The Hacker News discussion on text adventures and interactive fiction reveals several key themes:
Nostalgia and the Early Days of Text Adventures
Many commenters fondly recall their early experiences with text adventures, particularly during the 1980s. This era is characterized by the creative output of individuals, often on limited hardware, and the personal satisfaction derived from building these worlds.
- kevindamm reminisced: "I also have a few of those from the 80s but only as notes written on sheets of paper (including many pages of hand-written BASIC and sometimes in various shorthands) because my Atari 800 did not have a cassette drive peripheral with which to save them. They were fun when they ran for 15-20 minutes, even after keying them in for hours."
- alienbaby shared a similar sentiment: "I spent a bit of time using PAWS on an amstrad pcw to pen my own text adventure masterpiece. It's probably still down there packed up in the cellar .... Maybe I should dig it out again."
- Nevermark detailed a long journey through the evolution of text adventures, from discovering early titles to developing their own complex systems: "As a kid, the first text adventure I encountered with "The Cave" a text-choice game created by another student in the same town I lived... I began writing text adventures myself, bigger and bigger, and with higher and higher ambitions in terms of complexity, story and world scope, parsing."
The Challenges of Parsing and Game Design
A recurring point of discussion is the notorious difficulty of text adventure parsers and the quirky errors that can arise from them. These limitations often led to amusing or frustrating interactions for players, and for developers, they represented significant design challenges.
- bravesoul2 provided an initial positive impression: "Had a quick play and it's fun, quirky, well written. I might just get into this. Damn rat!" This was followed by a common player experience: scoot lamenting,
"That's not a verb I recognise." (So. Many. Times!) - vunderba suggested improvements: "I think it might be worth adding a few more verb synonyms to make the parser a little bit less strict - what's a few more years of development. :)"
- The pitfalls of complex object interactions were highlighted by vunderba: "I remember pretty early on making a rather large mistake in that regard when a friend who was beta-testing the game for me at the time typed in commands like "get key", "get sword", "get ye flask", and then "get Aldwin" to which the game merrily replied "OK" and promptly stuffed an entire human being into the player's inventory."
- amiga386 described a recursive summoning bug: "Unfortunately, they're immediately hostile so you start attacking them too, and they get near death and summon two comrades each, and so on. It turns into a Sorcerer's Apprentice scenario very quickly."
- Similarly, drewolbrich recalled: "I remember writing one of these and typing "put bag in bag" and then being confused why the bag disappeared from the world." This was further elaborated by kevindamm with a theoretical solution:
"put bag in bag of "things which do not contain itself"which directly references dp-hackernews quoting Russell's Paradox. - reactordev noted a solution to a similar bug in MUDs: "This was a long running bug with merc based muds. The logic was to scan the room items first which cased the bug. Later versions would scan corpses first, then self, then room."
The Drive to Create and the Pain of Loss
Many commenters shared personal experiences of creating their own text adventures, often highlighting the ambition and innovation involved, as well as the heartbreaking setbacks.
- ThinkingGuy shared that this was a common pursuit: "I was there in the 1980s; writing your own Infocom-style text adventure games was a common project among my peers. There are probably lots of unfinished (or even finished-but-unshared) games out there on old floppy disks in closets."
- Nevermark detailed a significant loss: "I was so proud of it, until the day I went to save it on my floppy disk, at which time it wrote all over the previous version only to abort because it was to big for the disk. No pre-write size check! :("
- spauldo related a similar experience that led to innovation: "I had the same thing happen - lost my text adventure because it grew too large. That spurred me to figure out a better way of writing text adventures."
- matthewsinclair offered encouragement for completing a project: "Well done for shipping. That’s the hardest thing of all to do!"
The Potential of LLMs in Text Adventures
A significant portion of the discussion revolves around the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into text adventures, with a debate on their potential benefits and drawbacks.
- ninetyninenine proposed a novel use case: "LLMs can enhance text adventures. ... Essentially the LLM can see the current game state and possible moves and it's the LLMs job to change the game state and report the current game state to the user (via a well written narrative). That keeps the world consistent and structured, but the LLM adds enough dynamism to keep it flowing well."
- However, SeenNotHeard pointed to existing attempts with negative results: "There have been attempts, the results were not promising:" linking to an internal discussion.
- ninetyninenine countered that the issues were fixable: "It looks as if the problem for this one was a game design issue. They had the LLM be sarcastic and ignore well known adventure game prompts on purpose. It's an easy fix to make the LLM more obedient and polite."
- anthk expressed skepticism about LLMs' capabilities compared to traditional IF engines: "Even Inform6 with the English library running under a Pentium would run circles over llm's. They aren't even close. If7 will curb-stomp it. ... llm's can't even compete."
- scoot suggested a more nuanced role for LLMs: "However the LLM should not be arbiter of game state (as they suggested), but simply the translator that ensures that the players instructions are understood by the game."
The Creative Freedom and Depth of Text-Based Mediums
Commenters recognized the unique strengths of text adventures as a medium for storytelling and game design, allowing for complex narratives and emergent gameplay that might be difficult to achieve in visual formats.
- Nevermark appreciated the potential of the medium: "Like novels, text adventures are a medium that naturally supports much greater freedom, than visual mediums."
- blacksmith_tb mentioned community efforts to preserve older titles: "I know Adventure exists via homebrew on the Mac via the open-adventure package. There are a bunch of Z-machine options for Zork."
- Pet_Ant recalled a game with extreme depth and consequences: "I remember reading about an ancient still being developed adventure game. It was from Eastern Europe... about being trapped in a prison that had crazy amounts of depth and consequences."
- scoot mused on a specific application: "I'm imagining the application of text adventures specifically designed for second language learning. Quite the possibilities!"