89. Text to text
A huge box arrived at my post office box recently. In it was Aaron A Reed’s 50 years of Text Games, a massive hardcover volume expanded from his excellent newsletter. What began as a newsletter telling the back stories of some of the most interested text adventure games evolved into a very readable and entertaining hardcover complete with stacks of additional research and sidebars. Also, as a Kickstarter project, it came with some nice ‘feelies’ - reproductions of different old computer media with a floppy disk, a cassette, and punch card tape.
Text adventures are a remarkably sticky genre - they’ve waxed and waned in popularity since the 1980s. When their first waves faded they were eclipsed by ‘graphic adventures’ and then later by full-motion-video narrative games, and then consoles took over. Text adventures (and interactive fiction more broadly) have roared back over the last decade as part of a surge of interest in indie games and the mass availability of non-code/minimal-code game creation tools. These creation tools have gotten better and better and allow authors to focus on ‘just’ writing good stories without having to also think about things like language parsers which interpret what player/reader is typing. These days large scale vocabularies for interaction no longer need to be created by the author. This abstraction of the code layer has been vital for a renaissance of interactive (text-based) fiction.
Reed’s book is also a potted history of the ways in which even the earliest computer systems were used for play. And through the domestication of the computer into the home in the 1980s, how the expectations of a mainstreaming of the computer were about 15 years ahead of the reality which came with the arrival of the Web in the mid 1990s. In book, rather than email newsletter form, each featured game has more space to be appreciated - I especially love the reproductions of the old advertising material and the maps for the games. The intertwining of interactice fiction mapping-by-hand and the role playing games of the era is specific marker that probably delineates the early generations from those who came later and expect and rely on ‘automatic mapping’.