Get Lamp? Just got one, thanks.

[Flack]

(Reposted from robohara.com)

Earlier this year Jason Scott released Get Lamp, his "text adventure/interactive fiction" documentary. (If you missed it, I wrote an interactive review of it.) Before the documentary was released, I pre-paid for two copies: one for me, and one for my dad -- after all, it was Dad who got me into computers and text adventures in the first place.

This morning for Christmas, I got a box from Dad. Inside the box was a treasure chest. The treasure chest was wrapped twice with a chain, and the chain was fastened with a combination lock that uses letters instead of numbers. Also inside the box was this:



A map. The map to the original text adventure, Colossal Cave, to be exact. On the right hand side of the map, the following handwritten note had been added:



To quote Sherlock Holmes, "The game was afoot." Dad mentioned that the note was a code, and added, "you wrote one like it one time."

After Dad left, I sat on the couch for almost half an hour with my brain's wheels turning. Five numbers. At first I thought it might be a math puzzle, but why would each number want you to subtract one digit? Plus, I've never written a code like that. What I did write one time, however, was eCoder Ring, a simple encryption program using one-time pads. My initial thought was that the numbers might respond to pages on robohara.com somehow, but that didn't seem likely. A good one-time pad code requires that both the encoder and the decoder possess the same source material (the "key"). And immediately it hit me, the book I know both of us owned.

Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie by Rob O'Hara. Me.

None of the numbers went over 178 (the number of pages in Commodork), so that was a good sign. I quickly thumbed through the book and, using the big numbers as page numbers and the small numbers (all ones) as character locations, I came up with the following letters: B A S S R.

BRASS.

I ran back to the living room and spun the dials with my thumbs. Could that be the combination? The lock clicked open. It worked! Dropping the lock and casting the chains aside, the chest then opened to reveal ...



A lamp! A brass lamp!

For those who haven't seen it, in the background of nearly every interview on Get Lamp (approximately 70 of the film's 80 interviews) sits a brass lamp. Dad said he wasn't sure if the lamp belonged to Jason or had been some sort of promotional item handed out by Infocom that all these people owned, but either way, he figured, I would want to own one too. The lantern appearing in the film is Jason's, and Dad was right -- I did want to own one.

And now I do.

[AArdvark]

That is Awesome!

[Flack]

Thanks man!

Did everyone else have a good Christmas?

[Roody_Yogurt]

I did, thanks, and yeah, that is a pretty great Get Lamp/dad/puzzle story.

[AArdvark]

Such a good gift that I went and watched the documentary again. That made me want to actually play some IF and I did.
But not for long. I seem to have lost the focus and or patience for IF games. I just could not get into the game like I was once able. This saddens me greatly. possibly it's because the world moves so much faster around us. I tried two or three times to solve the first puzzle and then just deleted everything. Was once a time where I could immerse myself into the story and actually feel it.


THE
STUNTED
AARDVARK

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

What game(s) are you playing? What games have you played recently, Vark?

[AArdvark]

I was gonna finally finish Jinxter but before that I started Fallacy of Dawn. Last IF game I played before that was Hitchhikers Guide, but that was years ago and really doesn't count because I had already beaten it on my Commodore and still remembered most of the puzzles.

The frustration is partly the super mini keyboard on my netbook which means that every third word is misspelled (I have gotten so used to spellcheck!) and partly because of the parser that does not allow for much flexibility in sentence structure. Also the concentration issues from the vast amount of media input that swirls around us like a digital hurricane.

'like trying to focus on a grain of sand in a hurricane' --

Perhaps is also a measure of the aging brain.

THE
ELDERLY GRAY MATTER
AARDVARK

[Flack]

Surprisingly, I find that the new "openness" of Interactive Fiction parsers is making games harder, not easier, to play. My big stint with text adventures was pre-1985, so I'm used to typing LOOK SIGN instead of EXAMINE SIGN. To me, LOOK SIGN means "tell me everything I can visually ascertain about the sign" -- that includes looking at it, examining it, and reading it. In modern IF, LOOK OBJECT doesn't do anything at all -- you have to either LOOK AT OBJECT or EXAMINE OBJECT, and it's possible those might have different results (along with READ OBJECT).

Most old text adventures were too limiting and suffered from restrictive vocabularies, but I'm finding that the modern wide-open approach often leaves me wondering where I'm supposed to be going or what I'm supposed to be doing. Both are frustrating in their own right.

[Roody_Yogurt]

I think we've shared our thoughts on Jinxter before, but man, that game has these moments of brilliance but I think they just ran out of steam when it got to describing and coding a lot of stuff (of course, that could be applied to some other Magnetic Scrolls games, too).

To be honest, it's not a game I'd expect anyone to beat in any day and age.

I think Fallacy of Dawn, overall, is very fair. There's just something odd about that first room puzzle that makes a player such as myself doubt his ability to play it.

Anyhow, note to self (regarding Flack's comment): let people LOOK OBJECT in any games I write.

