[Noisebridge-discuss] GET LAMP this Friday, 8PM at NB

[Jesse Zbikowski]

This documentary made some interesting points (like why mazes suck) and I
would recommend it to anyone interested in text adventure. However in
presenting the roots of the genre (Adventure!), it is fails to account for
the very obvious and dominant influence of Dungeons & Dragons and the (then)
nascent development of paper & pencil role-playing adventure games. So this
is a short rant about Adventure! and D&D; please skip if you don't care
about these subjects.

I pressed the filmmaker on the question of D&D afterward and for some reason
he was extremely reluctant to acknowledge its influence on Adventure!. He
admitted that Crowther, the developer of Adventure!, had "sat in" on a
Dungeons & Dragons game in 1974 (the year D&D was created) but called the
case for its influence "tenuous". On the contrary, it should be clear to
anyone who has played both games that Adventure! is a direct computer
translation of:

- the second-person narrative used in D&D (e.g. "You are standing in a
field...")

- the style of dungeon crawling and exploration from old school D&D (players
need to create maps, etc)

- the emphasis on solving puzzles and gaining special items to get access to
different rooms

Further consider this statement from co-developer Don Woods:

    D&D and Tolkien were the inspiration for a role-playing game designed by
Crowther and his co-workers in Massachusetts. And that role-playing game -
which I believe they called Tales of Middle Earth - was part of what led
Crowther to write Adventure.

http://www.avventuretestuali.com/interviste/woods-eng

So we have the world's first RPG released in 1974, Crowther develops his own
RPG, then he writes Adventure! in 1975 (which is immediately followed by
text games such as Dungeon which are an even more obvious homage to D&D).
AND YET the filmmaker expects us to believe the narrative that Mammoth Cave
in Kentucky was the sole inspiration for Adventure. This is totally NOT
believable. Mammoth Cave had been sitting there for EONS; Gygax & Arneson
publish D&D, and Crowther is inspired to write Adventure! within the year.
While it is true that Woods had not yet played any RPGs at the time of his
contribution, he was certainly influenced by them through Crowther's
framework and the burgeoning cultural phenomenon D&D was becoming from
1974-1977.

Why does this matter? Well for starters, for anybody who hasn't already
played Zork or Adventure! or other dungeon-crawl style text games, I don't
think this film is going to illuminate them very much as to the nature of
these games, and why people enjoy them. Much is made of the ideas of "text"
and "choices", yet I claim these are peripheral and superficial aspects. The
reason people play is NOT for the pleasure of reading text or making
choices; the real point of the game is ADVENTURE and EXPLORATION, concepts
which had JUST BEEN successfully game-ified in D&D (integrating ideas from
wargames, the "Outdoor Survival" boardgame, etc). Without understanding this
context, I can't expect anyone to understand text adventures.

Incidentally this is the same reason why TEXT ADVENTURES were as success,
whereas INTERACTIVE FICTION (divorced from the ideas of adventure and
exploration) has been a failure.

I hope the filmmaker will read this, and consider expanding his documentary
to present the roots and motivation of text adventure more fully and
accurately. Perhaps a mini-series? I'd watch!
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