Interactive fiction games

Many years ago (we're talking decades), my family purchased a TI-99/4A computer which plugged into the TV. My brother and I used to play a text-only adventure game in which you typed in two-word commands such as "go west" or "get torch," and you progressed toward some goal. I have very little recollection of the game itself... I think there was a boat in it somewhere... but I remember sitting there and wracking our brains for possible two-word commands that might work. In those early days the vocabulary recognized by such programs was pretty limited.

Later we played Adventure, which is now quite famous. It features the notorious line: "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." My brother and I mapped out the rules for that maze on paper, though our lamp went out and we got eaten by the grue any number of times before we got it all straight. We played this one on our Leading Edge computer, which, though it featured a monitor and two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, had no hard disc. Actually I think Adventure predates home computers altogether and was played on mainframes back in the 70's.

Nowadays text games are called "Interactive Fiction," and feature a more sophisticated command system, some tough puzzles, wit and humor, evocative descriptions, and often suspense. They give yearly awards for these games, review them, and offer 1- to 5-star ratings. To play one, you download a small program to run the game, and then download the game itself (for free).

I'm posting about this because they're fun and yet, dare I say it, educational. They make you use your imagination, they improve spelling and typing (if you make mistakes your commands won't be recognized), they encourage map-making, they introduce odd objects and slang (stuff like "dumb waiter" and "quid"), and they require hard thought. Call it strategy, logic, or whatever you want... they make you get creative and solve a stream of puzzles and mysteries. In one game I haven't solved yet, called Curses!, I keep getting sucked into T. S. Eliot's "Unreal City" from The Wasteland, and I can't get out. This has resulted in repeated perusals of The Wasteland, though so far to no avail. While I love graphics games like Myst and Riven, for sheer creativity you can't beat low-tech, unfunded text games.

My brother got so interested in text games that in his last year of high school, which he did at home, he wrote his own text adventure. (There are at least a couple of competing programming languages specifically designed for producing text adventures.)

If you think you or your kids might be interested in playing one of these, you can peruse a list of the 5-star games here, which is a good place to start. (You have to download a program called WinFrotz if you use Windows; then download the .z5 game file itself; then double-click the winfrotz.exe program and select the game.)