Text Adventure- Progression of Literature

February 23, 2012 By 2 Comments

In the last few weeks, I have been exploring various examples of interactive fiction in order to decide which genre I would like to base my project on.  The form of Interactive Fiction that I seem to be exploring the most are the “text adventure” games on Playfic.  I find these games to be remarkably interesting because of their ability to combine storytelling and game playing in one, without having to add in extra graphics, etc.  In addition, I find these games intriguing because in a way, it allows one to create their own story.

Prior to this class I had never even heard of these text adventure games, let alone actually sat down and played one.  The first game I played, Colossal Cave Adventure, was incredibly difficult to grasp because this was the first game I have ever seen that was based only on text. It took a few attempts to understand and imagine myself in the adventure, but once I figured out the basic concept, the game and story began to unfold right in front of me.  Although the instructions and commands are very simple, these games can still be very difficult to master.

Since I began playing other text adventure games I have realized that these games are indeed a form of literature.  Each game created a story.  Each game is unique in its setting, characters and plot, all of which are elements of literature.  These games are revolutionary for literature.  Unlike traditional stories, each time you play a text adventure game you have the option of changing what happens.

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Can You Hear Me Now?

February 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

While scrolling through the ELit blog page, I came across another ELit blog that caught my eye.  Shannotated wrote about the music in electronic literature (specifically, video games) and the significance it has.  This thought process struck a chord in me (get it?) and got me thinking about not just the music but all the sounds that go into a piece of electronic literature.

In video games, I considered how my experiences may have differed had there been a certain sound, or all the sounds, missing.  The ELit blog mentions the Legend of Zelda series, so I’ll bring that one into focus first.  One of the most well-known Zelda sounds is the ‘You Found…!’ noise that goes off when you open an extremely important chest or finally receive an item of utmost importance.  It is iconic to the Legend of Zelda series.  But what if there was no sound signifying an important action or discovery?  How would you know if you’re going in the right direction?  At points in the game, the only guiding light you have is the music.

I then began thinking of other electronic literature works, such as Colossal Cave Adventure.  It is just a text adventure and  thus lacking in any noise.  While playing through it, I found that I was never sure if I was going in the right direction.  I didn’t know if the items I picked up were important now, or if I needed to wait and come back for them, or if the item was important at all.  It made the game much more difficult than I originally thought it would be.  If, say, the Zelda series lacked that iconic ‘You Found…!’ noise, would that discover resonate as well as it does with the sound accompanying it?  In a way, the game industries are making it easier on the gamer by offering little hints like sound bites to tell you what to do next or that you just did something important.

In the Red Riding Hood piece that we explored for class, the jazzy music playing as you go through the story isn’t just fancy decoration.  I played through it the first time with the sound off, and while I understood the story and the theme behind it, it didn’t resonate with me.  When I played it again, speakers on, the music added a grungy feel that helped impose that feminist viewpoint.  The music has elements of jazz to it, but it also has a punk-ish style that emphasizes this new power Red has over the wolf.  She is tough, and grungy, and a punk, and will eat this wolf (or impregnate herself with him?) because she can.  With the music, the theme left an imprint on me that was unique to the feminine empowering message of this particular story.  Without it, it was just another feminist twist on an old fairytale.

Music plays such a role in electronic literature, beyond that of simply signifying important elements of a video game, that we don’t notice its effect until it’s gone.  You won’t realize that Link’s footsteps make different sounds on different surfaces until you can’t hear them anymore.  You don’t get the full meaning of Red Riding Hood until you hear the music playing in the background.  I never realized how satisfying it is to hear the crunch noise when you swing a hammer into  a guard’s face in Assassin’s Creed II: Brotherhood until I had to mute the sound.  Of course, it also goes both was.  Playing Colossal Cave Adventure with music playing in the background was strange.  It was distracting, because I was hearing songs so misplaced in the game’s context that I couldn’t focus on the words in front of me.  Electronic literature has come so far that it can implement music into our viewing/gaming experience, and the resulting effect is fantastic.  Not only does it play a significant role in telling us where to go, what to do, what we’ve been successful at, or what to feel, but it also makes the experience resonate.  It gives us an emotion to feel as we play, lyrics to expand on what we’re watching, background noise to an otherwise somewhat dull experience.

And, as with anything else, we associate between our senses.  Does the smell of clean laundry remind you of your mother?  If you have pasta for dinner, can you more easily remember the fancy Italian restaurant you went to last week?  If you hear a certain song, do you laugh because you remember it from a funny commercial?  If I hear that ‘You Found..!’ noise, I immediately smile or scowl depending on which memory of the game it brings to mind.  We hear the sound, we remember the game.  Maybe we’ll want to play the game again.  Maybe we’ll show it to a friend this time through, and they’ll like it so much that they’ll buy it.  It’s marketing genius, but more importantly it’s a sign that even the simplest sound in a game can affect our entire viewpoint on it.

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Colossal Cave Adventure: The Experience

January 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I chose to take this course because I was very interested in actually discovering what electronic literature actually was. After some intense Google searching, I came to realize that electronic literature was really any literary work that was created on a computer or electronic devise to be enjoyed on a computer or electronic devise. Having this information at the forefront of my mind, I came into this course with the assumption that I would probably be reading various texts on the computer. Much to my surprise, after the first class when Professor Whalen explained all that the course actually entailed, I happened to hear the word games mentioned in the course description. i thought to myself surely I misheard the professor no way would we be allowed to play games in an upper level English course like this. Just at the moment I happened to look at the syllabus and I read the words clearly GAMES. I could not believe it was true. This was going to be the best Literature class I had ever taken. I was sure of it.

