From df44200fff69d784296ee02b8dfabddf931b6df7 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: "richard.m.tew@gmail.com"
+ I’ve always liked consistency in the game world, which is actually a rare thing in most text MUDs.
+
+ Many builders typically work on the same MUD, all of them have their own ideas, preferences and writing styles, and as a Head Builder you don’t want to hamper their imagination too much, for fear that they’ll just up and leave — which many of them do anyway. Consequently, many MUDs end up with a patchwork of rather incompatible zones, on a wide variety of themes and environments, where you could walk directly from an elven forest into a Smurf village, or from a desert landscape into a field of snow, without any logical distance or explanation.
+
+ The other end of the spectrum, the grid based world, usually gets rather dull and monotonous, with very repetitive descriptions.
+
+ As a new and totally inexperienced builder in a brand new MUD, almost twenty years ago, I was happy to be allowed to develop my own ideas, and so were all the other builders. There was a lot of enthusiasm among us, as we toiled away on the zones on the build port, while the coders had their own fun on the game port. Building is slow work, but with all that unbridled creativity, zones were produced at an amazingly fast pace. The result was… a patchwork, as it was in most other MUDs back then.
+
+ As a new and totally inexperienced Head Builder in the nineties, I spent most of my time building “travelling” zones between all those different themed patches, so as to at least keep them apart a bit and provide some kind of explanation as to why they were so different. The result was better, but still not really spectacular. The MUD was still a patchwork, but by now with an amazingly large world to explore … and it kept growing.
+
+ About ten years ago, I started to get ideas about a more interactive world, where the inhabitants — the “mobs” — would have lives of their own. This, in turn, would affect the players to a point where they had to think a bit about the choices they made before going on a killing spree. I ran with some of these ideas, and they resulted in lots of scripted mobs who responded to approaches by telling the players about their woes and sending them on various quests to help.
+
+ The quests and the “intelligent” scripted mobs are now large and vital parts of our MUD, but it still isn’t quite the vision I had 10 years ago.
+
+ If I were to start a MUD from scratch today, with the knowledge I've gained over the years, I’d go about it in a very different way. I’d create a dynamic world that changes with the time of day and year, the weather and the seasons, with a working ecology system, where all plants and animals have a life cycle of their own, and where players also could affect the ecological balance with their actions — for better or worse.
+
+ The players should be able to utilize all natural assets – minerals, plants and animals – and also cultivate the soil, to increase the crops. They should be able to hunt and kill the wild animals for their meat and hides, but also domesticate herds of cattle, horses and sheep, fence them in for protection and drive them to the market to be sold. They should be able to develop most of the most of the raw materials into more advanced and usable products by crafting. There should be a market where they could trade their products, and get a higher price the more developed they are. Above all there should be a balanced ecology system, so that the MUD would be alive and changing in yearly cycles, even if not a single player were logged on to it.
+
+ I don’t know if such a MUD already exists somewhere. I’ve never come across one myself. Yet almost all the elements needed already exist in my own home MUD, which is run on modified Circle code and the DG_scripts. If anyone knows of something like this already existing, I’d appreciate a link, so I could visit and watch for myself. Otherwise, this is how I’d go about it, if I were starting from scratch today:
+
+ I’d go for a combination between a large, continuous grid and “normal zones”. The main world would be grid based, and I’d definitely utilize the beautiful graphic maps from the Client app that KaVir developed for MUSHclient and so generously shared with the community.
+
+ From this main grid you’d reach some “special zones”, which would be more like traditional MUD zones, such as islands, caverns, mine tunnels, or player built mansions, fortresses and cities. These extra zones would only show up on the main grid as a single entrance square, and you’d need to either enter a portal, or descend/climb some object to reach them.
+
+ The main grid world should be very large, meaning that you'd have to travel long distances to get from one end of a continent or ocean to another. Distance and weight should matter, meaning that you'd need to use mounts, carts, wagons or ships to travel far, or to carry heavy loads.
