At some point between the time my parents bought me a Commodore 64 and the time I started trying to make my own games, I played a text based adventure game. The most famous text games are the Zork series, and this was a cheap knock off. It was fine.

If you’re not familiar with text adventure games, here’s a quick tutorial: 

Everything is words. You move by typing in move north or move south or east or west. Every time you move you need to tell the computer you’re looking around. It tells you what objects you see or find. You tell the computer what objects you want to interact with and then it gives you a description. From all that you slowly piece together that you’re in a puzzle, and assemble information to solve it. Think badly written Sherlock Holmes choose your own adventure.

Pretty sure this was a science-fiction game that started me off on an abandoned plane. That’s not the important part. What I remember about playing it was how lost I was when it started, figuratively and literally. 

I remember stumbling from location to location without logic, filling my head with a messy  collage of objects and descriptions that left me confused. The world seemed huge and overwhelming. This was way before you could get information online, and even computer magazines where I probably could’ve gotten hints and tricks were just starting.

Eventually I broke out a notebook and markers and began systematically exploring. I went as far south as the computer would let me, and then started moving north one “space“ at a time until I hit the limit. I repeated for East-West, until I had the boundaries of the world. I can see my hand written grid map on the spiral notebook page, and recall how flummoxed I was to find out that the whole world was only a 10 x 10 grid. This gave me the edges of the puzzle. By systematically exploring each grid  space I could fill in the pieces of the world that I could picture and stop getting lost in. I don’t really remember what the plot and solution of the game were, because they were anti-climactic compared to the labor and value of mapping it out. That game was one of the few things I attempted mastery at in my teens, where perfection was the goal (besides math tests). 

The other vivid memory is typing “Fuck” into the game. The first time, it gave a firm but polite warning about using bad words, and requested I not do so again. Of course, I did so again. The screen, and it’s border, started rapidly shifting colors (it was connected to a 14-inch TV, maybe) and the game quit back to the C: prompt. It was very startling, and quite effective, especially since it didn’t save the game before quitting. I did not do so again-again. 

The lesson here, in Doogie Houser style is that problems often seem huge and overwhelming until you get a chance to map them out. Also, randomly typing “fuck” usually doesn’t net you much. Most people on the internet would benefit from learning both of these. I’d settle for either.