Ah, gentle reader, this certainly might be the most I’ve paid for a reading book so far. I mean, maybe I spent a similar amount on Homage to Catalonia when I bought it last year or The Gallic and Civil Wars when I bought it in 2014. But since I didn’t write down the exact price I paid for the books (and I’m too lazy to dig out the receipts because of course I still have them), I will just say that this is the most expensive set of books I’ve ever bought for reading since I backed the publication on Kickstarter for $125 (back in the days when I had a job and spent money on things like this and CDs by bands I’d only seen in a single YouTube video). To date, this is the only Kickstarter project I’ve backed. So it’s got that going for it, which is nice.
So, you say, “What is it?” Well, it is a long (623 pages including index) semi-scholarly look at the history of text-based games. It has a bit of a roll-up chapter leading to 1971, and then it has a chapter that gives a summary of the history of each decade (1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s). It then selects a single game from each year in each decade and gives a well-researched and written essay on that game not unlike you’d find on a Substack like The Lake of Lerna or The Librarian of Calaeno when they delve into popular culture or something you might have found on DamnInteresting.com back in the day (it looks like that site is still around, albeit more into podcasting these days–as you might remember, gentle reader, I tried out for that site in 2006). The essays touch upon the history of companies working in the space (Infocom, natch, but a couple of others), the technologies behind them (not only in discussing at a high level the parsers and whatnot but also including some sample code or data file extracts), and some of the people behind the games.
So, heck, yeah, it was quite a nostalgia kick. For a while. Because I played a number of the games listed in the first two or three decades if you include things ported to the Commodore 64 (I had a Commodore 128, gentle reader, but I downloaded a lot of things from BBSes for the Commodore 64).
I mean, I played Eliza. I played Super Star Trek. I played many Infocom titles–I still have Zork, Zork II, Suspended, and Deadline not in the original packaging but later folder packages. I played TradeWars 2001 on several WWIV BBSes (and I actually have downloaded the source code for TradeWars 2002 and have it somewhere around here). The latest of the games listed by name (but not covered in depth) that I played would have been Gemstone Warrior 3 around 1997–I remember introducing it to a friend from the print shop at the time, and he got into it, but his dialup access was long distance, so it amongst other things led to his declaring bankruptcy sometime shortly thereafter. After that, I didn’t really play games but the Civilization series past that (and up to now, as you know).
But:
One, as text games faded from the forefront, it seems to have become more of a community, with its proponents, academics, and development of games to satisfy the community more than the public. Many of the selections in this book are explicated more because they’re interesting to someone steeped in the culture of text games. Kind of like how art criticism and art itself in many cases has turned inward, pleasing artists and critics more than the public at large. It doesn’t make the essays about the games less interesting per se but it does make one wonder. Often, I read two or three chapters/years of essays in this vein and then got a chapter about an interesting game that was interesting to read about in itself.
Second, well, the book does have its political moments. I mean, it does talk a lot and choose several queer games (his word as he is academically minded), and it does celebrate/elevate trans and nonbinary representation. It made me muse about the nature of outsider community–in my day (sonny), playing on computers and reading comic books and science fiction and fantasy were an outsider community, whereas today, that is mainstream pop culture–so do people who consider themselves outsiders gravitate toward the current self-reinforcing outsider communities that trans and nonbinary life (and, somehow, certain political viewpoints which are almost 50% of the electorate apparently)? That’s outside the scope of this book and this blog. But back to the actual political elements: It gets all the way to 1985’s chapter on Infocom’s A Mind Forever Voyaging before slagging on Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump (president when the book was written, and soon to be president again). And not just slagging, but vituperating. And we get more sucker punch vituperation in the chapter on AI Dungeon because Trump is a lying liar who lies!!!!! (my words, but the spirit is there). For the most part, the book is even-tempered in its disposition, but the little political slaps are there, unfortunately. Also, GamerGate gets a couple of relitigations from the defense of the gamewriter who slept with game reviewers (or something), although that’s not the crux of the matter as it’s presented: it’s mouthbreathers who buy games versus the community (of text game writers and perhaps only those who think correctly).
One does wonder, though, if the author was just too darn young to realize how much Hitler George W. Bush was, too. Is it just me, or does he get overlooked in the pantheon of the worst presidents EVAR!!!!? Millenials filling the Internet are too young to remember, I guess.
Overall, though, those two bits only slightly diminished my enjoyment of the book, although I have to admit that I really got more out of the earlier years where I had first hand experience of the games. Heck, I can even see in my mind’s eye the advertisements for some of them. I could probably re-read the ads and the reviews in my stash of mid-to-late 1980s Commodore magazines (Run and Power Play which would become Commodore Magazine and Ahoy! and maybe Compute’s Gazette). I flagged a sidebar note about Little Computer People–I still have a copy with Bradley, my Little Computer Person, on it. I flagged his mention of a book called Pilgrim in the Microworld by David Sudnow, a book about a guy who got obsessed with the Atari game Breakout!. Man, I picked that up used or remaindered around 1990 and read it. When the book was less than 10 years old (I was there, Gandalf). But it seemed twee to me at the time because technology had changed so much in that decade.
As I got in on a mid or upper tier of the Kickstarter, I got a shorter companion volume entitled 50 Years of Text Games: Further Explorations which has another couple of games called out and brief essays on some text-adjacent game genres. It’s only 57 pages including a timeline of text adventure games at the end, but it’s a nice contiuation of the book. And I counted it as a whole book in my annual total (82 so far, and I’m feeling good–I might make it all the way if I start ripping through some poetry collections).
At any rate, a nice nostalgia trip despite clear signs that the author would vigorously and probably unkindly disagree with my political views.
And it really makes me want to unbox one of my Commodore 64s and run through some of these games that I was not patient enough to appreciate when I was fourteen. Only to discover that I am probably still not patient enough for Suspended.
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