+
+ I’d make the world grid in 20x20 room pieces, which is a nice size to map on A4 graph paper. It would be easy to expand this grid successively, by just adding more 400-room pieces, with varying topography. But I'd keep it small, until the ecology system was balanced. Just two basic 400 room zones, one land based, the other water based.
+
+ To these two basic grids I'd then add all the life forms: trees, plants and animals. Then I'd work at getting the ecology reasonably balanced within these two 400-room zones before starting to expand the world.
+
+ I am inclined to think that the room descriptions in the basic grid won’t be very important, because all the interesting and dynamic things in the game would happen with the mobs and objects. So the grid descriptions would be short and concise, set by the code, and based on the terrain of each room.
+
+ This is where the fun starts — because what would also be set by the code, based on the terrain on each grid square, would be a “fertility” value which would determine how much vegetation the square could sustain, and how fast it would grow. This value would be the basis for the entire ecology system. There should be a lot more terrains than the usual stock list, and naturally terrains like “field” or “prairie” would have a much higher fertility value than “mountain” or “desert”.
+
+ Time would naturally play a big role in the ecology system, and not just day and night changes. There is stock code for seasons, with weeks, months and years, which could be developed further. For instance, when farming you'd have to prepare the soil in early spring, then sow, then wait for the harvest in autumn. The outcome of the crop would depend on good tending and timing, (i.e., if you didn't plough or sow at the right time, there would be nothing to harvest).
+
+ The existing weather code does not add much to the game, just some messages about how it’s starting, or ceasing, to rain, etc. What I have in mind would have a much larger impact on the environment. It would be cold in winter, so you’d need warm clothes to survive. There would be the normal weather cycles, but also droughts and torrents, and occasional natural disasters, like tornados, wildfires, earthquakes and landslides.
+
+ The weather changes would affect the cultivated crops more than the natural vegetation, which would be adapted to the climate. For instance, if it doesn't rain for an unusually long time, some crops will wither and die unless you water them. The opposite is also a danger: if it rained profusely during harvest time, the corn would rot and there'd be a crop failure.
+
+ Seasons would be simulated through the vegetation. Instead of changing the room descriptions, you can work with the objects, showing the vegetation in different stages of development.
+
+ I've made a pretty simple system of scripts for an orchard, where each tree loads a new version of itself for each new season before purging itself. So there are flowers and budding leaves in spring, green foliage in summer, ripe fruits in autumn, and bare twigs in winter. The fruits can only be picked in autumn.
+
+ The same system could be used for all vegetation objects, like tufts of grass, herbs, flowers, bushes, trees, etc. These could all be shown in different stages of development based on the season and their life cycle.
+
+ The drawback, of course, is that you'd need four different objects for each single species, but once those are created, the rest will be automatic.
+
+ This brings us to the main feature:
+
+ The ecology system is controlled by five parameters:
+
+ To start out with the plants, I would make grass, herbs, bushes and trees (with leaves) as food objects, which the herbivores would feed from, and then make predators to feed from the herbivores. Most plants would have a life cycle on a yearly basis, and the fertility factor would determine how many plants of each kind a square can sustain. Some species, like trees, would have a much longer life cycle.
+
+ I'd make similar life cycles for the animals, so that they would get born, grow up, mate, give birth, grow old and die, all within a set time. Again, this means at least four mobs for each species, but it should be well worth the extra effort.
+
+ Some species would be bound to certain terrains, or have dens that they’d return to for sleep during day or night, but most of them would roam freely on the grid.
+
+ I'd make several types of animals: insects, spiders, birds, fish, snakes, frogs and mammals. Each species would have a different set of properties, like size, fertility, speed, agility, tenacity, stamina, ferocity and strength. High stats in one of these factors would be balanced by lower stats in others. For instance, a rabbit would be high in fertility and speed and low in all other properties, while a bear would be high in strength and ferocity, and low in the others.
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+ Depending on these properties, an animal would hide, burrow, flee, evade or fight when threatened or attacked. All of them would have to eat and drink to survive.
