~7 minute readThe Logical and the Dead
The text adventure game is growing up. It has resisted the appearance of hi-res graphics and sound-effect gaming and has moved instead in the direction of legitimate computer fiction, offering true plots, coherent story lines, and a parser that understands complete sentences. Yet the heart of every adventure is still its puzzle structure — the challenge and the reward of slugging it out with a program designed at once to frustrate and enthrall. Adventure puzzles, done well and fairly, are things of beauty: the problem of the Giant Room and the Troll Bridge in Adventure, the Oddly-Angled Room and the Bank of Zork in The Wizard of Frobozz, the Red Docking Port in Starcross, and the "Translucent" maze in Enchanter. Each of these puzzles provides the adventurer with everything needed to discover its secret without being so obscure as to become a turn-off to the rest of the game. Just as a good puzzle can create a genuine enthusiasm for the game, a bad one — either too easy, or worse, absurdly difficult — can easily destroy one's interest in the program.
One of the immediate criteria that might be considered in evaluating both a game and the individual puzzles within the game is the idea that the player, as a real-life character in the adventure, ought to have a fair chance at solving the puzzles (and, in fact, the entire game) on the first run-through without the use of a save/restore feature—that is to say, no puzzle is fair that requires the player to go through an exhaustive trial-and-error period before it will yield a solution, particularly when failure means either becoming hopelessly mired in a no-win situation or coming upon a quick and irrevocable death. This does not mean that either the game or the puzzles within the game ought to be overly simple — only that the game must have a certain integrity to it, allowing the player to trust the logic and consistency of the puzzle structure.
The most widely played text adventures today are the three underground fantasies that make up Infocom's Zork trilogy. Anyone paying close attention to the descriptions of rooms and objects should be able to tough out the puzzles in these games within a reasonable length of time.
((I (Eat What I) See) What I Eat.) The Zork series presents a variety of problems calling for logical, deductive reasoning as well as creative thinking. Patience is also a virtue when playing Zork, because some puzzles definitely require extensive thought. No game is perfect, however, and even in a program as carefully written as Zork, there are a few instances where the player can easily become trapped in a situation where too much is asked of, and too little provided for, one encountering the puzzle for the first time.
A good example of this is the "Alice" section of Zork II. In this case, there are two problems requiring as much luck as logic, and to complicate matters they are interconnected. The first situation is this: Entering a small room from the west, you find yourself standing in front of a table apparently set for afternoon tea. On the table are four cakes singularly colored green, blue, red, and orange. On the green cake is some lettering that reads simply, "Eat me." The other cakes also have some lettering, but it is too small to be read with the naked eye. On the east side of the room is a mouse hole, and to the northwest is a larger exit. What to do? Ignore the cakes? Play with the cakes? Cut them? Eat them? Eat a couple now and take the others along on the chance you might think of a use for them somewhere later on (maybe the unicorn in the garden will trade you the gold key for the blue cake)? One thing is certain: Making the wrong decision is certain to affect what comes later, yet there are no clues provided as to what action is correct.
The second half of this problem finds you standing in a strange room at the side of a pool of water (salty tears, apparently, although their origin is never revealed). There is a hazy something under the water at the deep end of the pool, and a transparent bottle marked with a skull and crossbones lies at your feet. You want to get whatever it is out of the pool, and at the same time you are awfully curious to know what is inside the bottle, even though you suspect that the contents might be dangerous.
The obvious thing to do here would seem to be to try entering the pool in order to salvage whatever it is that lies hidden on the bottom. Do this, however, and you drown. Never mind that nowhere else in the Great Underground Empire will this happen. (In most instances, a player will simply be denied access to the water.) Yet here, for no apparent reason and with no warning, you die. In this case, the solution requires that you have something in your possession you were expected to have picked up elsewhere. However, if you don't have what you need when you enter the Pool Room, you can never get it.
The problem with the Tea Room/Pool Room section is not necessarily its difficulty. The function and meaning of the four cakes and the solution to the retrieval of the object in the pool of tears can be deciphered without too much difficulty through judicious use of that old standby method of problem solving: trial and error. And that is the problem. What should be a cleverly written exercise in logic becomes merely a guessing game whose chief component is the scratch disk for saving and restoring.
In this case, the construction of the puzzle does no more than confuse the player. In other instances (and less well-constructed adventures), where perhaps trial and error is less effective, confusion can easily lead to frustration and eventual weariness with the game. Certainly there are players who will let nothing dampen their desire to solve the puzzles and finish the game. But many other players either run out of patience or simply lose heart before they complete a game — and thus potential adventure game players are lost to the genre.
The First One Won't Kill You. Programming large numbers of booby traps in an adventure game can also be a big mistake. The "haha, you're dead!" kind of writing, setting the player up for dozens of gratuitous deaths, seems unfair and easily becomes a tedious distraction. Planetfall author Steve Meretzky has stated his dislike for this kind of hazard in adventures. Besides Deadline and The Witness, his game is probably the most playable on a first run-through for just that reason. In only one place in Planetfall does the adventurer run the risk of a surprise death, and even then, though it is completely unexpected, it can be avoided quite easily, and most players will probably not even stumble upon it.
In Enchanter, it is quite easy to die time after time in the temple area of Krill's castle. But since there's something to be learned by these deaths, and because the novice enchanter is returned quickly to the fray, spellbook in hand, there is not the same feeling of frustration and anger at being tricked into entering a hopeless situation as there can be in several other adventures where bad luck translates into "game over." In the case of Krill's Temple, though there is no real way to differentiate between a safe room and a dangerous one, and no time to escape the trap when it is sprung, constructing the game in such a way that the deaths become a kind of necessity to solving the adventure completely changes the meaning and nature of the danger.
Adventure puzzles, after all, ought not to inspire unnecessary feelings of paranoia. Rather, with the exception of the kind of combat situations one finds in Adventure and the first Zork, death in an adventure game ought to be the result of a player's indiscretion and foolishness, not simply of chancing upon a random hazard. Such pitfalls detract from the cleverness of the game and, again, make the use of a scratch-save disk almost as mandatory as the game disk itself.
Of course, even a logical, straightforward puzzle structure is no guarantee that a player will be able to race through the game in record time. Any adventure worth the cost of entry will frustrate players to the point of irritation before allowing them to reach the end of the game. But there is nothing wrong with that. Marc Blank himself has said that it's preferable for games to be too difficult than too easy: at least with a difficult game, in terms of value (dollar per playing hour) players get their money's worth.
This last point is possibly the most crucial, because ultimately each game will be judged not so much on its cleverness as on its pure entertainment value. When a game is found to be engaging and fun to play hour upon hour, players feel they've found a good value and may decide to go back and purchase another, regardless of whether they solved the first one. A well-conceived and well-produced game will clearly have a better chance of achieving this final result than a poor one. With adventure games, the puzzle structure will be the deciding factor.
This article appeared in
Softline
Jan-Feb 1984
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
