What If… There Were No IF? An Alternative History of Games, sans Crowther’s Colossal Cave (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog)
During a break in the Princeton video game conference a few months ago, David Thomas asked me, what would computer games be like today if Will Crowther hadn’t created Colossal Cave Adventure? I pulled Nick Montfort into the brief discussion that followed, but then the next panel started, and the topic went onto the back burner.
Here is a possible alternative history of computer game design, based on the premise that Will Crowther never wrote his 1975 original.
For want of Adventure, the magic word XYZZY is lost. (Computer users around the world are forced to think of less-guessable passwords, and information technology is more secure.)
For want of Adventure, Zork was lost. (But now everyone uses a really cool spreadsheet called VisiCalc.)
For want of Zork, Roberta Williams does not create “The Mystery House.”
For want of Adventure, Adventure International was lost.
For want of Adventure International, Ken Williams does not work briefly for Scott Adams.
For want of Ken and Roberta Williams, Sierra was lost. (A generation of youngsters don’t bother nagging their parents to upgrade their video cards from CGA to SuperVGA; when an explosion at a factory in Japan cripples the world’s supply of memory chips, about six people notice.)
For want of Sierra Online, Leisure Suit Larry was lost.
For want of Leisure Suit Larry, Grand Theft Auto was lost.
For want of Grand Theft Auto, Grand Text Auto was lost. (The creators choose the name “Rogues’ Gallery” instead, because it got more votes than “The Pong Throng” or “VisiCalc User Forum.”)
For want of the text adventure genre, the entire field of computer science seems lifeless and boring to a significant number of young men and women who briefly consider it in the late 70s and early 80s. They drop out in droves. The ones who don’t end up running computers at financial institutions, but are eventually put out of work by high-school dropouts using VisiCalc.
For want of the text adventure genre, the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre is lost.
For want of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, scholars groping for a way to describe hypertext to their non-technical colleagues think harder and come up with a better metaphor, one which magically prevents the premature dismissal of hyperfiction, leading to its rapid acceptance into the literary canon.
For want of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, a generation of youths watches more TV. Later, in college, these youths daydream during their hyperfiction survey courses, wondering how their life would have turned out if they had dropped out of high school like their stoner friends did.
Oh, and Dave Thomas has a scar, Nick Montfort has a beard, side-scrollers all scroll the opposite way, and all ships have funky spikes on their warp drive nacelles.
A bit more seriously, now…
I’ve read many anecdotes from programmers whose early experience with interactive fiction games turned them on to computers, so I do think that without text adventures, some of these people might not have considered careers in computing. While it’s a meme that Adventure set the field of computer science back two weeks, I’d prefer to think that after everyone finished Zork, they went back to their jobs energized by what computers might be able to accomplish, and perhaps they shifted their expectations in such a way that might have affected the development of CS in positive ways.
Since the average computer user didn’t have access to CRTs that displayed fancy graphics, and since a significant chunk of computing took place on printer terminals, I suppose that ASCII genres such as Rogue, and strategy games such as Wumpus and mainframe Trek would have attracted the attention of the amateur hackers and students who, after playing Adventure or Zork, tried their hand at creating their own amateur interactive fiction.
Hosting the wild speculation up to the next level…
Perhaps the players who lost countless hours playing interactive fiction would have instead spent more time getting their game fix at the arcade. If coin-op video arcade games developed a little faster, then perhaps users of personal computers wouldn’t have been at all satisfied with the bleeps and blips that they saw on their home computers… maybe they would have been so disappointed by the offerings of home computer entertainment that they would have preferred dropping coins in the arcade, playing games that emulated familiar TV shows (however badly), to typing in lines of code from magazines in order to play games on their home computers. This might have delayed growth in the market for PC games, paving the way in the future for a direct transition of loyalty from the video arcade to the gaming platform.
Post was last modified on 2 Oct 2022 7:34 pm
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There was a move to offer IF over mobile phones a while ago, and there are a few places where you can play IF by text-message, but cost per message is prohibitive. The INfocom Z-interpreter has been ported to PDAs and who knows how many other OSes. I carry around several games in my PDA (including Adventure), and the interpreter I use does have a compass rose and a few other shortcuts. Most of the recent games permit "x" for "examine" and "g" for "again", so it's not as tedious as it otherwise might be.
Oh yes - I realize it was fun, I was just having fun along with. It is interesting to think on all the interweaving threads of influence and I wasn't meaning to suggest that there were not influences of one on the other. I just meant that videogames moved from spacewar to computer space, pong, breakout pretty linearly and the real influence of IF would not be felt until videogames were established commercially and you had the added computing power/memory/storage to be able to begin to inject story into a videogame.
The comment on playing a video game livebrings to mind a conversation I had with Henry Jenkins of MIT about videogames and classic forms of play - particularly the aggressive play patterns of boys - and the videogame does bring much of that play pattern into the home (thus the discomfort of Mothers with videogames revealing behaviors that they had previously had been removed from their attentions). It's just that videogames play fair, they give you a fair moderator for the action.