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+ The herbivores would have to roam to find food and water once they’d consumed all the available vegetation in one square. The carnivores would feed from the herbivores, mainly from kids and old animals, and all mature animals would defend their offspring. Kids would follow their mothers, and herd animals would stick together.
+
+ This could all be done with scripts, but should perhaps better be done by code. The important thing would be to maintain a balance, so that the populations are reasonably stable, unless tampered with by players. A population would be controlled and kept in place by several factors, like fertility, food supply, lifespan, size and strength, evasion ability, and natural enemies.
+
+ There would also be edible mushrooms, vegetables, roots, fruits, nuts and seeds, which animals and humans would compete for.
+
+ To this basic ecology, once it is balanced, I would then add the possibility for the players to farm the land and to fence it in, either to protect one’s farming field from herbivores or to protect livestock from carnivores. You should be able to domesticate some animals, but if you fence them in, you’d also have to feed and water them regularly.
+
+ Farming a field would increase the original fertility factor with each step (plowing, harrowing, fertilizing, watering and sowing), and if started at the right time would yield a substantial crop to harvest and trade in the autumn.
+
+ A vital part of the world would be a number of small villages, inhabited by human natives. These would be friendly, if approached peacefully, but they would also defend themselves and their possessions if provoked. Mainly they would serve as trading partners and mentors. They would buy your products, and in some cases help with developing them, or give advice on how you can do it yourself. Rare and hard-to-get items would fetch higher prices, and the more developed a product, the higher the price. Players would also barter and trade among themselves, encouraging player interaction and roleplaying.
+
+ It would be a survival game, both short and long term, and the players would enter the world as the sole survivors of a spaceship crash on an almost virgin planet. They would be armed with a knife and a gun, which would give them a small advantage to start out with — but only as long as the bullets in the magazine last.
+
+ To survive and raise their own status, the players can:
+
+ The raw materials form the basis of the craft system, where you develop them into more advanced products which fetch a much better price. Everything you make will also decay over time, so the cycle must be kept going.
+
+ Most of the development projects would also lay waste to a piece of land. Even building roads and turning grassland into farmland would affect the global ecology, mainly by reducing the available grazing areas for the wildlife and removing it from the ecology cycle.
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+ As long as the untouched areas and basic supplies are large enough, though, it shouldn’t crash the ecology system totally — this being one reason you need a really large grid.
+
+ Still, too many bad choices on a too grand scale might result in a global disaster, comparable to a meteor strike. If the players actually manage to crash the system, it would mean permadeath for everyone and a full reboot of the world and player base.
+
+ Over the years bits and pieces of these ideas have been added to my own home MUD. We have farm fields, garden plots and orchards, a ranch to raise cattle in, and a large, working mine. You can fell trees, milk cows, shear sheep, skin most animals, and scrape and tan their hides into leather. There is also an extensive mob-run trading system in place. But it’s still just “bits and pieces”, and I’m really tempted to try the full ecology system out in a full scale.
+
+ However, my home MUD — both the code and the world — has grown so large, complex and convoluted that in some ways it resembles the proverbial white elephant that’s so big, stubborn and heavy that almost every change of its course involves an inordinate amount of work. A radical upheaval, such as the basic ecology system I just described, would be next to impossible.
+
+ It would be a lot easier to start out from scratch.
+
+ But who’d do that at a time when text MUDs seem to be slowly dying?
