Random Notes on Computer Games
16-Jun-09
I’ve just played through the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game with Frotz on my iPhone. With a puff of nostalgia, I was reminded of being maybe 10 years old, sitting in the basement with our Apple //c, fishing through the cardboard box of 5.25″ floppy disks and pulling out a host of classics. Karateka, the cheerfully awful Castle Smurfenstein, Dino Eggs, and finally, the Hitchhiker’s Guide game.
Now THIS was something cool: the game opens with the computer giving you the introdiction to a story. Then, you just tell the computer what to do in more-or-less plain English, and it’d go ahead and do it ( or, sometimes, refuse hilariously) in the story world, telling you what changed. It was so simple — just text on the screen, a virtual ‘intelligence’ and a virtual world to explore.
Being a kid, I pictured myself an ellite hacker-type, typing into the night, peeling away the layers of puzzles to see the core artificial intelligence living in it’s artificial world. The glow of just text on the screen made it easy to pretend — I already was a bookworm, so I was used to imagining my stories anyhow. This took it to another level. It was my story!
Soon, of course, the interactions get silly. I’d try random things ( KICK THE DOG, EAT MUSHROOM ) just to see what the game would say. Often, you’d just get the standard “I couldn’t do that! Fido is your best friend!” or “I don’t know how to eat that.”, but once in a while you’d get a great response: “you chew up the mushroom; it tastes like gooey dirt. Slowly, the colors drain from the walls and the dog begins to quote Glengarry Glen Ross. Funny; he never liked Mamet before.”
After spending hours in front of these games, getting horribly stuck in all of them ( Adults need hints for these games; I was 7 or 8 ), what else could I do? I started writing my own. My friend Brian and I started crafting a brilliant piece of interactive fiction called “The Good Day”. Brilliant, I tell you! It had three whole rooms! It was written in Applesoft BASIC! You could fart and belch, you could kick stuff, you could use two-word commands! It was very nearly a work of art, ready for publishing… Except that it took about ten minutes to get through all the fart jokes and then ended abruptly, and had no real plot, and…
But it was ours.
So nowadays, that GOTO-laden mess of code seems quaint to me as I write software that processes millions of transactions, but I miss the unbridled enthusiasm for hilarity we had. So in my next program, I think an Easter egg needs to be hidden: from time to time, in the midst of the millions of operations in the code, my fancy processing code will have gas, and leave an “oops, I farted” in the logfile.
Because no, I still haven’t grown out of fart jokes. And admit it, neither have you.
