Text Wins

Unexpectedly and to my utter delight, a recent New York Times editorial by Daniel Radosh - in the course of a critical look at the new, super-modern game Halo 3 - claims that text games from the 1980s were the pinnacle of video games’ artistic achievement:

The formula followed by virtually all games is a steady progression toward victory: you accomplish tasks until you win. Halo 3, for all its flawless polish, does not aspire to anything more. It does not succeed as a work of art because it does not even try.
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There is no reason that gorgeous graphics can’t play a role in this task, but the games with the deepest narratives were the text adventures that were developed for personal computers in the 1980s. Using only words, these “interactive fictions” gave players the experience of genuinely living inside a story.... Today’s game designers should study this history as a starting point for an artistic revolution of the future.

This is precisely how I feel, and it’s why I haven’t been that excited about the last few generations of extremely popular console games: first-person shooters, car racing games, and sports games. I don’t care how realistic a shooting or racing game looks. I could run through hallways and shoot people, or drive a car quickly, or play football, in the real world. I look to video games for something different.

I recently read an entire Wired cover story on Halo 3, about the psychotic lengths of ultra-monitored playtesting that Microsoft was going to to ensure that players wouldn’t be challenged too much by the game, and would be funneled through the levels one after another, never spending more than five seconds in any room.

Reading this article, it seemed to me that the designers had missed the point entirely. They weren’t making a game, they were making an interactive movie or digitized theme park ride. What’s fun about playing a game that’s had all the moments of confusion or perplexity streamlined by hundreds of hours of group-focus testing sessions? I want a person with some interesting ideas to invite me to explore an interesting world, not a group-tested simulation of what stimulates the average teenage boy. I’d much rather play Pikmin than Halo.

This is why I feel that a lot of the most exciting games of the last five years were purposefully developed for the “limitations” of handheld systems. I find that an excellent Gameboy Advance or Nintendo DS game, Advance Wars for example, is usually ten times as fun as the latest Doom-type game where you run around dark hallways in circles emptying shotgun blasts into peoples’ heads. (Not that that isn’t fun, mind you, but I got tired of it in, oh, 1995 or so.) And this is why I still return again and again to play Infocom games from the ’80s, and to their excellent successors by passionate amateur writers such as Nelson or Plotkin.

Given this huge thumbs-up for text games from no less than the Gray Lady herself, this seems as good a time as any to complete my earlier story about how I put Zork and a bunch of other old games on my new cell phone.

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I had no earthly reason to believe that my new cell phone would play Zork, aside from a vague idea that I’d seen something somewhere online about old text games being playable on Palm Pilots. But I didn’t have a Palm Pilot, I just had a phone. This idea was a complete shot in the dark. But what’s Zork? let me back up briefly.

Zork is a text game that I first played on my friend Michael’s computer when I was about 8 or 9, so in 1983 or so. It looked more or less like this.


I played it for several hours, and all I did was read somebody’s mail, find a bird’s nest and fruitlessly yank at a grating hidden beneath a pile of leaves in a forest. Most of the things I typed were met with responses like “You can’t see that here” or “You can’t do that”. But I was hooked.

A year or two later I somehow got (I can’t remember how exactly I acquired things back then... birthday present? saved up allowance? spontaneous gift from easily hornswoggled grandparent?) my own copy of Zork I for our Mac Plus, along with, later, Hitchhiker’s, Spellbreaker, a copy of The Lurking Horror, and a couple others. These games were incredible, but they were extremely difficult to beat without carefully scanning the packaging inserts, paying for hints and/or hearing solutions from other kids, and they scarred me for life. In a good way. But around this very same time, we got our first Nintendo system, and I started to see text games as somewhat old-fashioned. The golden age of the text adventure was drawing to a close.