+ A cohesive MUD world with a working ecology
+ The world
+ Time, seasons and weather
+ The ecology system
+
+
+ Human Development
+
+
+ Conclusion
+
+ All authors retain copyright to their work, and have made their work available under the + {{tp.license_text}} license, which allows us to publish it. +
+{% endblock %} diff --git a/templates/volume07_issue03/dispelling-the-gloom/index.html b/templates/volume07_issue03/dispelling-the-gloom/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d3ce1bf --- /dev/null +++ b/templates/volume07_issue03/dispelling-the-gloom/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,130 @@ +{% extends "issue/article/index.html" %} +{% block page_title %} + Dispelling the gloom +{% endblock %} +{% block article_authors %} (Tomasz Gruca){% endblock %} +{% block article_date %}2nd June 2015{% endblock %} +{% block article_byline %} + {{ super() }} + “So, what was it like?” +{% endblock %} +{% block article_content %} ++This is a question I hear from time to time when I mention that I grew up in a communist state behind the Iron Curtain. - Or should I say “used to hear" — despite the fact that only about a generation passed since it all crumbled down, the Cold War era seems as distant as medieval times, truly ancient and confined to those strange "past centuries". Maybe it’s a function of time and place: flanked by one of the world’s biggest financial hubs on one side and uber-hip yupster’s enclave on the other (the quintessential "rotten West" of communist propaganda) in a once-futuristic year 2015, one might struggle to find people interested in anything other than here and now. +
++The question always left me a bit stumped. It’s an experience nigh-on impossible to describe in a sentence or two in a casual conversation. Partially because people’s expectations stem from descriptions of awful historical extremes, and my area at the time (the late 1970s) was lucky to avoid these, on a big scale at least. So I had no horror stories of gulags, bloodshed and paranoid surveillance to tell, stories that my compatriots from neighbouring states or other (mostly Stalinist) eras certainly would have. The other factor skewing my perception was age when you’re a kid, the grown-up problems do not concern you that much, however awful they might be. +
++Now, make no mistake, life in a communist state was quite awful — and that’s the word reserved for this system’s mildest incarnation, the one I experienced. Lack of freedom to leave the country (unless you’d fancy visiting another communist state) and overbearing censorship would be two major factors here. The more nebulous, but still depressingly real, fact that you’re not living in a sovereign country is another. The ever-present threat of "bad things" happening loomed large — after all, dissidents did die and go to prison, even in our "softer" version. And the Cold War’s nuclear threat might seem distant and bit unreal nowadays, but back then it was truly terrifying. +
++(There was also a more positive side to living in these times — there were lots of good things and ideas amongst the grimness, but that’s a completely different story...) +
++Still, while it all seems unbearable now, for a child or a teenager it didn’t qualify as such, at least not for these reasons. That is why, when trying to answer the original question with which I started this article, I would say "Well, it was… grey. And… surreal." Yep… grey and surreal, but mostly grey. +
++"Grey" is the word that sums up the communist era best for me — describing a state of mind more than the color itself, though there was plenty of that too. While as kids we were of course aware of major goings-on in the adult sphere, that was more of a high-level dark cloud, looming but distant. Disturbances in our immediate world were more mundane, caused by cramped living conditions, +vodka, religious zealotry, unpredictable shortages of literally anything and other quirks of the commutopian life. But… the Greyness was more vague, yet ever-present, and manifested itself mostly in depressed adults, endless propaganda and military parades on the black-and-white television, oppressive concrete architecture, power-cut-induced twilight zones, and a sense of general helplessness and hopelessness — emotions which were not clearly understood but certainly felt. Contrasted with the beauty of the natural world and simple joys of life itself, it often resulted in a strange melancholy state. +
++Even so, as kids we did our best to battle the gloom. We could and did improvise and use our “local” toys and media, some of which were quite brilliant. Yet, because we were aware of the existence of the forbidden fruit — LEGO (never had any), Matchboxes (had one), Star Wars (saw it ten years after the premiere), Disney cartoons (on TV once a year for Christmas) — our playthings and heroic World War II TV dramas couldn’t compete in the long run, and perhaps even made things a bit more depressing. +
