I have a couple of my own, now archived on my home server.
They were fun when they ran for 15-20 minutes, even after keying them in for hours.
Like many other devs I also dipped my feet in the world of interactive fiction. As a kid I was just learning about concepts such as inheritance / OOP / etc. so I went a bit overboard on the ontology.
I remember pretty early on making a rather large mistake in that regard when a friend who was beta-testing the game for me at the time typed in commands like "get key", "get sword", "get ye flask", and then "get Aldwin" to which the game merrily replied "OK" and promptly stuffed an entire human being into the player's inventory.
Weird things happen when you give your MOO players a REPL in LISP land.
Unfortunately, they're immediately hostile so you start attacking them too, and _they_ get near death and summon two comrades each, and so on. It turns into a Sorcerer's Apprentice scenario very quickly.
I managed to bring the MUD to a halt. An archwizard (not Yen Sid) had to instakill the enemies to avoid hitting their "near death" condition and creating more of them.
It's probably still down there packed up in the cellar ....
Maybe I should dig it out again.
Then at a junior college I encountered Adventure, Zork (the full version), Mystery Mansion, and Warp on an HP 3000/terminal mini-computer system.
I began writing text adventures myself, bigger and bigger, and with higher and higher ambitions in terms of complexity, story and world scope, parsing. My "Command English" parser was an incredibly versatile subset of English.
At home I had an IBM Jr (Hey, I loved it!), whose BASIC didn't have GOSUB, so I invented a stack for the parser using strings. (Used strings as a heap in another program to create a very slow 3D vector graphics program.)
In high school I wrote this massive text adventure called Wanderer. I was so proud of it, until the day I went to save it on my floppy disk, at which time it wrote all over the previous version only to abort because it was to big for the disk. No pre-write size check! :(
That was the last one I wrote. But by pushing every text adventure to new levels of capability, over and over, I learned a lot about programming, and developed a habit of innovating in program styles, and domain languages, to match problems.
I wish I had the source for all those programs, but these were the days of many incompatible computers, and storage media that decayed quickly.
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I would love a Mac version of those four text adventures mentioned above. Mystery Mansion seems to have become particularly forgotten.
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"The Plot of the Phantom" makes me so happy! Thank you Scott Andrew!!!
(Completely random, but reading the opening scene, it struck me how perverse it would be to get deeply into the game and find out I was in the text adventure equivalent of "Deliverance"! That would almost be art, lol. Like novels, text adventures are a medium that naturally supports much greater freedom, than visual mediums.)
I'm not saying having LLMs narrate the entire situation. I'm saying have the LLM sit between gamestate and the player. The LLM is the UI.
Essentially the LLM can see the current game state and possible moves and it's the LLMs job to change the game state and report the current game state to the user (via a well written narrative).
That keeps the world consistent and structured, but the LLM adds enough dynamism to keep it flowing well. You can even make the underlying game state complex as well. Like you can have enemy AI's that actually move through the world too (independent of the LLM).
https://intfiction.org/t/first-full-game-available-on-new-ll...
The biggest issue is attempts to hack the LLM, to get at hidden gamestate. But I feel this can be easily remedied by just not providing the LLM with hidden game state.
That would keep its behavior passive and restricted to simply the current state, since it would retain no memory of previous actions.
NPC's running around were a thing even in the 80's, see The Hobbit. That on a ZX spectrum. 8 bit CPU, 48k of RAM. With if6 and Zmachine games for 16 bit and 32 bit computers in the 90's llm's can't even compete.
From Jigsaw, Anchorhead, Curses, Spider and Web to that anagram word puzzle game for Glulx (a 32 bit zmachine cousin), the array of amateur but professional looking games it's huge, really huge.
An Inform 6 compiler can run under DOS/386 or Linux/BSD for 486 and compile a really large and functional game in seconds. For Inform7, maybe a Pentium II/III and a bunch of seconds too.
An AI to do the same, not even a 'modern' Core Duo with a GL 2.1 adapter (the lowest of the lowest bearable specs for light web browsing and office work) can't even run a consistent world.
There's a reason "Guess the verb" meme exists. There's even a satire game on this concept: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=35arqepm2q92hcqu
Your comment coudn't be more outdated since the Curses! release for the ZMachine in 1993.
The v5 machine release was much better than the v3 one, and the v5-V8 ones allowed semi-complex phrases with indirect object pronouns after a previous entered phrase and much more.
Go play Anchorhead and compare it to a z3 machine game from Infocom, or any game made it with Puny Inform.
Anyone know the game?
Sorry, but that isn't a verb recognition problem, it's a comprehension problem. I agree with the downvoted poster that LLM integration would significantly improve the end user experience. However the LLM should not be arbiter of game state (as they suggested), but simply the translator that ensures that the players instructions are understood by the game.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTYkFJbUswOHFQclE... [PDF]
Thanks for sharing. Very intriguing collaboration between child-author and adult-author.
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