When we were assigned our first game, Colossal Cave Adventure, I was so excited to be playing a game for homework that I began to fantasize about how the game would go. Later on that night I went online to read up on Colossal Cave Adventure before diving into the actual game. After reading several, not so stellar reviews, I was nervous and decided, maybe it was time that I check it out for myself instead of simply taking the opinions of several unknown others.

When I began the game, at first, I was confused about exactly how to phrase commands. I started the game a few different times and it seemed like each time I got a bit further and a bit further. Eventually I got so far that I was actually in the cave. I found that once inside the cave however, I seemed to be caught in some sort of loop involving me, an angry dwarf, and an axe. After about an hour of continuous play I decided to end the game. When I came back later on with renewed confidence, I fell prey to the vicious loop yet again. Though I was pleased with how far I had gotten I wanted to see how far others had gotten as well. I decided to turn to my trusty advisor, GOOGLE. While searching, I stumbled upon the video below. I thought it would be a great idea to add it to this post so that everyone could see it.

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Now that you know my experience with Colossal Cave Adventure, I would like to hear about yours. What was the Colossal Cave Adventure experience  like for you?

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Colossal Cave Adventure: The Good With the Bad

January 24, 2012 By 2 Comments

I would initially say that this game is made to torture people who refuse to quit. I tried the first couple of times on my own, and got to about 89 points. I ended up looking at six different guides and following three pretty closely several times. Needless to say, I was quite happy when I finally managed to combine two decent guides with some ingenuity and knowledge gained through a great deal of trial and error and actually got 350/350 points.

Firstly, I’ve never played text adventure games before. I played D&D for the first time last semester, and thought it was fun. But that might be more due to the fact that I had a great group of fellow players who were more open to cracking jokes and stacking dice than actually playing seriously and intensely, as well as a DM who was very open to even the craziest suggestions, and rules that were greatly toned down from anything “hard-core” D&D players might use. I didn’t much know what to expect with this besides “oh, it’s text-based, it’s probably easy”. I was wrong.

I admire a number of the cutesy bits put into the game. There aren’t many games where you can say that you beat a dragon with your bare hands. That I have to take my hat off to. I also admire the many avenues of exploration and the opportunity for secrets collection (reminiscent of games like “Tomb Raider” and “Super Mario Bros). Also, the tame bear was quite cute. Also, telling the user that “violence isn’t the answer” and that violence is also “futile” are very amusing to see. The many different ways of moving around and doing things are also quite neat, especially for something as “early” as this was.

I can also find parallels to more complicated, visual games like “World of Warcraft”, where drops for certain things are random and rely mainly on luck. Perhaps my biggest problem was the “luck” factor. While I played, I considered myself lucky to not be attacked by a little dwarf for seven steps or not have to restart from my last save because all my stuff got pirated when I was trying to get somewhere. Games like WoW possess this factor as well: drops for certain things, especially vanity items, are random and drop rates for the best things are often incredibly low, whereas in CCA, getting attacked is relatively high. When I compare CCA to visual games, I mean to say that someone else (like me) who isn’t used to text-adventure games needn’t fear: we can connect, too!

Another parallel to be drawn is to games like “Tomb Raider” (or really anything that involves some sort of dungeon and lacks an in-game map), where your best bet is to draw a map or seven while playing, to figure out where things are. I admire the way “Colossal Cave Adventure” is actually like a real cave and doesn’t simply go forward or back (or N/E/S/W, depending on where you are). My Dad is a GREAT person to ask for in-game map creation, especially when the makers of “Tomb Raider” just LOVE their underwater tunnel systems.

There are also parallels to draw to games like “Super Mario Bros.” or “Sonic the Hedgehog”, or really any game that involves saving. I actually really like the save/restore tool. It came in very handy, in comparison to games like Super Mario or “Oni” where you don’t get the option to save or have to reach checkpoints. I’ve always wondered on the preference for one or the other: a game that saves automatically at specific checkpoints level changes versus a game that lets the player save when they want. On the one hand, if you can’t choose yourself, you risk restarting over and over and over again and accumulating hours and hours of frustration as you go over parts you may know perfectly in order to get to those you don’t, etc. On the other, you risk not saving at the right times and still having that frustration as you start from way, way, WAY back.

The game might be trying to teach you to think on your toes. Certainly, games that do not change or have strategies that don’t change (unless glitches occur) are “relatively” easy to beat once you learn those strategies, or have access to the no-doubt plethora of guides available to you on them. If you play the game often enough, you’ll find that even unexpected bits like the little dwarf appearing every other step and harassing you or the pirate randomly stealing your treasures while trying to move somewhere can be easily beatable because you figure out patterns. Or you just save every time you collect something.

My second difficulty (well, besides connecting the dots “oh, I have keys, MAYBE they unlock the grate”) was finding the right vocabulary to use. I liked the variability and the ease, since you didn’t have to type out “run south” or “walk south” or “go south” or even “south”. You could just type in simple things like “n, e, s, w” and even “u, d” for “up” and “down” (here’s to laziness!). I have to wonder if there was a way to insert commas, since I tried a couple of times. I wish there had been a way to pick up the axe AND throw it at the little dwarf in one move, instead of risking death twice to throw and miss, and then pick it up. It also would have been nice to deposit everything you wanted to at the same time instead of “drop jewelry”, “drop rug”, etc. This was mainly annoying because the list filled the screen, and I had to pull my inventory back up to make sure I dropped everything on me (twice I forgot to drop something and had to go back and forth to take care of it, using up precious lamp oil).

An interesting adventure with a great deal of frustration (as most games, and even books, have). Text-based games (if they’re all somewhat close to this) clearly require a lot (or just a little, maybe, depending on who you are; I think I sit at the “a lot” end of the spectrum) of imagination and allow for more variability than I initially thought. If you get to the endgame… well, it’s worth it.

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