++One thing that proved harder for the governing overseers to control was the written word. Sure enough, books in general were censored, and most of the exciting foreign titles were either banned or printed in extremely limited quantities, fetching crazy prices at second-hand market. I saw The Lord of the Rings mentioned in a rare TV program once, and instantly knew I just had to read it, but obtaining a copy was a quest in itself — it took me several years before I finally found a tattered volume in an obscure library. Literacy was very high, thanks to free and quite strict schools, and that, combined with +the unavailability or poor quality of other media, made reading a very popular pastime. +
++It has been my obsession since a very early age — I burned through a few books per week, living in imaginary realities of Messrs Verne, Conan-Doyle, Dumas, Poe, May, Stevenson and countless others, reading with a torch under a blanket at night (if this sounds like it would start a fire, then what I call a torch is what you call a flashlight). I was +once conned by my family into agreeing to an extended hospital stay on the premise that “they have a library there!” (They didn’t.) Books offered an escape hatch to fantasy worlds but also the hope that things could be different in the real one. +
++While reading was a great distraction, we loved games too, same as kids all over the world. But, again, this cultural sphere was rather limited in the late-Seventies Eastern Bloc. There were playing cards and board game staples like chess or checkers, but nothing too exciting (when I was about 10 I was given a Monopoly-clone set for Xmas — I thought it was a revelation). Despite sci-fi and fantasy being very popular literary genres, pen and paper role-playing games were virtually unknown; they only started gradually appearing in the mid-Eighties. +
++Yet, while lacking in all other fun departments, we had arcade games. It’s a mystery to me how they managed to seep through the Iron Curtain; these huge, costly machines must have been quite tricky to obtain and transport into the country. But there they were, appearing to us kids as complex alien artifacts, so totally outlandish when contrasted with our grey world. Found in back rooms and the corners of smoky bars, train stations or converted caravans, mostly surrounded by menacing grown-ups (to a 7-year-old anybody five years older is a grown-up). These places were often dangerous to visit, as you could easily be mugged for change — which you seldom had anyway, since there was no such thing as "pocket money". +
++Of course we went there anyway. The allure of this surreally wonderful medium was simply too strong. We would rarely play ourselves, mainly due to the aforementioned lack of fund, but watching was a joy too. At first the games were mostly pinball machines, with all their mechanical bleeping, blinking and popping wonders. Sometimes we were lucky enough to find a coin in a slot or a hasty traveler had a train to catch or somebody would forget he won an extra ball, and we would swoop in immediately and claim the prize. This was mostly short-lived fun, as our skills were obviously very poor, but it didn’t matter (and if you had a good friend with you, you would share a game playing a flipper each — probably not what designers had in mind). +
++Pinball was great fun — I even recall my DIY-genius uncle building a little book-sized home version from a bit of wood with holes drilled in, a few nails and flippers made of laundry pegs held by rubber bands. (Surprisingly, it worked! It was great fun too.) When the first proper video game machines appeared in arcades, though, pinball was instantly relegated to second tier. From then on, it was all about pixels. Still very rare and hard to approach, especially to a not-even-teenage child, they became a firm feature in our imaginations — though we would never even dare to dream about what was to come and we never knew what was happening in the parallel Western Universe. While our rulers appreciated science and tech very much, the news programs were mostly dedicated to our own local flavor, and reluctant to report on the Evil Westerner’s achievements — especially regarding “decadent” pleasure- and fun-enabling inventions. +
++And “over there”, the entertainment market was being revolutionised — Magnavox and Atari brought video games from arcades into people’s homes. In our world such a thing was still totally unimaginable — an arcade was a kind of shrine, with the bizarre alien machines put there by some higher force for unfathomable reasons. To have one at home? Incomprehensible. +
++This perception changed over time, though. The System couldn’t censor and control all the sources of information, and the political climate was slowly thawing — the Eighties, while still firmly communist, were much less darker and oppressive than the previous decades. The Biggest Brother had a new leader who talked of “openness” and “restructuring”. There was a lot going on in my area too — a certain dissident electrician scaled a shipyard’s fence in my town to join an illegal union strike, an act that eventually led to the ruling party’s collapse, ten years later. The Pope was visiting while the American president was issuing embargoes — all these groundbreaking events being still a distant noise in the kids’ world. Even the Chernobyl disaster was remembered mostly because of the awful taste of the liquid (Lugol's iodine) they forced us to drink at school, that and a supremely eerie atmosphere. +
