The Magic Pantry » History

XYZZY

Lloyd Kranzky — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 09:00:34 +0000

I really love text adventure games. I’ve always had a fascination with natural language processing (my postgrad research was about computational grammatical inference after all), so part of the fun was figuring out how the parser works, and applying that knowledge to write my own text adventures in BASIC on the C64.

A classic text adventure. Image by Peter Scheyen.

These days there are great tools for writing text adventure games. The best would have to be Inform 7, which lets you write text adventures that are compatible with the Infocom Z-Machine (and thereby playable on a whole bunch of platforms, including the iPhone). Code written in Inform looks like this:

The wood-slatted crate is in the Gazebo. The crate is a container

Insane, right? You should try it out. It’s pretty amazingly great.

If you’re not interested in writing your own text adventures, but you do enjoy playing them, then you’ll be pleased to know that there’s a vibrant community that continues to produce wonderful games (and who would prefer it if they were referred to as “interactive fiction”, thank-you very much). If you want to play the very best of these modern text adventures (sorry), then you could do worse than check out the winning entries of the Interactive Fiction Competition, which has been running for the past fifteen years. Heck, you can even play them in your browser, with Parchment (a z-machine interpreter written in JavaScript).

Speaking of text adventures, I’ve recently received my copy of Get Lamp, the text adventure documentary. Perhaps a screening is in order?

The Owls Are Not What They Seem

Lloyd Kranzky — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:11:51 +0000

We’re watching Twin Peaks at the moment. Lain lent us the Gold Box Set, and Daz (brother number one) comes over each Tuesday night. He and I watched Twin Peaks when it first aired, in ’91 or ’92 or whenever it was. I’d “tape” it, using a “video recorder”, or we’d watch it live. We’d almost always accompanied this by eating doughnuts (from Puffin’ Fresh in Garden City) and imbibing coffee. These days, we do three episodes each Tuesday, accompanied by beer, and preceded usually by Viet Hoa takeaway. Oh, and culminating in some kind of dessert reminiscent of cherry pie (which, tonight, was blackberry and apple strudel from Corica, which is the best strudel in the metaverse).

In one of tonight’s episodes, a recently shot Agent Cooper has a visitation from a giant who tells him “the owls are not what they seem”. Afterwards I mentioned how, back in ’91 or ’92, the idea of owls as replacement memories for alien visitations spooked me out. I think I was reading Whitley Strieber’s books at the time, and I took them semi-seriously. Daz reminded me of something I’d forgotten; I used to speak of seeing a “golliwog” – a living, breathing creature – behind the shed of a neighbour when we lived in our childhood home. I must have been about four at the time, and I guess I remembered it vividly enough when I was 18 or whatever, and watching Twin Peaks for the first time.

I can only think that my neighbour (a boy a year older than me) and I snuck around the back of the shed, and…

saw a toy golliwog on the ground. Or…
got surprised by the boy’s father, who was holding a golliwog and trying to frighten us. Or…
it never happened, and I’m just remembering a nightmare I had as a child. Or…
we saw a frickin’ alien.

Should I Facebook this childhood neighbour and put the question to him? Or will he think me insane?

A Bit of History

Lloyd Kranzky — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 10:28:33 +0000

I checked my personal records. I purchased my first-generation, “stick’o'gum” iPod shuffle on Saturday April 23, 2005. It probably cost $150 or something outrageous like that. On the same day, we ate barbequed corn and “shaking beef”, played “Lost Cities” and “Carcassonne”, played the demo of “Meteos” on the DS and watched “Iron Chef”, which still seemed like a cool thing to do. I was also busy working on a game, “Quantum Lightcycles”, for the one-key competition.