Advent of Computing - Episode 82.5 - Aaron Reed Interview, 50 Years of Text Games

Episode Date: May 22, 2022

In this episode I talk with Aaron Reed, author of 50 Years of Text Games. We discuss the history of computer games, interactive fiction, business "gaming", and why we all love Adventure. You can find Aaron's work here: http://aaronareed.net/

Welcome to a surprise episode of Advent of Computing. If you're familiar with the show, then you should notice this is an off week, which traditionally around here only means one thing, an interview. I usually don't do these, I keep telling myself I need to do more interviews, so hey, maybe this is a sign of things to come. Anyway, last week I had the chance to sit down and talk with Aaron Reid, author of 50 Years of Text Games. It's a fantastic blog series and supposedly an upcoming book. I don't really have much preamble here besides the announcement, so I'm just going to dive right into the interview.

Enjoy, and I'll see you next week with a normal episode. Well, I have with me here today Aaron Reid, who is the author of the 50 Years of Text Games blog, and he's currently working on another larger project. So Aaron, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to my listeners? Hi, yeah, I'm Aaron A. Reid. I have been writing interactive fiction for probably almost 20 years now, originally doing kind of old school text adventure games, but then moving on to kind of more experimental stuff across augmented reality and just like all kinds of different fields. And yeah, lately I have been working on this blog series that's being turned into a book about the history of computer games without graphics

it's kind of the one sentence pitch so basically taking one game from each of the last 50 years starting in 1971 when the original text version of the Oregon Trail was released picking one game each year and kind of diving into how it works what's interesting about it

the story behind it and that's diving into, you know, how it works, what's interesting about it, the story behind it. And that's turned into a really cool and interesting project. Very good. So I think we both share an interest in computer history to put it mildly. And you bring up a couple really good questions I want to talk to you about. So what's with your fascination with, as you were saying, games without graphics or text games, or should we call it interactive fiction? Yeah, it goes by a number of different names, right? Text games is like the term I picked

for this project because I feel like it's kind of the broadest, right? Yeah, I mean, so for me, I'm a writer. Ever since I was a little kid i loved writing and also the the the notion of writing being interactive right being a story that you're reading but you can also maybe change something about it you can it's asking you for your opinion about things uh that was always really cool to me so um when i was a kid in the 80s when our family got our first computer one of the games that it came with was adventure kind of the original like 1970s um text adventure that kind of spawned that whole genre yeah um so yeah even though i was born technically too late to have experienced that when it first came out i kind of got um i started at the beginning essentially right because that was

the first um almost the first computer game of any kind i played. And so that just kind of sparked this lifelong fascination for that whole genre. And I think it's just so interesting to me because writing, like telling stories with words is like one of our oldest human things, right? We've been doing that in print for hundreds of years and verbally for thousands of years. And the idea of then combining that with all of the sort of new, interesting stuff we're figuring out how to do with computers. It's just such an interesting mixture of like old and new. And I just love the kind of,

all the kinds of creativity that have happened at that intersection over the last, you know, five decades. It seems that adventure or colossal cave adventure, right? That's the original name is also just a really good starting point, especially since it's been ported to like every platform. I remember in high school, one of my friends showed me that he had an install of it on like his old iPod touch. And he's like, oh, check this out.

Yeah. Yeah. It's been ported probably to every, pretty much every computer platform ever made, right? Well, it's such a simple program to the actual back end of it. I mean, it is in Fortran, so it's not the most portable thing, ostensibly. But I guess that also brings up another good point. I'm a little jealous of your medium, Aaron. Since I just do audio stuff, I do end up talking a lot about programming.

