Lippard.Multics 1986-01-06 11:14:07 mst Mon
Subject:  Zork as applied to real life
Date: Fri 3 Jan 86 12:37:55-PST
From: Judy Anderson <yduJ@SRI-KL>
To: info-cobol@MIT-MC.ARPA@SRI-KL.ARPA

>From Jon Carroll's column in the January 3 San Francisco
Chronicle


Beyond Zork:  The Terra Game
====== =====  === ===== ====

In my recent holiday swing around the state, I was lucky enough
to spend some hours in the company of an 10-year-old boy who had
been given, for Christmas, an Atari home computer and half a
dozen bits of software to complement it.

Most of the software was of the interactive adventure game sort.
In these games, users are challenged to work their way through an
elaborate and supernatural narrative, encountering monsters and
dwarves and magic potions and spaceships and many other things.

Figuring out these games requires imagination and patience;
inductive reasoning is of some help, but it is essentially a
trial and error process.  It takes a very long time, but a small
boy with a computer, has, by definition, cornered the world
market in available hours.

It occurred to me, just after a loathsome greasy alien had mashed
my being into constituent molecules for the 14th consecutive
time, that almost any human activity could be abstracted to an
interactive adventure game.  Thus, therefore and herewith, I
present "Real Life on Terra," an educational game suitable for
the whole family.  It would start something like this:

          You are lying in bed in a small room.  You just woke up.
          The clock says 8:20am.  You are due at work at 8:30.  On
          the table beside you is a telephone, a glass of water, a
          cheap novel and a bottle of pills.

          -- Get up.

          You are up.

          -- Put on work clothes.

          I see no clothes here.

          -- Go to closet.

          You are in your closet.  All of your work clothes are
          missing.  You remember that you took them to the
          laundromat last night and forgot to pick them up.  In
          your closet is one swimming suit, one bathrobe, and one
          pair of slippers.

          -- Put on bathrobe

          You are wearing your bathrobe

          -- Run to automobile.

          Your automobile will not start.  It is broken.

          -- Go back inside house.

          You have locked yourself out of your house.  The
          temperature is 36 degrees.  You are barefoot and almost
          naked.  You catch terminal pneumonia and die.  Want to
          try again?

          -- Yes.

          You are lying in bed in a small room.  You just woke up.
          The clock says 8:20am.  You are due at work at 8:30.  On
          the table beside you is a telephone, a glass of water, a
          cheap novel and a bottle of pills.

          -- Pick up telephone.

          You have the telephone.

          -- Call boss.

          What shall I call the boss?

          -- Dial boss' number.

          You have reached the boss.

          -- Tell boss I am sick.

          Your boss says you are fired.

          -- Pick up novel.  Pick up glass.  Pick up bottle.

          You have the novel, the glass, and the bottle.

          -- Take pills, drink water, read novel.

          A shining figure from the planet Xenon suddenly appears
          at the foot of your bed.  "Congratulations," he says,
          "you are learning how to play the game."