I’ve started work on an optional essay for my CGT 105 – Intro to Games class. I chose to focus on text adventure games.
The following is pasted from the assignment document:
The paper should focus on the following:
- What the topic is, and its history.
- Who developed/invented it?
- When did it happen?
- What interesting or new technologies did this thing use?
- What interesting game design aspects did this introduce or use?
- What was the influence or impact of this?
- Why should modern game developers be aware of this?
Here’s an overview of what I have so far:
Interactive fiction (IF) is a collection of game environments, usually 2D, that players influence or interate with mostly or only using text commands. Players choose between a few text options with different consequences to the game’s storyline. IF more commonly refers to text-based adventure games, and some further distinguish between text adventures that are more puzzle-free narration and those with puzzles.
The first text adventure game is Adventure (1975), created by William Crowther. He graduated from MIT, where, a few years after Adventure’s release, was the birthplace of the company Infocom.
Infocom was founded in 1979 by MIT’s Dynamic Modeling Group. They went on to create popular text adventure games including the Zork series (1980-1982) and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984).
Infocom was absorbed by Activision in 1986 and closed in 1989.
2 responses to “Game History Research Paper Start”
Following with baited breath… I don’t know much about the history but remember my Atari and the videogames that had tape cassette players. The tapes were such a new level of excitement in top of the old ones
This is entirely accurate. Let me ramble some things about them:
+ They were almost all turn-based – no time. So how you connected to the computer and how powerful the computer was didn’t matter
+ They were almost all run by text commands. Most important text commands were look/l, get xxx, drop xxx, inventory/i, examine xxx, n/s/e/w. But the list of commands could be long and they wouldn’t tell you what they were.
+ You would always be in a room/place with a name and a description. The description would tell you what you wanted to get or examine, and usually which ways you could go – hence n, s, e, w (occasionally something weird like ne or up)
+ The name and description of the rooms were basically all you had to go on until you started “touching” stuff. So if a bunch of rooms had the same description (“A maze of twisty passages all alike”!), you needed to draw a paper map to figure out where to go.
+ If you moved while you were in the dark, you were likely to be eaten be a grue.