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Substance Over Style – What We Can Learn From Text Adventures

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front
door.
There is a small mailbox here.

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If you’re Gen-Xer like me, then you’re part of the generation that grew up on text adventures. Great games like Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Wishbringer, which is the first game I ever beat on my own and one which still holds a special place in my heart. I would spend hours in front of my little Apple IIc, reading the text on the screen and trying to figure out what to type next. It was a very simple concept for a game. The game would describe what was happening to the character that I was playing, let me interact with the environment, and let me know the consequences of my actions. Sound familiar?

As a DM, this is exactly what you do in every game. You narrate the story and the players fill in the details. One of the things I always loved about text adventures was the depth of detail presented to the player. It was a great combination of information given to the player and the player filling in any blanks with their imagination. In today’s video game world, the same is still partially true. While games may be flashier, and less imagination needed to fill-in-the-blanks of what you couldn’t see without graphics, the story is still what drives the player forward and makes them want to continue playing. Games like Saints Row and Fallout 3, one of my personal all-time favorites, give you a great graphical feast while still presenting a character-driven storyline. Unfortunately, those kind of video games are few and far between lately.

Fortunately for us, however, a lot of classic text adventures are available to play online for free. If you’ve never played them, I highly recommend you take some time to sit down and run through them. If you have played them before, sit down and reminisce for a while. Either way, enjoy the game, figure out why you enjoyed it, and then apply those concepts to your next RPG. You won’t be disappointed.

Adventure (the first computer adventure game)

Adventureland

Deadline

Enchanter

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Leather Goddesses of Phobos