And that's, I have to limit myself because that's hard to get across on an audio medium, you know? So was that a consideration that was in your head when you chose to do a blog? Because I guess for people that haven't read any of your work on your 50 years of text games blog, you have code snippets that you explain for like, well, I think the Oregon Trail when you have one equation that I thought was cool for the difficulty curve for bandit encounters. Right, right. Yeah, that was definitely a consideration. You know, like I thought, you know, yeah, maybe I should make this a podcast or a video series or something,

because that's where a lot more people are getting content these days. But yeah, again, as a writer, that's what I'm inherently good at is the written word. And yeah, the chance to be able to do things like, let's look at some there's, I use a ton of, um, interviews with authors, especially when around the time the game first came out, like what they were thinking when they were first writing it. And that's the kind of stuff where, you know, you're not gonna have a video clip of it. You're not going to necessarily have audio. So, um, it's, uh, it's just a good way to get really in depth in the subject. Um, and yeah, the source code stuff in particular, um, was something that was important to me to do in this project because, yeah, the source code stuff in particular was something that was

important to me to do in this project because I think it's a really like actually going to the source code and looking at it and saying, okay, how did this work? What was this doing? It's such a good way of understanding something in a different kind of way than if it's a game, if you're just playing it or if you're just running any kind of program. I was kind of inspired by a guy named Mark Marino who's been behind a movement called Software Studies in Academia, which is kind of that same idea of if you're going to write critically about software, don't just use it. Look at how it works and understand on a deep level how it works. Not necessarily all of it, right? You don't have to

look at every line of source code for a program to have an opinion on it. But if you can find, if the source is available, and you can find a little part that kind of illustrates something about what the programmer was thinking, or the context of which was made, you're sort of understanding it on a different level than if you're just looking at the surface. point i know i've i ran into a lot of um source preservation projects that i think are really value especially are really valuable especially one that comes to mind in this context is zork all the original code for that even though it's its own special language is preserved which right is really important to be able to have access to yep so i guess while we're talking about preservation what do you think are some of the success stories of preservation in this genre of text games? Since it does go back a little ways, and I know there's been some code that's missing. So have there been any games that you've been excited when you've actually seen the code for? Yeah, it is. It is really interesting because, you know, like with any

digital archival work, there's this sort of weird dichotomy of, on the one hand, it's like so easy to preserve data, right? You can copy it an infinite number of times without degrading the original, right? But on the other hand, if no one ever thought to do that preservation before it got lost, it's gone forever because it didn't leave behind any kind of physical imprint, right? So, yeah, this history is just this weird mixture of stuff that's really well documented and then stuff that's just gone and it's unclear if it's ever coming back. So it's a success story, I think is, so I started writing this kind of stuff, doing those sort of text adventure style games, parser games is kind of one of the terms for those. And the community...

So I guess a little background. In the 1980s, those games were kind of the computer game market for the first half of the 80s, especially, because most home computers were still bootstrapping themselves up to where they could show kind of any amount of graphics at all, right? So text adventures are sort of an easy sell, and it was something that was cool and impressive and not like four colors in a jag at all, right? So text adventures are sort of an easy sell and it was something that was cool and impressive and not, you know, like four colors in a jagged polygon,

right? To impress your friends. After graphical games kind of took over and text adventures died commercially in the 1990s, there was a group of kind of hobbyists who came and reverse engineered a bunch of the commercial story formats and started making their own games in them um and that kind of spawned this whole renaissance uh and and really developed that medium into um a kind of unique storytelling medium moving beyond kind of what had been explored in a kind of a commercial context before um so anyway that community which kind of got started in um the early 90s on usenet, has actually done a really extraordinary job at preserving their history, preserving the history of those games,

and making all of that stuff available and continuing to keep it playable. So a lot of that has been work in keeping software running on modern platforms, porting things. It's been work in setting you know, setting up archives. So they have a thing called the IF Archive, Interactive Fiction Archive,

that's been running since the early 90s and it's just got thousands of files, everything from source code to games to, you know, records of discussions. And that stuff is just invaluable to understand the medium, but also to just kind of keep a continuity going. And I think there's a real difference in the kind of stuff that community has made compared to communities that just kind of have a shallower history and are only looking back at the last couple years of work because the stuff farther back is lost or inaccessible or whatever.

So yeah, that community is a really interesting success story to me. And you can go back and find the news group archives and find discussions from 1996, where people were post by post inventing a certain concept or coming up with an idea. And that's really cool to have those records. And that's maybe different, I think, than the era where the now where a lot of that stuff is happening, I think, in more ephemeral spaces like Discord chats or, you know, Zoom calls, for example. So yeah, it's always been through this whole project, just this weird balance between, you know, being able to read an exact conversation from 1993 and having no way to play like an iPhone game from 2015 anymore, right? It's just a lot of weird contrast there.

