> And it would go on like this for hours while you tried in vain to guess what the hell it wanted you to type, or you discovered the outdoors, whichever came first.
The part about Zork doesn't make sense to me. As I understand it text based adventure games are actually quite lenient with the input you can give, multiple options for the same action. Additionally certain keywords are "industry standard" in the same way that you walk using "wasd" in FPS games, so much that it became the title of the documentary "get lamp". Due to the players perceived knowledge of similar mechanics in other games you can even ague that providing these familiar commands is part of the game design.
It seems to me that the author never played a text based adventure game and is jut echoing whatever he heard. Projects like 1964's ELIZA prove that text based interfaces have been able to feel natural for a long time.
Text has a high information density, but natural language is a notoriously bad interface for certain things. Like giving commands, therefore we invented command lines with different syntax and programming languages for instructing computers what to do.
Have you actually played these games? I put in some hours on Hitchhikers Guide, and It was anything but natural. Maybe once you get far enough in the game and learn the language that is effective it gets easier, but I never got there. You wake up in the dark and have to figure out how to even turn on the light. Then you have to do a series of actions in very specific order before you can get out of your bedroom.
Figuring it all out is part of the fun, but outside the context of a game it would be maddening.
As for Eliza, she mostly just repeats back the last thing you said as a question. “My dog has fleas.” “How does your dog having fleas make you feel?”
Which is why it's done that way. Other text-based games where the focus is not on puzzling out what to do next (like roleplaying MUDs) have a more strict and easily discoverable vocabulary.
This would be like saying using programming languages is terrible because Brainfuck is a terrible programming language.
It seems to me that the author never played a text based adventure game and is jut echoing whatever he heard
Indeed. And this makes his judgmental pettiness about people who like these games all the shittier for it. I don't know why extremely-online bloggers think unrequited snark is a glide path to being funny.
I loved text based adventure games when I was growing up, but I also thought this comparison was incredibly apt and also found it very funny. I’m a bit surprised people are so offended by this article, have we lost the ability to read something with nuance?
It's a bit weasel-y to refer to criticism as just "people being offended".
> thought this comparison was incredibly apt and also found it very funny
I'm happy for you, but I didn't.
To "read something with nuance" is to be open to nuance that is already present in the writing. This writing is not nuanced!
Perhaps you're asking us to make an effort to be more tolerant of weak writing. That's a fair request when the writer is acting in good faith. But to mock nerds for liking text adventures when you clearly do not like them yourself is not acting in good faith.
I understood this to be a comment on the fact that a text interface has a lower affordance than a graphical interface. A command line doesnt suggest what you can do in the way a graphical interface can.So even if you have industry standard keywords, a user has to know/learn them. I see it as similar to the buttons versus screens debate in car interfaces.
It was certainly jarring reading that immediately after accusing someone else of having never played the games.
(Who is clearly playfully poking fun at something he enjoyed playing but can recognize as being constrained by computers of the era and no longer a common format of games thanks to 3D rendering).
The part about Zork doesn't make sense to me. As I understand it text based adventure games are actually quite lenient with the input you can give, multiple options for the same action. Additionally certain keywords are "industry standard" in the same way that you walk using "wasd" in FPS games, so much that it became the title of the documentary "get lamp". Due to the players perceived knowledge of similar mechanics in other games you can even ague that providing these familiar commands is part of the game design.
It seems to me that the author never played a text based adventure game and is jut echoing whatever he heard. Projects like 1964's ELIZA prove that text based interfaces have been able to feel natural for a long time.
Text has a high information density, but natural language is a notoriously bad interface for certain things. Like giving commands, therefore we invented command lines with different syntax and programming languages for instructing computers what to do.