++We had other, more pressing issues. Dealing with puberty, poverty, and the “greyness” — despite the fact that the Utopian State was crumbling, the gloom was still very much present. But there were new weapons with which to battle it appearing on the horizon — to a youth who first got the video game bug in these hard-to-approach arcades, glimpses of possibility showed here and there. Vague mentions in magazines, Soviet Game & Watch bootleg clones (that a rich kid from school would rent for a day in some sort of barter deal), a friend’s dad’s amazing Pong clone with one working paddle, strange machines called "computers" seen at a Trade Expo… yes, the pixels were getting slowly closer and closer. +
++Then one day, a revelation. One cool Saturday my favourite science news program dedicated last 10 minutes to the new wonder in the tech world: microcomputers. Sir Clive’s finest creation featured heavily and my mind was bombarded with nearly unfathomable facts, like that a person could actually own one of these, have it in their room and play video games on it. They showed Knight Lore and Mugsy and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Pong and arcades, however brilliant, couldn’t even come close. These games were totally next level, creating true worlds beyond simple pew-pew of the arcade hits. They saved the best for the last — the Hobbit text adventure, with the tantalizing prospect of "talking to a computer", an interactive book of sorts that would have you read and respond at the same time. It was all a bit too much to take in, but I knew that now I had a goal in life: to obtain one of these machines and "talk to a computer". +
++For a kid with no income and whose most technically-advanced possession was a hand-me-down sometimes-working tape deck, it was quite a challenge — in fact, mission rather impossible — so it took many years before I finally managed to get one. It was a strange period; when others drew logos of their favourite bands on school notebooks, I did the same for micros. I read every available tidbit of information about video games, a subject that inevitably was becoming more and more popular. It started with a mention here and there, eventually reaching the point where dedicated sections in magazines appeared. Sometimes these mags printed game listings in BASIC, which I would try to analyze and imagine what it would be like to play. I went on trips to other towns just to see working models in expensive specialized shops for the wealthy. I also started learning English, mainly to decipher a few of the proper video game mags my friend owned. These tattered copies of Your Sinclair and A.C.E. +were my blueprints for the future. +
++After what seemed like eternity, and a rather depressing quest filled with scraping pennies from odd jobs and pestering relatives (and even non-relatives), my good-hearted auntie finally caved in and "lent" me the remaining sum. I became an owner of Timex 2048 / ZX Spectrum clone. These micros, along with Commodore/Atari/Amstrad models, were very popular in the Eastern Bloc thanks to mass piracy — since we lived in another reality, there were no pesky copyright restrictions (consoles with their hard-to-copy cartridges were virtually unknown). +
++Despite the fact that more than half a decade had passed since my first text-adventure encounter with that Hobbit program, I had not forgotten it and wanted to play it immediately. Unfortunately, obtaining programs for your machine was not easy; while piracy was normal (that term didn’t even exist at first, and we were just vaguely aware that people actually pay for software in the West), the availability was somewhat random. There were computer fairs where you could go and purchase some software from a dude with a micro set up on a table who would copy it to your tape for a fee, or sell you a "set" tape with some games on it. This would require hard cash, though (plus often a train trip to a faraway location) and after the machine itself, I could hardly even afford the tapes. So I had to rely on swapping with friends — but since it was such an expensive and rare hobby, this choice was severely limited. +
++Mostly, I’d get a tape with no description and no clue what was on it (and few programs managing to load anyway — audiocassette is not the most reliable medium for data). The ZX Spectrum library contains thousands of games of varying quality. Text adventures were surprisingly popular, despite the obvious language barrier, but not as popular as action-oriented games. That meant it took me some time before I managed to find The Hobbit itself, but in the meantime I encountered a few others… +
