Text Adventure
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The wiki is now hosted by GameDev.NET at wiki.gamedev.net. All gpwiki.org content has been moved to the new server. However, the GPWiki forums are still active! Come say hello. Text adventures are one of the oldest forms of computer games. Typically, their entire input and output consists of phrases of natural language (although some slip in some diagrams and graphics here and there). The game gives the player descriptions of his or her current situation, and the player responds by typing in simple commands (such as 'go north' or 'put junk mail on satchel'). The earliest text adventure is probably 'advent', also called 'adventure' (once files could have names longer than 6 characters...), a dungeon crawling game where you explore a maze of rooms and solve puzzles trying to collect treasure. Infocom's Zork series is very closely related to this, and other games from that same company (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (link leads to playable game, it is a very good game, but not for the faint of heart), Leather Godesses of Phobos, A Mind Forever Voyaging) are classics of the genre. Early text adventures show a tendency to be rather cliched, doing the cave-exploration to find treasures, D&D theme, door and bridge puzzles, and several other things over and over again. Of course, this stuff was creative when 'advent' did it for the first time, but it soon became very overdone. Fortunately, the genre has been becoming broader and more creative over time. Taking a look at the contributions to the latest IFComp participants will demonstrate that. Commercially, text adventures are pretty much dead. I don't think many people are trying to sell such games nowadays. There's still a large and active hobbyist community making and playing these games though. In a way, they are the ideal platform for independant development - a single person can create a good text adventure in a reasonable period of time, something that can not be said for most other genres. The newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction is a place where writers of interactive fiction (a less outdated name for text-adventure-type games). A few systems have been developed for writing text adventures / interactive fiction. The most important ones are TADS (text adventure development system) and Inform (a programming language and compiler for Z-code, Infocom's virtual machine system). Links:
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