Talking just broadly about the history, how would you pick your start point for the blog? And is it going to be different than the book? Because I know your blog starts with Oregon Trail, and that's not necessarily the first time that people started using text for our computers, really, for some kind of interactive fiction or interactive game? Right. Yeah, yeah. That's a good question. So yeah, the book and the series both start in 1971, although the book actually has kind of a little prologue that goes back earlier. But I picked that mostly because of the Oregon Trail, right? So I had heard back in 2020,

it just sort of randomly came across my feet or something that 2021 was going to be the 50th anniversary of the first version of that game. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. I wonder, you know, maybe if there's something that could be done like to commemorate that anniversary. And that kind of kicked off the seed for the project. But as I was doing the research and really getting into it, it actually is kind of a, it was a good choice to begin this series because 1971 was really kind of the first time you started seeing like communities of software practitioners and game makers specifically emerge. So before that you had individual people doing

experiments here and there. You know, you had things like ELISA in the 60s and a lot of those early experiments. But the 70s was kind of the first time that you started to see enough computer installations exist that there started to be things like national newsletters of computer enthusiasts writing about the code they were doing. There started to be local meetups outside of the context of a research lab or a university computer center. So when I was compiling a list of possible games to cover before 1971, it's pretty hard to find more than one or two interesting programs a year. You don't have a lot to choose from. 71, 72 is really when you start seeing like a selection of games, right? Like a bunch of different games being made each year. So I think it's kind of arbitrary in

a sense, and it's just tied to this one particular game, but it's kind of in another way, a sensible starting place because it's the first time you really kind of start seeing this accelerating momentum. I really like that answer. And I've kind of grappled with a similar problem myself on my own show because it's hard to pick out first, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And anytime you claim that something happened first, you're possibly wrong. There was probably someone else who did it earlier and who just isn't as famous or has some caveat attached to it or whatever. Yeah.

That was definitely something across the series where there were a lot of times, you know, I'd discover something. I'd be like, Oh, I think this was the first time, you know, X happened,

but I really had to learn to catch myself because I would almost always be wrong. It was some earlier precedent. I like to usually say that, Oh, this was the first X that was actually public and actually used by other people right because otherwise you get into weird situations like the the first mouse that was actually copied and used was made by engelbart in the 60s but prior to that there

was another mouse that was very similar that was made under a government contract that no one saw out of the labs was like well yeah technically that's the first but yeah how does it actually matter in the grand scheme of things for decades yeah i went down an interesting research rabbit hole for this prologue section trying to figure out well when was the first time that people could type text into a computer that's a tough one yeah and I assumed it was like maybe sometime in the sixties. Right. But like ENIAC, the first computer had a typewriter hooked up to it. Yeah. And, and yeah, it was very, the kind of input you could put into that was pretty limited, but but I had no idea, right. That that first was so early and there were a lot of interesting things like that. There's even like pre-computer or pre-computer we're getting into the the fun territory of what's actually a computer but there's like pre-real computer machines that

were built at bell that they were using teletypes to interface with remotely so like yeah you can't typing into a computer you can't morse code yeah you can go back that's Yeah, you can go back into the 1800s if you really want. So we've obviously been talking about there's a long history of these text games, graphic-less interface style games. I mean, you have at least 50 years that you're covering. So why do you think that in general general text games are such an enduring genre is it does the interactive fiction aspect here matter or is it just that the interface works on everything yeah i think it's it's um you know i like i was saying earlier it's like writing is just such an old human endeavor right we've been doing it for so long.

And we lived through this sort of weird time where because text games were some of the earliest computer games, when the popular style of computer games changed, those games started to be seen as old-fashioned or retro. And for 20 years, that was kind of the association we had. But I think we're sort of circling back now to like, oh, okay, well, this is just text, right? We were writing this in the 1800s. We were writing it in the 1600s, right? It's been around a long time. Yeah, yeah.

So I think you're seeing these kind of games reemerge in all kinds of weird places, right? So one of the things that I cover is sort of mobile romance games, which especially the first generation and for earlier phones were mostly text-based. And millions, like tens of millions of people played those games, but they're not really talked about much, right?

