The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure
technicshistory.com64 points by cfmcdonald 9 hours ago
64 points by cfmcdonald 9 hours ago
For a fascinating insight into "The Colossal Cave Adventure" see the Literate Program version of the source:
I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g. King's Quest and what not, but in the 1980s or so that was novel and creative. Today the games tend to have powerful 3D engines, but the creativity was lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new to the table, for instance) and of course the graphics and sounds are great, but something is gone now. In part this may be me getting older, but in part I also think that the whole computer game segment got much more boring over time.
I agree that mainstream games tend to feel more predictable in their mechanics than what we got in the 8-bit era, but I'm not sure that that means they're more boring. There were a lot of crap games that came out in the old days that only seemed interesting at the time because our access was so limited. Nowadays anyone can play thousands of games for free, on pretty much any device, so they can choose to spend their time in the kinds of games that they actually prefer.
I'm not sure it's worth lamenting that the most popular games today tend to have addictive mechanics and otherwise little novelty. Clearly that's what people enjoy. If you are interested in experimental or avant garde games, then that stuff is still out there in the indie scene. Lots of them are bad games, but they still might be good ideas.
There's plenty of examples I am sure people can share on the thread, but here's one that comes to mind for me as interesting but not very fun: Bokida - Heartfelt Reunion. It's a gigantic monochromatic world with impenetrable puzzles and weird geometry that reminded me of those old freescape games like Driller. I don't think I enjoyed it very much but somehow I did play it all the way through and it still sticks in my mind today because no other game I played really did the same stuff. But, then, it's possible that that's just my subjective experience and for someone who plays Minecraft or something similar, Bokida was just derivative and forgettable? I dunno.
There's a lot out there, though. I think we're in a golden age of games! As a kid I could never have imagined having a literal "backlog" of dozens of games I've already bought but not even started yet because there's so much to play.
When the first-person shooter arrived, somehow we collectively decided that's what all games should now be.
I think we've learned that creativity comes from constraints. Early computing platforms certainly were replete with that.
I've never been into Doom clones (to use the term from back in the day) and yet I have enjoyed playing countless video games from about 1984 through to the present. Very few of them are first-person games, whether they're head-clickers or other forms of first-person gaming.
To be sure, all games are not FPS. But you know, what are the so-called "AAA" game companies constantly grinding out…
One of my dream games is a truly open world text adventure. I got a glimpse of it by having ChatGPT run this game, but it started hallucinating and misremembering after a few rounds. It has to be perfect to avoid breaking the immersion, but I'd pay $100 for such a game even without graphics.
Isn't this what MUDs are? I tried a few in the early days of the internet and even back then they were like much bigger and more dynamic versions of text adventures of the 80s. For me I bounced off the idea that I had to role-play with other humans - I thought it was far more interesting to chat with other humans about real-world topics - but if you are looking for a large, text-based role-play experience then it's probably worth trying out a few. There might even be some that can be soloed these days, there are so many.
I think the challenge of trying to make an "endless" game using an LLM is the same challenge that all procgen games face - they are boring for people who are seeking a well-paced narrative. There are players who enjoy the mechanics of looting/crafting/trading/etc who will gladly play games where the story is incidental or emergent, but if you're specifically looking for something with a bit more narrative depth, I'm not sure procgen will ever work. Even if there is a system that tries to project coherent storylines onto the generated world, you still need the player to do things that fit into a storyline (and not break the world in such a way that it undermines the storyline!), otherwise the pacing will be off. But if the system forces the player into a storyline, then it breaks the illusion that the world was ever truly open. So you can't have it both ways - either there is a narrative arc that the player submits to, or the player is building their own narrative inside a sandbox.
AAA games try to have it both ways, of course, but it's always pretty clear when you are walking through procgen locations and leafing through stacks of irrelevant lore vs when you are playing a bespoke storyline mission that meaningfully progresses the state of the world.
What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people with little technical skill a means to create a world—or extend an existing one. And then I wanted a way to join MUDs together—like if you leave a forest by a certain path you are, unbeknownst to you, rerouted to a different MUD that picks up where the forest left off.
