Monthly Archives: December 2012

Lost Treasures of Infocom

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If the words “plugh” and “xyzzy” mean nothing to you, you probably won’t understand why I’m thrilled that the Lost Treasures of Infocom have hit the iOS App Store.

Back when I was a lad, just getting started with computers, the neatest game around was called ADVENT. Also known as the Colossal Cave Adventure, it was the very first text adventure game, a genre now known as “interactive fiction”. Originally written in Fortran, it was eventually ported to pretty much every platform then in existence; and it can now be played on-line.

ADVENT is the remote ancestor of every adventure game now in existence. You had a large world to explore, monsters to cope with, treasures to loot, puzzles to solve, and an inventory of items to solve them with. Of course, this was 1976. The average micro-computer had no more than 64 kilobytes of RAM, and probably much less. There were no computer graphics to speak of; the game world was presented as text descriptions, and your commands were simple “verb” or “verb object” sentences parsed by the game, e.g, “GO EAST” or “GET WAND”.

The next big adventure game to come along was written at MIT, and was called DUNGEON. Set in the Great Underground Empire of Zork, it included a much more powerful parser, a much larger world, and much trickier puzzles. (You can play it on-line to, at the link given above.) It become so popular that it was commercialized by a company called Infocom, but it was too big to fit on micro-computers, so it was split into parts, now known as the Zork trilogy. Infocom went on to produce almost thirty different text adventures.

Infocom was eventually bought by Activision, and in 1991, shortly after dissolving the Infocom brand, Activision released a CD called Lost Treasures of Infocom, including all of their text adventures (except Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, due, I guess, to licensing issues).

When I was in junior high, we had ADVENT running on a HeathKit H-11 computer at our house. Later we had the Zork trilogy running on an Apple II and on a KayPro 4. It was inspiring, and for many years writing text adventures was my educational project of choice when learning a new programming language. When Lost Treasures of Infocom was released for the IBM PC, I grabbed it. (I think I still have the CD somewhere.)

Now the Lost Treasures are available on your iPhone or iPad. For free. And per the linked review, Activision managed the transition to the touch environment quite nicely.

If you’re looking for retro gaming, it doesn’t get any more retro than this. Go check it out.

Miskatonic School for Girls

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So we were given this game for Christmas: Miskatonic School for Girls. The basic notion is that you are a student in an elite girl’s school in Arkham Massachusetts, and the kicker is that all of the faculty members, from the headmaster on down, are Lovecraftian horrors bent on driving you insane. Your goal is to retain at least some of your sanity (you won’t keep all of it) longer than the other players.

The mechanics are interesting. This is a deck-building game: you’re trying to build a deck filled with spunky, tough students, filled with stern resolve, who won’t easily be driven insane. But your opponents are trying to stack your deck with nasty demented cosmic horrors—teachers, that is—who will make your class times a horror. You start with 20 sanity points, and as your sanity declines the rules require you to cackle and gibber fiendishly.

It’s an interesting game. We’ve played it twice now, and I’m dimly beginning to work out some strategies. You can try to buy students who will give you lots of points to buy more powerful students (to defend you) or faculty (to afflict your neighors), or you can try to buy students who will do well in the classroom against the horrors that Student Was Not Meant To Know. Whether it will hold up over time, I’m not sure; it strikes me that there’s not quite enough interaction between the players.

The younger of my two sons loves to play to lose, because he really likes gibbering and acting insane. It’s kind of scary.

I Have to Sit Down

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I like Simcha Fisher; she makes me laugh:

Listen, deadbeat. It’s too late to send out paper cards, which you’ve been “taking a year off” from doing since 1993. In fact, failing to send out cards is the only Christmas tradition you’ve managed to keep faithfully, other than miraculously transforming, every Christmas Eve, from someone who owns six pairs of scissors and four rolls of tape into someone who is seriously considering using little dabs of strawberry jelly to stick together the shredded edges of wrapping paper, which you attempted to cut by scoring it with a Budweiser cap. Jelly is sticky, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/simcha-fisher/how-to-write-a-family-christmas-letter#ixzz2Fi8lUbSu

Obscure Beauty

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Pondering yesterday’s posts, on The Little Drummer Boy and on software that runs mazes, got me to thinking about obscure beauty.