[Flack]

I don't know if the LOOK OBJECT issue is a problem for everybody, but it is for people like me who got away from playing text adventures back in the mid-1980s and just recently rediscovered the art form. It might be akin to my grandfather lamenting about how good movies were back before they had special effects ...

This is hard to explain, but I like games where I understand what I'm supposed to be doing, regardless of the genre. I hate 3rd person games where I end up wandering around, trying to find where I'm supposed to be, and I wouldn't care for Mario if I had to wander around aimlessly, wondering where each level began.

After thinking about it, I think the problem lies in the fact that back in there day there was only one kind of "text adventure", whereas today's "interactive fiction" varies greatly. Interactive Fiction today could mean a Choose Your Own Adventure story, a work of fiction with very little interactivity, a broad, open world to discover, or even an old-school type adventure.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Question for ya, Vark (and I meant to say, thank you for your Christmas card. I hope to have my life together to where I can send them out next year): would in-game help have helped at all? I know that text adventured thrived when we didn't have a ton of other things to take our attention. I get that. But would have been at all helpful if you could consult a help menu that was in the game?

I guess I am asking because now that I am almost finished with Cryptozookeeper, I could very well put a hint menu in. The reason I didn't do so for FoD and Necrotic Drift was because I was hoping there would be discussion on how to solve puzzles on the Usenet newsgroups. Well, it took a decade, but Jacek Pudlo, Steve Breslin, Poster and a host of other human ovaries destroyed the Usenet interactive fiction group (thanks, if any of you miserable wastes of space are reading this, by the way). So with that not a factor, I'm asking myself why *not* put a help menu in the latest work.

I understand if your answer is, "Honestly, it wouldn't help." No sweat there. I'm curious as to what people think though.

[AArdvark]

No, in-game hints would have made it just a cheap way out. I solved the puzzle pretty easily once I turned off, dropped out and put my brain into gear. It's more to do with the gimmee- gimmee-gimmee content without having to think about it syndrome than anything else.

let me cite an example.
Agatha Christie.
If anyone has ever read an Agatha Christie murder story, you know that no matter how convoluted that plot gets you can still just hang in there and wax-mustache Belgian pouf Hercule Perot will tell you all about how the maid turned the hallway corner just in time to miss the poison dart, meanwhile Mr Boddy got hit through an open window by a rare bugblatter bug and was only able to stagger to the window and close it before he died of trichinosis from last weeks beef wellington.

IF games wont tell you squat unless you figure it out for yourself, which you should. It's part of the satisfaction of the game.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I guess there are a few stages of puzzle design that IF authors go through.

The ideal is the puzzle that is overwhelmingly brilliant, it makes its players feel like King Beef of Shit Mountain for solving it, and it makes other authors clap you on the back for designing it. The puzzle could arguably fit in many games. I've made one puzzle that I've liked in all my IF games and it still falls short of this standard. OK.

The next thing I went through was "a puzzle that stops the action for a bit and is integrated into the game." Like defusing the bomb in Fallacy of Dawn. What was I really going for there? In terms of being integrated into the game, I wanted the player to feel free to read about the 10 or so arcade games that were in the arcade. I think the game hints at it being the current restoration project. (OK, I checked, and it did.) But. But! I don't know if "take in the atmosphere" is THAT pleasurable for a text game that is describing arcade games that you can't actually play.

If I had to do the first puzzle in Fallacy of Dawn over again, I would have still had the urchin plant a bomb inside the Crystal Castles cocktail game. Mostly because I have a Crystal Castles cocktail game. But knowing what I now do about arcade games, the obvious solution would be to drill the locks, not saw through them. Flack even has a video about drilling through locks! I would have placed the drill in the back of the Mr. Do! machine (again, because I can take pictures of it. I didn't have Mr. Do! when I made FoD) and I would have referenced the fact in the text that Delarion says something like, "I've basically got to become Mr. Driller here to get into that game with the bomb in it." Mr. Driller is a clone of Mr. Do! if I remember right. (Maybe it's a clone of Dig Dug. But that was a Mr. Do! ripoff.) The point is, there were better ways to handle that.

But I asked myself, why even put "puzzles" into the game? Because it's a genre convention? I'm really trying to handle semi-realistic problems in the new game that, when solved, reveal a little more about the characters in game world.

I do appreciate your feedback on the hints.

[Roody_Yogurt]

I think I already used my best puzzle idea in that unreleased game the other year. I figure most of my "puzzles" ahead of me are 'find the hammer for the nail' or 'find the key' here on out, unfortunately.

Oh well, I'll just try to DAZZLE them with mediocrity!

[AArdvark]

I knew that it wasn't the game but my seeming inability to get into the plot. In days of past when you entered a command and a large paragraph of text popped up, you had that; 'Yeah! Now something is happening!' feeling.
When I entered a command and a large paragraph of text popped up, my reaction was; 'What! I gotta read all that'. Surely not a good way to immerse oneself into the game.
I will continue to play it, though, in an attempt to get back to where I used to enjoy the medium.