But there's this interesting statistic where the first game from the company Choices, which makes those games, had more players than the Call of Duty game that was the best-selling PC game that year. But it's never talked about in the context of gaming history. And I think it's because people just have such a blind spot about games without graphics. The whole games industry is so predicated on wanting to be interactive movies. And you've got game trailers and you've got colorful screenshots. And if you don't have those things, right, like how do you make a preview of a book? If you've ever seen a book preview, you'll know it's a hard proposition. Without that stuff, it's just the mainstream game industry has a hard time wrapping around like how to even engage with this. But reading and writing are

just such constant human things. And I think that's where the fascination comes from and why people keep coming back to this medium. It's not dying. It just keeps being reborn in all kinds of different, interesting ways. Because I think the idea kind of really just keeps independently occurring to people, right? It's like, what if you made a book

that someone could change or be part of or affect? So yeah, I think it's just kind of you know 50 years from now i think people will still be making these kinds of games they'll probably look very different from what we have now uh but but i think it's it's going to be an endless well to draw inspiration from so going back to the prologue discussion, because I don't know, I always like the weird liminal spaces where stuff hasn't emerged in a way we can recognize yet. We were talking very briefly, I guess, just mentioning about business games off prior to the interview. So what do you think of those? Do you think that those cross the threshold into text based games yet?

Or is it still a little too primitive? do you think of those? Do you think that those cross the threshold into text-based games yet, or is it still a little too primitive? Yeah. So for folks who don't know this reference, I did a post on the blog about these really early 1950s games that were used in business schools uh to sort of teach basic uh kind of like business management skills and my my uh my uh side theory on this is that um these were actually invented largely because business colleges had just bought these expensive computers and were trying to desperately find some way to justify why they had spent all this money that would actually make a lot of sense because i i've read a lot about them when i've done, whenever I do episodes on text-based games, I'm always like, well, I have to add caveats about we can't always have first firsts.

And that always turns into a quick discussion on business games. But they've always seemed like an answer that's really looking for a problem really hard. Right. Yeah, totally. But yeah, so, but the interesting thing about these, and yeah, that's right, because you had re-implemented one of these, right. For, um, for the, yeah, yeah. That's really cool. Um,

yeah. So what's interesting about them is their, their input and output is mostly numbers, right. Because, uh, they would generate these reports, uh, sort of like quarterly report simulations, right. Of like how well the business did, how much money things cost, how many units you moved at this product, whatever. Right. and then you would write back mostly in numbers too right because you'd say well i want to increase the marketing budget by five percent or i want to you know spend this much money on r&d next month or whatever and it had to be mediated with staff because right punch cards yeah yeah that was a whole interesting thing is nobody outside of a few specialists knew how to operate a computer so most of these games were designed to have this kind of um this layer between this human layer between the players and the computer um so some of the early

um war games which were in design pretty similar to the business games um had a role called like an umpire which was sort of the person who would like, you know, take what the players wanted to do, decide if they were within the rules to the game, feed that into the computer. Right. But also kind of like make decisions and adjudicate it. Like they might say like, oh, well, you know, I've decided that that's impossible. You can't do that because in real life, you wouldn't be able to do that for reason X, even though that's not part of the simulation, right? A dungeon master. Yeah yeah it's very similar um but that's that's really interesting because we don't think now of that being a role that you should need right like if you're playing a game you would just expect the computer's going to handle all the game stuff right um but in these

in these early programs um i think a computer was still more seen as an aspect of an exercise, like let's simulate running a business. The computer can crunch some numbers, but of course, you're still going to need people to do things. And those games are interesting because a lot of them are almost like live action role-playing games. So the students would get together with their generated quarterly report, and they'd have these mock meetings where they would plan out budgets. The one I wrote about, the students even had to assemble a board of directors

made up of faculty members at the business college and give reports to them. That's just so much. Yeah. Was that the Rand game or was that the Honeywell? That was the Carnegie Tech one. Yeah. Which was three or four papers i think they

were actually published about these games right right right yeah um but yeah it's it's just so interesting so you would you would sort of indirectly be using the computer like once a week but you'd be playing the game the whole week in the middle right and that's that's just a really interesting space to me of these sort of like hybrid you know you you started by asking if those are really games and it's like they are, but they're not quite operating in the way that we think of computer games operating today. And so that's really interesting to me. Just really quickly, the re-implementation I did is, it's not very good and it's way over-engineered. years um but i was telling my friends about um the rand game which i think's 54 is when that's published off i remember correctly off somewhere in the annals of my head um and i was describing this to my friends they're like oh that just sounds like the worst video game imaginable that's

that's so boring i'm like well maybe it's not. But so I ended up making this Node.js implementation of it, which like I was saying, it's overkill. It has a database backend for concurrent play online. But some of my friends got together and played it. And they're actually, we didn't do the week-long style of play where you have to plan. We sat down and did like real-time rounds for an evening. And it's kind of fun when you have the real-time feedback.