I always loved playing Infocom games at friend's homes and then later through other means - but as a kid I was armed only with a TRS-80 Color Computer and Infocom avoided that platform.
I really enjoy your IF site and am truly a fan of the artform. I'm really surprised that it hasn't enjoyed a resurgence on mobile phones with a clever little interface to provide shortcuts in typing commands (or perhaps just uninformed if there are such games).
Keith
Thanks for your feedback, Keith. Yes, this was just a bit of fun. Dave and I have actually submitted an article for Playing with Mother Nature: Video Games, Space, and Ecology, in which we argue that the cave setting of Adventure had more influence on videogames than you might think. Among computer science majors who had access to vector-graphics terminals, yes, videogames were already established, but the videogame industry depends on access to consumers. Adventure and other text games (Wumpus, mainframe Star Trek) were written during a period when many users would have print terminals rather than CRTs. The first commercial computer game was Scott Adams's Adventureland, and during the 80s, when there were multiple completing personal computer platforms, it wasn't agnosticism but rather the Infocom Z-machine that created a mass-market for computer games.
I prefer "computer games" because "videogames" does seem to exclude text adventures. It's fair to say that such a book is a paper version of a hypertext, but IF is actually much more complex than, and very different from, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels.
To stretch a point, videogames *could* also be played without a computer. You'd just need a live artist capable of rendering scenes as pictures, a live orchestra, and actors standing by ready to improvise.
But you're right about videogames driving the home PC hardware market.
An excellent overview of the Infocom era is available in this MIT student project: http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/infocom/
Very interesting and fun discussion.
I think that the leap from Leisure Suit Larry to GTA is a bit too far. You need to go through EA adnd Binary System's Starflight 1 and 2 and TFB/Accolade's Star Control II, gaining the great storytelling and "go anywhere, do anything" gameplay pioneered there in order to transition to the Grand Theft Auto games. These early games established the videogame (basically Spacewar in this case) and essentially used as the interface by which a player could experience a grand and free roaming Interactive Fiction.
The comment on the tendency to look at the history of videogames without consideration of IF is an interesting one as well and begs the question "Are IF games 'videogames'? I would argue there is a difference between computer games and videogames. There's a discussion of this (long dormant) on the Videotopia exhibit site (in the Medium section) and I think there is quite a difference in the two - both in the nature of the game itself and the relationship between the game and the technology running it (where IF games, strategy games, etc. are almost technology agnostic - IF can be played without a computing device and display, so can strategy games - but the immediacy of "videogames" makes them far more dependent, intertwined with the technology.)
The evolutionary line of videogames goes directly from Spacewar on minicomputers to Computer Space in the arcade and then on to Space Invaders, Defender and Pac-Man and it was these titles that drove the great interest in owning home computers. It was the desire for new and better videogames that began the technological arms race that gives us the benefits we enjoy from out current personal computers - certainly no one needs 32 bit color and the ability to process the geometries of millions of polygons per second to word process, do a spreadsheet or play a text adventure. The influence of IF spread into the world of 'videogames' after they had already established themselves as a self-sustaining medium.
A study of interactive entertainment is utterly incomplete without a discussion of text adventures, Interactive Fiction, and some of my favrorite memories of games on my first computer were text addventures like Pyramid, Raaka Tu, Bedlam, and then "graphic adventures" like "Sands of Egypt" and "Calixto Island" but a look at the history of videogames is really not greivously incomplete without exploring IF - don't get me wrong, it would surely be better to discuss the great influences that early text adventures had on video gaming - and they are certainly there, the influence of artist on artist, etc. - but I think they are two completely different animals..
Keith
Check out "Horrible Things" (and the others too)!http://stiivryan.home.mindspring.com/downloads.htm
David, Sulu ran around with a sword after being infected with a disease in "The Naked Time." He had a scar and was part of an alternate universe in "Mirror, Mirror."
One can only hope that they threw "horrible things" at you!
Ah--Evil Sulu! Well, now I get the reference.
We can only assume the scar was from a sword. Wasn't this the episde where he runs around with a sabre? Or, has my razor sharp Star Trek memory gone to mush.
Anyway, your not did remind me of why I asked the original question. I think there is a tendancy to look at the history of video games without the IF stuff. Spacewar and Pong, you have to have those.But ADVENT and CC seem optional.
I think that this might be a PR problem. The nut or your argument is persuasive--the video game business would be different without this theme--scars and all!
Aha, both forehead and cheek. Or temple and cheek, perhaps.
I recall once as a grad student I walked into the common room where an episode of Classic Trek was playing. I knew from a glance at the screen that it was "Operation Annihilate," when flying pizzas kill Kirk's brother and threaten his nephew. I came in just before the moment when Kirk's sister in law is trying to block an air vent and she says, "Things... horrible things."
When I walked into the room, as the actress was saying "Things," one of my hallmates asked, "Have you seen this one before?" At the same time, I said "...horrible things," perfectly in synch with the actor's timing.
People looked for things to throw at me after that display of choric geekiness (of which I am still very proud).
Here is a photo of the alternate universe Sulu with scar! http://www.agonybooth.com/evil_sulu.jpg