++By then a teenager, I knew much more about how video games and computers work in general — certainly more than my bug-eyed 8 year old self — and the initial fantasy of "talking to a computer" seemed a bit naive by then. Still, text adventures stood out as special amongst the mostly simplistic 8-bit video gaming fare, coming across as rather sophisticated and promising some sort of AI interaction. So, despite the language barrier and total lack of support — no Internet to look stuff up and very limited local literature — I was determined to delve into these mysterious domains. +
++My friend, whose father was a seaman (a profession that not only was well-paid but allowed access to the outside world), had a luxurious ZX Spectrum with a built-in tape recorder, and even some original tapes — a true rarity. One of them was Seabase Delta, a text adventure with graphics and great cover art. I was completely spellbound by it — a very good, atmospheric game but also simple enough to be playable using my (very) basic English. By "playable", I mean managing to move around a few initial locations and lo! even solving some puzzles — something I was immensely proud of, since it was all pretty much terra incognita, both the medium and language. +
++Eventually I got stuck, of course — the age old problem with adventure games. In my case, getting stuck was for good — there was no helpline to call, no mag to write to, no friend who could help. Game over. +
++It was quite tough, and discouraging. The allure of ASCII worlds proved greater than that, though, and I continued playing every interactive fiction title I could find. In some of these I didn’t manage to progress further than the first room due to obscure parsers or complex language used. For example, here’s an unforgettable (for me) quote from Urban Upstart describing the town of Scarthorpe where the action takes place: "Scarthorpe is the sort of town where even the dogs carry flick knives! Where there's a only one road in, and that's a one-way street! The sort of town where rebuilding means a new coat of paint, and where people queue up to queue up for a job!" Most of the humour here was lost on me, but in particular that "queue up to queue up" phrase caused me immense headache — for some reason I couldn’t find "queue" in a dictionary and started believing it was all a mistake or invented English. +
++I ploughed on, though, and sometimes it paid off. My English slowly improved and, as it is with puzzles, some solutions and ideas would come to me later on, after my subconscious mind was allowed to work on them in peace. One day I reread the aforementioned Your Sinclairs borrowed from my pal and, amazingly, found the answer to the Seabase Delta riddle that I was stumped on. It involved making a pancake to throw at a security camera, and while I hated the fact that I had to rely on a hint, I had to admit I’d never have figured it out myself. +
++The one and only game I managed to finish completely on my own was Valkyrie 17. It was an amazing game, some sort of espionage mystery that I don’t remember much about, apart from being presented in a true noir fashion and having quite logical puzzles. +
++Eventually I found The Hobbit, the original Holy Grail that started my obsession. Despite the passage of time and impossible expectations, I still loved it, even though I didn’t manage to get very far in the game itself. It wasn’t a straightforward romp like Seabase Delta but more complex fare, involving the passage of time, NPCs, and so on. These more nuanced adventures — The Lord of the Rings, which I had on the same tape, was another example — were still too much for me. Most of the stuff that would come naturally to a native speaker with more understanding of the genre was lost on me, and I was still mostly stumbling in the dark, though having heaps of fun nonetheless. Evenings spent learning English through text-adventure location descriptions and occasionally solving a puzzle were an unforgettable experience, and though I was into all sorts of video games, these were the most cherished. +
++Parsers were a biggest challenge for me, and since I didn’t quite know how they worked, I started building my own private text-adventure dictionary — by scanning a proper one and picking up verbs which I thought might be used by game designers. Later on I would try them in-game, brute-force style. It was a rather tedious process which yielded few results, and I think I gave up somewhere around the letter C — still, wish I had kept that notebook, saved as a token from that strange, surreal era. +
++Eventually I started slowly drifting away from interactive fiction; the times were changing in my little world, and in the big one too. I "grew up", which meant I wasn’t afraid to go into arcades alone any more, started noticing — and being noticed by — that strange, opposite sex, experienced hangovers, and all the other trappings of being a young adult. The Iron Curtain had just collapsed, and so did the communist governments in Russia and all our neighbouring states, replaced mostly by chaos and uncertainty. The Greyness was slowly banished by the loud and brash Nineties and all the grand things they had to offer. +