I can't imagine it would be fun, though, having to wait around for a report and go to your fake board of directors. Right. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's so many of those super early games are lost just because the hardware is so old, right? That porting it to a modern platform is just like out of reach for most people to do.

And they were so obscure, right, that there wasn't like an audience of people wanting to do that. So, yeah, a lot of those games are hard to play. So it's really cool to see, you know, people trying to make them run again, give them a new life. cool to see you know people trying to make them run again give them a new life the the other weird thing with old software and old hardware too i guess tangentially is you run into a lot of interface problems right yeah so like with business games not everyone happens to have a a punch type machine sitting around in their office which is right crying shame yeah i love like so like the adventure source code we're talking about that has all this stuff sitting around in their office, which is a crime shame. Yeah, I love... So like the adventure source code, we were talking about that,

has all this stuff about how to restrict the hours people can play because computer time was valuable, right? So there are all of these... If you look at the text strings of that program, there's a ton of them that are just about this kind of administration and the business of running a not for professional use program on a computer on a mainframe computer in 1976 which again is like a thing we're not used to thinking about anymore as being part of games so so i guess on that same topic a lot of these early games were written explicitly for teletypes. So do you think that that's how

much of that DNA stuck around in text games, do you think? Or has that just been fully wiped away at this point? Yeah, that's something that I really tried to engage with in this series is kind of like the materiality and the physicality of what playing these games was like when they first came out. And that's everything from what's it like to sit at a teletype and play the Oregon Trail in 1971 to what's it like to play a game for the iPad in 2014, which in 50 years will be as weird to people as thinking about teletypes is now. That's the stuff that gets lost in emulation. As thinking about teletypes is now, right? That's the stuff that gets lost in emulation, right?

So you can sort of like play an emulated version of a game, but where's the, like, what's the difference between, you know, being there at that time playing it. And so, yeah, teletypes, you know, obviously predated computers, right? They were this existing technology for transmitting and printing text over distances. And yeah, there's a lot of interesting things for me that came about, that came about from thinking of what it was like to play them.

So, so just one example is the original Oregon trail has, can operate the bell on the teletype, which was used for alerts sometimes, but also just for the like end of line carriage return familiar from typewriters. But if you look at certain events in that game, like if you're hunting and you successfully shoot, um, a deer, um, you can see like the, the ASCII code to ring the teletype interspersed, um, through the string printing the, the success message. Um, and the teletypes mostly in use at that time printed about 10 characters a second and the frequency of that is about every 10 characters so you can imagine then what it would have sounded

like to hear that you would have heard this bell ringing about once a second and that made me think oh i wonder if when he did that he was trying to emulate the sound of like midway carnival games right when you win you get this like the repeating bell right and again that's the kind of thing that an emulator you don't necessarily get the exact timing of that the way that would have played out um another similar thing to that too is um so rocket which was the game that inspired a million kind of lunar lander style games um the original version of that also um because of the speed of the teletype um you put in your inputs of how much you want to adjust the rocket as you're sort of trying to land on the moon in 10-second intervals.

And that's, again, about how long it would take for your input to go in and for it to print the next line. So that game is kind of unfolding in real time, even though in the modern sense, we're not used to thinking of it playing that way because you think of a line of text that's just instantly appearing, right, if you're playing it in an emulator but at the time it took time for that to transmit um so yeah i think some of those aesthetics creeped into how the first generation of game makers thought about what they were doing right um like the command line is a thing that um evolved out of early teletype interfaces because you got a report of what happened in your last command or your last program that would be printed out.

