Maybe you're a big fan of adventure games, but have only playedgraphic adventures before. Perhaps you've tried some online textadventures and don't know where to begin. Or maybe you bought acollection of the old Infocom adventures and aren't sure how to playthem.
This article is here to help you out. Text adventures can be a lotof fun, but they take some getting used to. By taking you by the handand leading you through part of a game, I hope to make your trip upthe interactive fiction learning curve easier.
What I'm going to tell you won't apply to every game that's outthere, but it will help you play many of them. My goal is to help youlearn how to look at a text adventure and figure out what's goingon.
Some General Principles
When you start up a text adventure, it will display someintroductory text and then print an input prompt, something like>. Nothing will happen while you wait at the prompt; timedoesn't pass until you type something and hit Enter.
That prompt seems to be saying, "Type anything you want to do."Don't let it fool you. It's lying. What the prompt is really sayingis, "Type in a command in one of the formats I understand and maybeyou can do that." This sounds restrictive, but once you becomefamiliar with how text adventures work, it'll help you narrow downpossible actions.
The commands you type are, for the most part, imperatives. It's asif the sentences begin with "I want to...". Think of the commands astelling your adventurer alter-ego what to do.
While many older adventures varied greatly in what kinds ofcommands they would accept, modern adventures tend to share the samecommands and general syntax. For modern adventures, commands tend tofall into one of six categories:
- A one-word action
These are the commands like LOOK, JUMP, andSING which don't act on any objects. - An action and a direct object
These are the commands that act on something. For instance, TAKETHE BOOK. TAKE is the verb, and THE BOOK (orsimply BOOK) is the object. - An action, a direct object, and an indirect object
These are the commands that act on two things. You give a verb, thedirect object of the verb, and the indirect object. PUT THE TOASTIN THE TOASTER is an example: PUT is the verb, THETOAST is the direct object, and THE TOASTER is theindirect object. - An order to another character
In many games you'll meet other people or animals, and sometimes youcal tell them to do things. You do that by saying their name, followedby the command you want to give them. For example, RONALD, GIVE METHE FRIES. - Communicating with another character
Besides ordering characters around, you can communicate with themusing commands like ASK RONALD ABOUT THE FRIES, TELLRONALD ABOUT THE MANAGER'S SPECIAL, and SHOW THE GREASYBURGER TO RONALD. Strictly speaking, these fall under the thirdcategory above, but they're specialized enough that I wanted to makethem a separate category. (And in some newer games you can TALKTO characters, just so you know.) - A special command
These are the commands which do something outside of the game world,like AGAIN, which repeats the last command you did,SAVE, which saves your game, and RESTORE, whichreloads a previously saved game.
If you're having trouble getting the game to understand what youwant to do, make sure you've phrased your command following one of theexamples above. And if this all seems really complex, don't sweatit. A lot of the times you'll figure out what to typeinstinctively. This list is for the times you can't figure out how tophrase what you want to do.
Rather than give you a list of sample commands, I'm going to leadyou through parts of a real game called Glowgrass, by NateCull. It's a short, relatively easy science fiction story. Nateentered it in the 3rd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition, and itplaced third. If you'd like to play along at home, please doso. You'll need to get thegame file (glow.gam) and something called a TADSinterpreter. If you're running Windows, I'd suggest you getthe player's kit. Once you've downloaded it, double-click on thefile you downloaded to install the player. To play the game, select"HTML TADS Interpreter" from the TADS menu under the Start button. Theinterpreter will ask you to select a TADS game. Find where you placedglow.gam, and select that. If you're running MacOS, I recommend HyperTADS.It comes binhexed, so unhex it and you're ready to go.
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