Interactive Fiction

I'll start with a link:

In my last entry I talked about the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books. The next generation of this form was in early computer gaming. At least, this is the next generation that I remember using.

The Zork games were probably the best-known and most popular versions of these entirely text-based adventures. That's right - no graphics whatsoever. As a child, I whined at my parents to buy me a computer just so I could play these games.

The link I started with has definitions for all of these, so if I confuse you, click there.

Zork was essentially a single-player MUD (or Multi-User Dungeon). This phenomenon is even more interesting. These were the first networked games - one could play with people in other countries or people sitting across the computer lab. My experiences with these started when I began college in 1993. I understand that they had been around since the mid-Eighties.

I witnessed some people who became too immersed in this culture - beginning real-life relationships with online buddies and ignoring studies or even personal hygene in an all-consuming drive to spend more time on the computer.

There were several competing MUDs back then. All were available via Telnet; you had to know the IP address of the hosting computer, but that's all. They were loosely based on Dungeons and Dragons-ish adventures with swords and sorcery and all, but many evolved into not much more than a chatroom. Relationships, alliances, and conflicts were all formed on these boards.

Again, you can read more about these things by following the Wikipedia links that I've provided. They're interesting stuff.

But this was my first exposure to the time-draining abilities of networked computers, and I learned my lesson. As soon as that became a priority in your life, you were lost to the real world. College is a time in which weak or addictive personalities often became marginalized, and no one was talking about Internet Addiction. It's not drugs or alcohol - there's an extensive warning and helping system for those types of addictions. This is something which blindsided my generation, and several people were lost to it.