And then you would type in the next thing you wanted to do and hit return and then wait, and then you would get the next thing to come back. And so that became the interface for the first text games, right? interface for the first text games right the text adventure you type a command which would be what your your avatar your player character was going to do next like go south or get lamp or kill dragon or whatever um and that was just really natural because that's how people um operated computers as you know things switched over to keyboards and stuff you still had you know uh interfaces like dos that were command line based um but in later generations who didn't grow up with that kind of interface, it seems really baffling, right? And a really common thing for younger people, especially,

but just anyone not familiar with the text adventure is sitting down at this command prompt and just having no idea what to do, right? Like, what am I supposed to type here? Help. Yeah. And the people, you know, when all of those tropes crystallized, it was just, everybody knew, you know, at a command prompt, well, there's going to be a list of commands that work. And the way to find those out is to read the manual or whatever, right. That like people knew how to figure out how to swim in that environment. But as the hardware

and the UIs change, that's a different um it's not the same design language right that modern computers are using anymore so so yeah i think a lot of that stuff really does deeply affect the assumptions that go into genres and the kinds of um approaches people make it's it's so fascinating the blind spots that develop over years right like a game that was perfectly playable in 1985 becomes totally baffling by 2015 because the people trying to play it just have so many different assumptions about how things are supposed to work. Yeah, different expectations. Yeah, yeah. So one question that I think some people grapple with, I come down on a very firm

side of this, so I think we'll agree on this. But do you think that the history of video games or computer games in general, I guess, putting the video part aside, do you think that that should be something that's separate from the broader history of computers? Or should they be told as one bigger unified story? bigger unified story. Yeah. One of the things that I thought was really fascinating as I was researching this project is just how kind of intertwined the history of these games. And I suspect all video games are with the history of computing, right? Whether it's, you know, there's a new piece of hardware or a new software platform that somebody wants to try out and see what it can do. And then they make a really cool game with it. Whether it's the limitations of a particular era or particular system, causing someone to be creative to work around them.

That kind of creativity from constraint is such a huge thing. Almost every one of these games, I ended up writing about the computers they were running on for one reason or another. Right. And so if you, if you read through this series, it's impossible not to learn a ton about the history of computing just

because they're kind of so intertwined. So I don't think it's necessarily that they, you know, ideologically should or shouldn't be together it's just they're they're they're interrelated at such a fundamental level right um and that's i think a place where this kind of writing is different than um novels right or or other kinds of more traditional forms of writing because those have had a stable platform for quite a while now. They don't really release paper to very often. Right. Yeah, exactly.

But people, people making text games are constantly, you know, trying to figure out like, what can I do in this platform? How can I get around its limitations? What, what is the next platform going to offer me that no one could do before this? So at least so far, right. For a half a century now um it's it's been just kind of a fundamental part of the way these games are made and thought about um so so yeah i think um another angle on that too is that um i know like in in at universities right like computer game classes are sometimes used as kind of like a gateway drug to get students interested in just computer science generally. Right. Um, so, so it's definitely like a fun way

to, to start, you know, uh, learning this stuff and thinking about this stuff, um, at the very least. Um, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's very intertwined. I think it's, it's, uh, it's hard to talk about the history of these games without talking about the platforms they ran on. There's also a good, well, not a good good number there are a lot of games that have pushed the technical envelope and actually helped with advancing computing zork i know i keep mentioning zork but that's that's the code i'm probably most familiar with um the stuff they were doing with their source code for portability is wild because they developed a whole language, a bytecode, a virtual machine, and an implementation meta language for a text game that

you don't really think of text games as being insanely sophisticated pieces of software, but a lot of them are. Yeah. And especially in the early years of home computers, a lot of those games were really pushing the limits of what those computers were capable of doing. Because if you had a system that only had 12K of memory or was running on a cassette tape that could only load in a few thousand characters of data and text, you had to get really creative and you had to really push that hardware to its limits to figure out how am I going to fit a whole simulation of a cave system or a whole, you know, virtual world in this tiny footprint. And I think that's, you know, it's maybe less visible, but that's continued in a lot of more recent games, text games, you know, whether it's, you know, a game like Fallen London, really trying to figure out how to make a web-based UI look professional and be easy to read

in an era when a lot of websites were still pretty ugly, right? Or whether that's games for mobile devices that are really trying um, you know, trying to figure out how to, uh, get the, the, the content they want delivered, uh, in a way that's readable.