++I still played video games every day, but now on an Amiga, and with all its bells and whistles it was much easier to abandon the old text/parser territory. There were some of the grandest text adventures available on this platform — modern titles from Magnetic Scrolls and their compatriots, titles that I read about and was awed by — but without feelies and clues these proved only frustrating. +
++After the 3D appeared firmly on the scene with the arrival of Wolfenstein — accompanied by some epic CRPGs like the Gold Box games and the Fallout series on the other flank — I abandoned the text world completely. I remembered it very fondly over the next two decades, but the few times I came back — playing the excellent Anchorage or Lurking Horror, for example — were short-lived. The dazzling world of AAA games took over. +
++The fact that text gaming largely dropped off the radar over the years didn’t help, either. It happened to quite a few of the popular genres from the Golden Era — flight sims, point-and-click adventures, turn-based RPGs and such — but these never vanished as completely as interactive fiction did, and now are enjoying a revival of sorts. Sure, there were always things going on underground — IFComp and the ifarchive.org crews keeping the flame alight — but in the commercial world, text adventures ceased to exist. +
++This sad fact makes me realize even more how lucky I was to get infected with the ASCII virus back then, in this now-forgotten realm of communist utopia. It also seems that its lodgement in my neurons was much more resilient than I initially thought — even the glittering world of AAA polygons didn’t eradicate it completely. Over the last few years, dismayed by the state of modern gaming — casualization & monetization being the worst offending factors — I started to gravitate slowly towards serious retro gaming again. That, combined with my gradual conversion to the roguelike mindset and its ASCII aesthetic leads me to an inevitable conclusion: it’s time to complete the circle and delve into the text adventure world again. +
++I felt my brain buzz with emotions, just like back in the day, when I recently started up Border Zone — the fact that its tagline reads "Action and international intrigue behind the Iron Curtain" surely a coincidence? I felt it again, a few months ago, when playing Knight Orc on my phone while traveling on a local train — a train in a country that’s being claimed as a part of this planet’s last communist superpower — but that must be another coincidence. +
++This time, though, I’m better prepared for the challenge ahead, with all the feelies, clues, covers and mags now just a click away. Hopefully there won’t be a need for a self-written dictionary, either. I feel dazzled and incredibly excited by the myriad games available, text adventures I never played yet and which surely will last me at least until another era, whatever that era might be. I’m quite certain that this excitement can’t be easily dismissed just as a severe case of that much maligned middle-aged gamer’s affliction known as “nostalgia”. While there’s surely an element of that, it is different, and I know that the real joy stems from the brilliance of the gameplay itself — the writing, the mood, the puzzles and the process itself. When it’s just you, a few lines of text, a blinking cursor and infinite possibilities, the imagination takes over and nothing can match or challenge that device. +
++I only have one regret — that I would love for others, especially the new generation, to experience the wonders of text adventuring, yet I’m not sure this could be possible in our day and age. The indie scene is booming, and the "retro" style is extremely fashionable, but this fashion doesn’t seem to extend to our forgotten ASCII worlds. How to entice modern gamers, who demand graphical tiles even in very trendy roguelike games and have countless distractions permeating their immediate world, into engaging with this medium is perhaps material for another article or discussion. Here’s hoping, though, that some at least will find their way into these text-based worlds of imagination and manage to get lost in them as much as I did in the days of Greyness. +
+{% endblock %} +{% block article_bio_content %} + Akeley (Tomasz Gruca) is currently slaving away as a bicycle courier, hoping to complete his transition into a wuxia swordsman sometime next year. More of his video game adventures can be found on arkhammanor.com. +{% endblock %} diff --git a/templates/volume07_issue03/how-integral-are-letters-and-text-to-ascii-gaming/images/image00.jpg b/templates/volume07_issue03/how-integral-are-letters-and-text-to-ascii-gaming/images/image00.jpg new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..f717081b128581ce127cd3b0697a85b340dfa772 GIT binary patch literal 21356 zcmbTd1yodR`1ZT$kdW>YBn9anhLG--RzWH0&LI>LDM1hr8I*33?q&!HY3Ux2PKjYS z+xLC{-*?tI>#TLo8P=Y)nAvOAzV|%O_57~ue&%-Ob{V*
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