Simple Pleasures

Kristi reminds me today that I promised to write a new R&K entry this weekend and never got around to doing it. Just preoccupied with all the very predictable things, and for the moment I’m kind of tired of writing about it. It’s all been said, all been sorted out, and now there’s really nothing left to do but get up each day, pick up the tools we have, and get on with the business of living.

So today I want to write about something entirely different.

Lately, I’ve been playing around with interactive fiction again. Anyone else remember a game company called Infocom? They were big in the early-to-mid 80’s, writing text adventure games like Zork, Deadline and (my favorite) Planetfall. Back then, a “text adventure” was a purely text-based, typing-based computer game where you moved from room to room, chapter to chapter in the story, navigating events and terrain with commands such as “GET ROCK” and “THROW ROCK” and reading the words “I DON’T UNDERSTAND” a lot. These early computer games, written by guys like Scott Adams (not the Dilbert guy), were very popular in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

Infocom created an entirely new form of text adventure – what they coined Interactive Fiction. Gone were the one-sentence room descriptions, replaced with several paragraphs of description that changed as the story developed. Instead of those damned two-word commands, you got to type whole sentences! It wasn’t just a lame romp through The Room and The House and The Hallway, but an opportunity to take part in an interactive novel, written with true literary complexity and rich and textured characters.

Infocom was the reason I had a typing speed of 90 words per minute by the time I was 13 years old.

Anyway, Infocom passed on and eventually fans of their games managed to crack open the computer codes they used. That community of interactive fiction fans then used that knowledge to build new tools for making entirely new Infocom-style games. Today, almost thirty years since Infocom first rolled these digital novels out on the first home computers, people are still writing these games to be played on PCs, Macs, iPhones, you name it.

So every so often I flip back through one of the old Infocom titles, or play one of the newer games. They’re all free and legal downloads, and a nice alternative to expensive computer games if you’re looking for quality entertainment without spending money.

Tonight I’m playing through Vespers. The plot: you’re a monk living in a 15th century Italian monastery, five days after closing the monastery gates against the Black Death. But the disease has made an appearance within its walls, and madness has crept in with it..

Yeah, I’m a geek. But I’m a well read geek.