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Adventures In Computerland

Computer text games are a big hit in the USA (caption)

Latest hit: text instead of graphics (caption)

More and more home computer owners in the USA are buying games
that have only words instead of graphics on the screen.  The new
"Text Adventures in Computerland" are holding players in check for weeks.

"You are standing on the east side of a house.  To the west there is
a forest.  What should I do?"  Your eyes, sharpened on video games,
search the screen in vain.  There's no sign of a house or a forest,
just the printed word.  Is this some kind of joke, or...?
 
The 100,000 fans of text games wouldn't say so.  "Adventure," where you
gather treasures in an underground labyrinth, guard them from dragons 
and thieves, and bring them safely to the surface, is already a classic
among these games where the computer functions as the eyes, ears, mouth,
arms and legs of the player.  Simple commands like "Go west" or "Take the
lamp," which the player types in response to the ever-present "what shall I 
do now?", lead to an astounding discovery: suddenly you are standing 
in a room full of garbage, in which only an empty birdcage seems to be worth
closer inspection.

The secret behind text games are the rooms, in which you live your fantasies.
If the player wants to reach a certain goal, he can (and must) get involved
in all kinds of things.  It is up to him to decide which of ten possible
directions to take, what to make of the rooms he has stumbled upon,
and what to do with the objects that just happen to be lying about
everywhere.  He must experiment with these objects, and then avoid danger,
or steer into the shoals, or fight with a sword, or even get shot by the
butler. 

The most successful games of this type are put out in the USA by the firm
Infocom.  These young programmers have succeeded in establishing a real
dialogue in the best conversational English between the computer and
the player.  A vocabulary of over 100 words enables the computer to respond
to full sentences.  Infocom games, which have taken their place next to 
the "Adventure" series, have distinguished themselves in the literary quality
of their descriptions of action and locations.  The game becomes a real 
prose adventure, in which the player himself is the hero.  

There is no shortage of games: there's "Zork" the Great Underground
Empire, where you gather treasures; or "Enchanter," where you free 
the land from the evil wizard Krill with the help of sorcery;
"Witness" is a traditional thirties Hollywood mystery, which must be solved
in a limited period of time; and "Infidel" leads an abandoned, over-inquisitive
researcher into a bizarre pyramid.

Once you are infused with text games, which keep you busy all day long, you'll
readily give up those "great" graphics games.  And who can criticize this kind
of entertainment--these games make learning English a pleasure.