So like a lifeline, the game where you text the astronaut was developed for the Apple watch, which has, you know, like a tiny screen. So how do you tell a text-based story when you can only fit, you know, 25 words on the screen,

uh, at a time. Right. Um, so yeah, it's, it's kind of still ongoing in a way. So to close out here, I have one last big, not a yes or no question. How do you think learning about all this history of text games since you write IF yourself,

how do you think learning about the history has impacted you? Is this going to change how you approach interactive fiction in the future? Yeah, that's an interesting question. So yeah, like, you know, my background originally was making these games and writing about them. And then I kind of took a long detour through academia. I guess this phase probably started with writing a dissertation about interactive stories, which involved a lot of historical research. And then a piece of that got spun off into a book I co-authored on the history of graphic adventure games, which is related to this work, but it's its own thing. And then now this project. So I've been in research and history mode for five or six years now.

But yeah, I do think once I kind of do get back to making new games, it's going to be invaluable. Because I think something that's true in any medium is if you look outside of the stuff people are doing in that particular medium or that particular sub-genre of the medium, it's always enriching because you're just getting a broader perspective. You're pulling in different ways of seeing things and thinking about things. And I think a lot of people, it's really natural and easy if you start making visual novels or roguelikes or some little genre of games, you're only playing that kind of game. You're only talking to other people making that kind of game. But the more you can broaden your horizons and expand what you're looking at to other domains, I think the more useful that is

because your stuff is going to be less like what everyone else is doing. It's going to be more original. So for me, having come from writing parser style text adventures that was the kind of sub-genre of this whole field i was most familiar with um but diving into so many weird parts of this history from play by mail games which were big in the 80s to um you know bbs games um uh hacking simulators there's just all of these of these different ways people have tried to combine text with code. And I think when I start going back to think about making new stuff, I just have such a big well of inspiration to draw from now. There's a game from the 80s called Star Saga 1 that was a kind of space trading strategy game, but with this heavy narrative component. But the narrative all existed in this huge printed book that came with the game.

So it was like a multiplayer game for multiple people, the same computer. And every now and then the game would tell you like, okay, you need to go read uh text 1987 and then that would have like a bit of story or and in it and and the game was programmed with how all of these bits of story connected and what order they could go in and how they related to what you know how much money you had or what planet you were on or everything but the actual text was in the game presumably because it couldn't all fit on the the size of discs that were around then. That's so interesting. This is a side tangent, but one of my big areas of research in the foreground, I guess,

also in the background is hypertext and alternative modes of hypertext. And that just really sounds like they're trying to get at doing some kind of hypertext implementation with really limited features. Yeah. Yeah. So, so what's so cool about all those things and having all those things in my head is like maybe an inspiration for an ideal strike. And I'll be like, Oh, like actually the idea of a bunch of people sitting around a computer, but also reading a book together at the same time, like maybe there's something in there, right? Like maybe that could provide a basis for some kind of new idea. So I just, I love finding sources of inspiration from unusual places like that.

And so I think having spent so much time thinking and looking into this history, it's inevitably going to like spark interesting ideas. And I'm excited to get to that part. Well, good. That's, it's always exciting. Well, Aaron, that's all I have for you. So thanks so much for coming on the show. And can you tell my listeners where they can learn more about what you're working on? Yeah. So this blog series, like I said, covers these 50 games. That's all still online. I'm getting ready to crowdfund

a book version of it, which is going to be, I think, a really cool kind of way to have a keepsake of these ephemeral blog posts. Probably the best way to find out about that is to just Google for 50 years of text games, and you'll find links to it. But that's going to be crowdfunding this summer. So yeah, check that out if you're interested in the history of this kind of game. Sweet. Well, I know I've enjoyed reading through the blog post, so maybe I'll get a book once it comes out. Cool. Yeah, thank you.

So thanks so much for coming on. Great to be here. Yeah, take care. That's it for right now. So I guess all that's left is to thank you for listening to Advent of Computing. I'll be back, like I said, next week with a normal full episode. If you like the show, then you probably know the drill by now. You can share the show with your friends, leave reviews on Apple Podcasts, and I think on Spotify now, too.

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