Life as a Text Game
Through no fault of my own (I blame my Muse — a chick whom I’ve never met directly, who seems to take great pleasure in withholding inspiration from me for years at a time, then delivering it to me all in one gigantic pile), I’ve found myself working on what may become a new adventure game. Though it’s hard to see how I’m going to have the time to put this thing together properly, what with the daily web features, a change in my employment status and my continued attempts to locate something resembling a social life, I suppose I shouldn’t be complaining. I’ve been involved in the production of three such games in various capacities in the last few years — one as a voice actor and beta tester, one as a co-writer and one as a full-fledged writer/producer/animator — and each time has been an absolute blast. Games, by definition, are fun to play, but for a certain kind of person, they’re even more fun to make.
This particular project (of which I will say little at the moment, in fear that I might actually get somebody interested and then not finish the thing) is meant to be a sort of homage to the classic adventure games of early home computing — everything from the earliest text games like Zork to the earliest pseudo-3D adventures like King’s Quest on through the time when, rather unnaturally to my way of thinking, they started to talk.
Talking games still creep me out a bit, despite the quite superb casting options available to the modern game designer. It’s just that (god help me) when I was a kid, two or three of us would gather around the computer to play these games together, and part of that involved doing an assortment of silly voices as we read the dialogue out loud. I suppose I feel rather like the adults at the time who glowered at us because we forsook books for television and computer games.
Only the thing those adults never realized was that those old adventure games encouraged a level of interactivity that you never got from television, and (outside of those silly Choose Your Own Adventure things) really not even from books. To a certain kind of kid who grew up during exactly the right time, those old games not only brought hours of enjoyment and, in the case of the aforementioned, a certain level of social interaction, they also taught us the importance of creative problem solving. I mean, sure; putting a placemat under a door, then poking the key out from the other side and retrieving it with the placemat might seem like elementary thinking now, but when you’re twelve, you’re having to rub together brain cells you’ve never really used before to start a very interesting fire.
And as I go back through all the Kings Quests and Space Quests and even Leisure Suit Larry, among many others, I begin to realize that my current problem-solving skills (which I hold in fairly high regard, at least in relation to my other, more dubious skills) originated almost entirely from sitting in front of our old Tandy 1000 and trying absolutely everything till something worked.
There was no internet available to us then, and if we desperately wanted hints, there was a 900 number we could call, risking an almost certain thrashing from our parents when the phone bill came. (Everyone remembers their childhoods this way. I was probably not spanked much and certainly never thrashed, but my memory seems to want to insist otherwise. Fine.) Hint books were available, but they were expensive (about 2 weeks’ allowance) and the only computer store in town would often take months to get the suckers in. Generally by that time, even the most impossible puzzles got solved somehow.
And I suppose that taught me some valuable things about life. I suppose, whether I consciously realize it or not, I often see my life’s various obstacles in terms of an adventure game puzzle. USE RESUME WITH ATTRACTIVE JOB, for instance. Or TALK TO MAN OF LOW MORAL FIBER (NEIGHBOR). Bouts of depression often feel like “a maze of twisty passages, all alike,” and often the only way out is to draw a map to the best of my ability and hope I can escape the same way next time I find myself caught there.
Douglas Adams once wrote a game for Infocom called Bureaucracy, in which the entire goal is to get the post office to acknowledge your change of address. Obviously, the quest becomes every bit as surreal and impossible as those games where you have to defeat evil wizards or find some ancient lost treasure. I wish this were some clever metaphor that I could apply to my life, but the sad fact is, I often feel as though I’m literally playing Bureaucracy on a fairly regular basis.
But all of those games helped me prepare for the puzzles of existence, in one way or another. And, like those earliest days of gaming, the answers are not easily available. The best thing you can hope for is to gather a few good friends around and try to solve it together. It’s certainly more fun that way. Especially if you do silly voices as you go.