Several spasmic waves of roughly biennial nostalgia have since prompted me to play through these old games on every computer I’ve owned, and I have even attempted to program a couple things myself in a modern, freeware text adventure creation language called Inform. I currently play this sort of thing on my MacBook using this program, where games look like this:

So, having been playing Zork since 1983 or so, I grasped my spanking new Razr, plugged its USB cable into my computer, and set out to force it to play Zork with me. This rite of passage would take several days of arduous work, eventually shaving years off both the phone’s and my life, but it was a success. I figured out that the phone could play small Java games, and that somebody had made this program, a scaled-down version of this program, for playing old Infocom games on cell phones in Java.

Only trouble is, the only game that the scaled-down program could play was a demo version of Zork 1, in the now-beyond-extremely-obsolete Z3 story file format. It took me a couple of days’ tinkering to figure out how to get multiple copies of the mini Java application uploaded onto my phone, each loading a different story file. But I did it. This is what Zork looks like on my mobile phone.

Being able to carry around in my palm a childhood treasure which, at the time I first played it, required a humming beige box and monitor which together were larger than I was, almost reduced me to tears, and I began playing it immediately. I just beat it a few hours ago.

Never mind that the applet only has one save slot, and that I have to type everything in thumb-punishing SMS style. I now love my new phone, not only because it plays Zork - but that’s a big part of it. Anything that can play Zork is my friend. Is not dirty. Is not fighting me. Is very nice.

(Those last remarks were in the Bengali-Thai-English pigin I’ve been using to communicate with one of my students this week. But that’s an whole other story.)

The Loch Nichada Monster

I live in Bangkok, but I don’t really LIVE in Bangkok. I live in a pleasant, Epcot-Center-like community of the future, where cheerful Swedes and Koreans zip around on electric golf carts, jackbooted yet oddly childlike Thai guards pick flowers, nap and tickle each other at every corner, and everything - from Baskin-Robbins ice cream to the legendary “Strong and Bitey” Australian cheddar to my personal favorite grocery store item of any kind, ever (for the story behind it, not the taste), Weihenstephaner Korbinian - is available at the local store. Our apartment is near a pleasant artificial lake, ringed with tropical trees and a few apartment buildings, with the school looming in the background.

However, there’s a dark side. I’ve already mentioned the strange plague of albino geckos. There are also an awful lot of bats, and centipedes as big as a man’s finger. There are snails nearly the size of my fist that often get stepped on or run over, leaving a tragic, omelette-sized smear of invertebrate gore. There are glistening things that rustle in the undergrowth as you hurry down the slimy, uneven lakeside path.

And there are... things... in the lake. Large things. I don’t know what they are, but they thrash periodically. The sound is exactly like the sound of Shamu leaping ten feet into the air, through a hoop and slapping back down into the water. When this happens as I’m strolling around the lake, I always look, but a moment too late, and all I can see is a giant welling circle of disturbed water, as if someone had just dropped a boulder into the lake. I have no idea what sort of sea beastie could possibly be making splashes like that in a peaceful little pond. I am picturing something roughly dolphin-sized. With needle-sharp teeth and a taste for human flesh. I tried to take a picture of one of the splash blast zones earlier, but it didn’t come out. You can’t see it, but half of the lake in the picture below is rippling from the aftereffects of a creature’s vigorous, whalloping aquathrash. I’ll try to capture this phenomenon on film later today. If I don’t post after this, you’ll know what happened.

Under the Bathrobe of Gandalf

Problem: I live in Thailand. I need to learn Thai. Yet I am too shy to talk Thai on the fly.

Proposed Solution: Read a Thai translation of a book I’ve already read. This has worked for me in the past, during such successful projects as “Read Heart of Darkness in German” and “Read somewhat less than half of Foucault’s Pendulum in Italian before giving up.”