There’s a beauty to well-written software. I’m not talking about attractive user interfaces or pretty graphics; I’m talking about how the software is put together inside, the way the individual pieces fit together. Well-designed software is pleasant to contemplate, and easy to modify and extend. Everything just works, and it’s easy to find things. Solving a software problem in a beautiful way can be an absolute joy.

Some few of my readers (the programmers, or at least some of them) are nodding their heads. The rest of you are shaking them, or, at best, thinking, “Yes, I can see how that could be true…but I certainly can’t see the beauty myself.” It’s an obscure kind of beauty, one that could only be appreciated by a very few people. And then, of those who might be able to see the beauty, I might be the only one who ever sees it. I may never make this code public, and even if I do, there’s no guarantee that anyone else would look at it.

But here’s the thing. God is the Good, the True, the Beautiful. Everything that is beautiful participates in the beauty of God; and to appreciate something beautiful is to in some small measure give glory to God, knowingly or unknowingly. Recognizing the beauty of creation and glorifying God is one of our functions on this earth.

Now, I spent the weekend making George run through mazes, and delighting in the software I was writing. Is it useful software? I dunno. Was my time spent productively? I dunno. But drummer boys gotta drum, and I gotta code…and I can offer the beauty of that code to God. And it’s likely that I’m the only person in the whole of time and space who will ever offer exactly that small obscure beauty to His Glory. And that’s a great and glorious thing. Makes me feel special.

But if there’s beauty that I’m uniquely suited to spot, there’s beauty that you’re uniquely suited to spot, either because of your interests and talents, or simply because of your place and time. Let’s not miss it.

A Confession

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I have a confession to make.

I like the song “The Little Drummer Boy.”

No, really. It brings tears to my eyes.

Every so often this time of year I read snarky comments about it: “Yeah, I bet Mary was pleased as punch to have some punk kid come start banging a drum right when Baby Jesus had finally fallen asleep.” And yeah, I admit, it’s a bit of a stretch. But then the singer gets to this part:

I played my drum for him, pa-rump-a-pum-pum
I played my best for him, pa-rump-a-pum-pum
Then he smiled at me, pa-rump-a-pum-pum
Me and my drum.

And then I start to weep. I feel stupid, but I do it anyway.

Because that’s what Jesus wants from us: to play our best for him. What I have to offer might seem insufficient, or trivial, or foolish. But that’s what I’ve got, and that’s what he wants from me: that, and no less.

Of course, it has to be done right: the singer has to sing it like he means it…which is why my favorite version of the song is Ringo Starr’s. I don’t know whether there was any religious feeling there when he recorded it; but by golly he plays his drum, and he plays his best, and whether he meant to or not he’s offering his playing as a gift to Our Saviour. God bless him.

Running the Maze

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This weekend I’ve been busy programming “mobiles”, creatures that can move around in the maze. In fact, I’ve implemented two mobiles, George and the roach. George is a simple guy; there’s a treasure chest, and he means to find it, provided that he doesn’t get killed doing so. The roach is even simpler: it has a magnetic attraction to George, and will always move closer to George if it can. It’s not smart about walls, though, so it often gets stuck in corners.

The game is simple. If the roach catches George, it wins. If George gets to the chest before the roach catches him, he wins. If George can’t get to the chest but the roach can’t get him, it’s a draw.

Early on in development, George got eaten a lot; he was smart about moving to the chest, but dumb about avoiding the roach. He’s smarter, now, but he still gets eaten sometimes. Here’s an animation that shows the action.

Dead george

More frequently, the roach just gets stuck somewhere rather distant from George. As I say, the roach is no genius.

Roach stuck

And once in a while, things get exciting.

George avoids

George is pretty smart. At each step, he figures out the best route to the chest that doesn’t get too close to the roach. If there is none, he’ll back away from the roach until he gets stuck. But if a route opens up, he’ll take it.