be mapped onto a Cartesian grid.  "Haunted House",
the type-in adventure which appeared in the book and which the bulk
of the book was dedicated to analyzing, had 64 locations in an
8-by-8 grid.  Further, the book claimed that if you wanted to model a
3-dimensional world, with passages going over and under other passages,
you'd need a 3-dimensional array, and that this takes a
lot of memory ("48K is probably the minimum to make it worthwhile").

This was probably an intentional simplification, but it did not jibe with
my experience, even at the time.  The games I had played had quite irregular
maps that would not comfortably fit in a grid, with one-way routes
and up-and-down routes and even "bendy" routes (where west and south are
"opposite directions", for example.)

I had seen a map of Zork I published in Electronic Games magazine, too,
and it made this visually obvious.

I realized somehow (through I did not know the term "graph" at that point in
time, and indeed the term "graph" seems to not have been standardized at that
point in history, with some authors calling them "plexes" or "mazes"; see
[Microprocessor Programming for Computer Hobbyists][]) that the map could be
represented by a graph with degree 6 for the four cardinal directions plus
up and down (or degree 10 if you wanted the 4 diagonal directions too), and
that such a map could be implemented in BASIC as a 2-dimensional array,
like `DIM EX(30,6)`, where one of the dimensions is the "location number"
and the other dimension is the "exit number".  Which is what I did, when I
went to write my own games. [(Footnote 1)](#footnote-1)

But other than that, there is a lot of sound advice in this book, for instance

> It is no good putting the light behind a locked door and then putting
> the key in a dark room.

Indeed.

Another piece of advice was to put objects where they would be expected
to be found - "knife in the kitchen, book in the library, axe near the woodpile".

However, that gets back to why I feel that text adventures are a different
beast from interactive fiction.  Discovering objects in places they don't
belong can induce a _frisson_ of surrealism.  I remember several such instances
in Zork I and African Adventure.

Along these lines, I could go even further — although I fear it might not
make much sense, as I am still developing this theory.  But you could bear with
me, if you like.

A major part of most text adventures is interactively exploring the
environment.  They are, in some sense, _conductors of psychogeography_.  In fact,
even a linear, non-interactive novel, or a first-person graphical video game like
DOOM or Myst, is a "conductor of psychogeography" in this sense.  But text
adventures seem to be _better_ conductors than these media.

Why this is, is probably because a textual description of the environment engages
the player's imagination and sensibilities in a way that visuals of it do not; and
having the player wander across the map, in a largely undirected way, also engages
the player's imagination and sensibilities.

It is not unlike a kind of virtual _dérive_.

Giving it a plot and other narrative elements, though, does not improve this
property; it does does not improve the text adventure as a _mode of exploration_.

But as I said, I'm still developing this theory, and I'm not entirely sure what
I mean by it yet, so take it for whatever it's worth.  I just thought I'd raise
the point.

What I do know is that, long before I had heard of the word "psychogeography",
I used a term I made up myself, "locationness", to describe something extremely
closely related.  And one of the ways I could try to describe locationness is to
say that a place has locationness if it would make a good location in a text
adventure.

### Footnotes

##### Footnote 1

Compare and contrast Gregory Yob getting fed up with the omnipresence of
the Cartesian grid in seek-and-locate computer games, and designing
Hunt the Wumpus to break out of that pattern.

[Zork I]: https://catseye.tc/node/Zork%20I
[African Adventure: In Search of Dr. Livingston]: https://catseye.tc/node/African%20Adventure:%20In%20Search%20of%20Dr.%20Livingston
[Write your own Adventure Programs for your Microcomputer]: An%20Esolang%20Reading%20List.md#write-your-own-adventure-programs-for-your-microcomputer
[Microprocessor Programming for Computer Hobbyists]: An%20Esolang%20Reading%20List.md#microprocessor-programming-for-computer-hobbyists