New Problem: After some research which consists of walking into the bookstore and judging books entirely by their covers, I conclude that when Thais turn to fiction they apparently prefer to read nothing but Harry Potter, cheesy romance novels with amorous Conté-crayoned Hindu gods on the cover, some strange comic book series about a boy with a watermelon for a head, which might or might not be Japanese, and, for some reason, the Wizard of Oz books. I can’t find any familiar, easy books to start with. Except a few neglected shrinkwrapped Tolkien bricks on the top shelf.

Insane but Somehow Perfect Solution: Buy Tolkien’s The Return of the King in Thai and attempt to read it.

I’m pretty excited about this grand project. The book has a really cool green cover, with some pretty badass Thai fonts. The Thai version of the series title is, oddly, the same as the English one; it actually says, more or less, LORD AAF DAA RINGS in Thai letters. You’d think they could have come up with their own version, but whatever.

The book also came with a removable map. Thai pretty much looks like some kind of mutant Elvish already, so seeing Tolkien’s map actually in Thai letters (again, in an extra cool font with extra curlicues) is more or less mind-blowing. Those big letters say GONDOR. This map is quite possibly the coolest thing I’ve seen in my entire life.

Let the great experiment begin! I just spent about an hour translating the first sentence. Thai has no freaking spaces between words, and the vowel notations are a bit obscure to me at this point, so to my untrained eye, after figuring out what I thought the letters were in English, the first sentence in the book looked like this:

PPPNMNGLDAAKMAJIJTSAKLMKANGKNDLF

Not very promising. But wait! PPPN? KNDLF? I know those rascals! Things snowballed from there, if snowball is the right verb to describe an hour of agonizing dictionary research. Soon I had produced the following translation:

“Pippin watch pass through out come from under dressing gown of Gandalf.”

Not exactly a masterpiece of lucid prose, right? I must have screwed up somewhere, right? Nope! It’s pretty much on target. The English version is:

“Pippin looked out from the shelter of Gandalf's cloak.”

I was close! Apparently, I can translate Tolkien from Thai. One sentence down, many, many thousand to go. Huzzah!

And by the way I just found out it’s Rosh Hashanah this evening, so to my triumphant huzzah may I add Shanah Tovah! I’ve got a good feeling about the year 5768.

Unfrozen Newhandythal Man

I am notoriously (if one can be notorious among a circle of acquaintances which totals eight or so people) crotchety about getting new personal accessories. I have purchased probably five pairs of shoes in my adult life, one watch, one wallet - which is now gradually disintegrating from the punishing condition known as chronic tropical swampass - and most of my electronic equipment has been battered hand-me-downs from my much earliery-adoptery wife.

Why do I hang on to stuff for so long? While most people seem to be thrust into effervescent spasms of ecstasy by the act of buying a new car or cell phone every other year, for some reason, there’s something about buying new stuff that actually disturbs me.

I think it’s partly because no matter what you buy, they keep making better, cheaper ones every six months, and partly because I hate to admit that my old whatever-it-was is not good enough any more. If I have to get a new whatever-it-is every couple of years, then doesn’t that make me an idiot for buying the old one? Shouldn’t I have chosen better in the first place? Agh.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I am the polar opposite of an early adopter. Late adopter doesn’t begin to cover it. I am such a late adopter that by the time I adopt something, it’s old enough to be cool again in a retro kind of way. I am a T-800 grappling my way clumsily through a world of T-1000s, still rocking the same clothes, boots and bike I took off the first guy I met. So imagine my pleasure (mixed with vague uneasiness) upon my wife’s getting me a brand-spanking-new cell phone for my birthday. A gleaming, sleek metal phone with a camera and a sort of Tricordery flippy part and God knows what else.

Actually, my new phone was purchased slightly used, and the model has been out for a couple of years, but compared to most of my possessions it was if this thing was an example of some unimaginably refined future technology that had just been beamed down from an alien spacecraft. I hadn’t the slightest idea what to make of it, but excitement definitely had the upper hand over technophobia. For, within minutes of being presented with the phone, I had an idea for personalizing it, alien gadget that it was.

I decided I would force it to play Zork.
More later.