Sami came to visit my place for a few days. We had a small celebration for the Spring Equinox. And the usual - discussing on-going work, future plans for UnReal World development, choosing tasks I could help with. For education and inspiration we wanted to watch something - either an iron-age related movie, or a documentary about history-themed games. Then I remembered that years ago a visiting foreign UrW player gave me a DVD box titled "GET LAMP" - a documentary about the golden age of text adventures. Both Sami and me played text adventures as kids, and naturally we also had experimented with writing our own parsers, designing our own text adventures. So, GET LAMP felt like a perfect choice for the night. Then I realized that my desktop doesn't have an optical drive. Neither did Sami's laptop, nor any of mine. But I have an old iMac, which I once got hoping that simply having a mac device would be enough to help with testing and publishing for Mac - but it turned out that the iMac was hopelessly outdated, being of very little use to help with game development. Well, the iMac has a DVD drive, and it could play the documentary with no problems.

The documentary had multiple episodes, and we watched the first two of them. There were the legends, the creators of some old real classic games. Both Sami and me are a bit too young to have witnessed the birth of the text adventures - when we got into the world of computer games, the text adventure was one genre among others. Yet, we found it very interesting. I think I learnt a lot of my English playing Hobbit as a kid. It was very interesting to follow the documentary, getting to hear all the stories of the early years, and the developments which led to the titles, companies and phenomenons we remember from the 1980's. And, somehow it felt little bit surprising to see how strong was the sentiment of "it is over now". One person in the documentary said that maybe they all felt that it was like the days of youth - you feel that it will be forever, and then suddenly you realize it is all past and gone. So, what happened to the text adventure? Did it die? Why?

Seems like the text adventure never fully died - it just got marginalized, and has been kept alive by a smallish community of hobbyists. And that people who still play text adventures are mostly the same people who also make text adventures themselves; there isn't that much audience outside the circle of hobbyists. Somehow, it feels a bit sad, and there quite isn't a compelling reason for it being so. As said in the documentary, the physical book as a format is still pretty much alive, despite there being movies and computer games - so why should text adventure as a genre be dead simply because it got replaced by fancy graphics or fast-paced action games? The other day we watched some more of the documentary episodes to find out, and it seems that it was mostly the business side of things which led to waning of the text adventure as a commercial genre. And it made us to feel like "this needs to be reinvented" - thinking of different ways to make the text adventure easy to pick up for the modern audience. I wonder if that is ever going to happen =)

The documentary made us appreciate the fact that roguelike as a genre is still alive and kicking. UnReal World has stayed afloat despite all the new trends of the computer gaming. Cheers to that, and as always - big warm thanks for all the players! I once talked with a teenager just starting to learn game development, and they mentioned that in their eyes roguelike is a thing in the history. But, as long as the genre is kept alive by enough of adult audience, then some of the teenagers of today have the possibility to pick up roguelikes and to learn the peculiarities of the genre =) I just wonder why the same doesn't go with the plainly text-based interactive fiction / text adventures. Or, maybe it does, but just to smaller extent. (I just checked, itch.io seems to have a bunch of text adventures. Also Steam, but I didn't find Steam listing interactive fiction nor text adventure as a genre, so maybe in their eyes it is not that relevant). Surely, the standards of computer gaming have changed a lot since Sami and me were teenagers. Roguelikes with ascii graphics and keyboard controls were a strong phenomenon in the early years of PC gaming. Now some of the positive UnReal World reviews come with mentions like "you need to be autistic to play this game" - which leaves me unsure if some degree of adhd is the normal in the era of tiktok, and being able to sit down to concentrate to memorize keyboard commands is seen as "autism". Don't get me wrong - I'm not a purist, and I'm not against things changing and developing. But at the same time I also think that some things can easily go wrong if too much of the creations are dominated by all the flashing things constantly fighting for the split-second of your attention, and too much of the marketing based on evoking the quick response, leaving little or no space for the slow-paced contemplative content. Hmm...

Oh, so many thoughts sparked by the documentary, and I feel some of the ideas already escaping into the wild pastures somewhere in the back of my mind. So let them go there, enjoying their freedom. Maybe they return later on, to contribute to another discussion, or to connect with some game idea for Enormous Elk productions. And, all the reflection, thoughts and talk about something is good - but at some point you just need to get into actually doing and experiencing the thing, not just observing it from the outside. And for that the GET LAMP box has a second DVD which has a selection of fully playable text adventures. After a bit of tinkering we realized how to run the games on the old Mac, and it gave us a list of games to choose from.

We chose Raising the Flag on Mount Yo Momma for it was written by a person with a Finnish name. And before we could notice we were fully focused on trying to solve the puzzles, trying to think of different ways to approach a problem, different ways to interact with the game objects and characters - and cheering with joy when we got a puzzle solved. Eventually we got stuck, and had to look for hints, which helped us to get forward. I think there are three main puzzles, and we got two of them solved. Sami left for home, and I chose to write this blog post instead of digging deeper into the game (or, reading the source code to figure out how to solve the remaining puzzle). So, not going to spoil too much of the game content (yes, you can play it online), if someone figures it out please tell me; how to get the bubblegum? I was pretty sure that the business card would be the tool to scrape the bubblegum off the table, but either we didn't find the right command to do so, or then the card is used for something else and some other tool is needed to get the bubblegum.

Before Sami left we had time to discuss the experience, also reflecting it on the level of game design and implementation. Like, for me it felt somewhat too restrictive to having to find the right wording to do a thing - maybe it would help if the parser was more developed, and giving clear feedback - instead of telling me that the command I typed is too complex for it to handle, it would be nice to read something indicating if the card is suitable or not for scraping off a bubblegum. But Sami pointed at the good sides of the minimalism - as said in the documentary; there is always a solution. And part of the genre is that you can't blow the solution, the game tells you if you try to do something which would make it impossible to solve a puzzle. So, you know that the solution has to be there, and you just need to keep your commands simple, looking for clues and the in-game hints to figure out the solution. Sure, yes - I'm not against that, but I just feel that if I had time and energy to write an interactive story then it would be nice to design it so that there are multiple ways to solve a puzzle. Oh, wait - I already have written the Lakeside Story. Oh, it would be nice to take some time to upgrade the underlying engine, so that it could display a map of known areas etc. Hehe, but again, this starts to sound like "too many game ideas, too little time and money to make them come true", so better just stay focused with the current projects. But, who knows - maybe some of the related ideas will find a manifestation in UnReal World NPC dialogues, or in the "choose your adventure"-style mini-games in Ancient Savo. Or both.