In this way I imagined in time a world larger and richer than any that had come before it—where you could really just keep going, keep playing, never see all of it.
I never got deep into it, but I remember reading magazine articles back in the 90s that that's exactly what the new generation of MUDs were. Wiki has pages on MOO, TinyMUCK, MUSH etc - these are basically platforms where the players themselves can expand out new objects and locations, presumably in a similar way to Second Life or other MMO sandboxes do today.
So the tools already exist, but it seems to me that they primarily appeal to a very specific type of gamer, one that doesn't have much overlap with the type of gamer who would like an "endless" open world or the type of gamer who would like a tightly-plotted narrative experience. I think it's more something that appeals to fans of table-top RPGs, people who are looking for a collaborative storytelling environment.
I think many gamers have the imagination of an epic infinite metaverse style game, but then when they actually get the opportunity to participate in one, it turns out that that's not really what they wanted after all, because it requires a level of creative labor that they weren't expecting. This is why I think the market has naturally segmented into sandbox builders, survival/roguelikes, traditional narrative adventures etc.
My experience was that in practice all that mapped-out world of most social mu*s was largely ignored by players; they'd all end up in a few gathering spots, or in private spaces disconnected from the main map, open only to their owners and people they teleported in.
> chat with other humans about real-world topics
You can do this with regard to a MUD too, but typically out of character and not every MUD would allow OOC chatting within the game world, as that is disruptive to those players who seek immersion.
It seems to me as if you may not have found a good roleplaying MUD back when you played MUDs. You may be missing out on that experience. I retired from playing MUDs about 11 years ago permanently, but the in-world roleplay was the only thing that was interesting to me since it was the creation of a unique storyline potentially involving many other playercharacters.
I think I just don't really vibe with roleplaying in realtime with other humans, to be honest. I grew up trying to play tabletop RPGs (my dad was a DM and used D&D mechanics as a way to make storytime more engaging), but while I really enjoyed making up characters, I never had much fun actually doing a campaign.
The thing I love about computer games is that I can go through them at my own pace, pause whenever I like, hang around looking at a cool visual, go back to an old save and try something different, whatever. Multiplayer takes all that freedom away because everything has to progress on somebody else's timetable, which isn't as fun for me. Nowadays being expected to perform on a time limit just reminds me of work, which is the last thing I want when I'm playing a game.
Instead of relying on the model's memory alone, you could have it read/write to a file.
You're on to something. I tried this too, a few months ago, with offline Ollama/Magistral on Mac. "You're a dungeonmaster for a single player adventure game, with me as the player..."
It lost track of things almost immediately. But the foundation was there.
Maybe if we had a MUD-tuned model...
If it has an approximate way to track state, and a "pre-caching" method where it can internally generate an entire town all at once, room by room, so hallucinations are rarer... actually starts to sound like a traditional DM's method of world building for a campaign.
Maybe something like an LLM-assisted Inform (interactive fiction engine). https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/
Side note: been playing Aesir, then the Aesir 2 MUD since 1994. It's still up!
There was a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, with writing from Douglas Adams. It's entertaining, but insane what you have to figure out to get the babel fish...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...
> Play was central to the formation of personal computer culture.
In his book, Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, Steven Johnson applies this thesis to pretty much all the things. Enjoyable book, but the thesis probably does not hold up too much scrutiny.
Some fantastic text adventures can still be had online. There are MUDs (my favorite), Roguelikes, Sims, and even cyberpunk adventures. A half dozen Star Wars ones as well.
This was peak 1986. A few years later and we’d be jumping a little pixel plumber on cathode ray tubes.
Can’t wait for the next part…
I loved this game. I want to make it into a mud.
I wonder how a book of type-in AI prompts would do…
Text adventures whilst sometimes infuriating, if played as they are meant to be back when released with a piece of graph paper to help map out where you have been and where you go, there is still some magic about them that isn't had with graphical games. Every room becomes exciting which just isn't the case even in my favourite games such as Fallout New Vegas. Oh more bottle caps again in a drawer but I can begin to tell what rooms will be essential to look in and which won't buy the middle of the game. There is none of that in text games, you just have to explore and get truly lost, another thing that is much harder to do nowadays.