The joy of mobile text adventuring

Once upon a time, there were these incredibly bulky computer hardware capable of far less computing than even the most modest cellphone these days.  It was in one of those that Adventure was born.  Instead of investing in crude raster blocky pixels as other games from the era, it completely lacked "graphics": all of its interface consisted of textual prose describing the game surroundings and events, to which the player responded with text commands at a cursor in turns.  Yet it captured like few the imagination of early computer games players and spawned a whole industry.  The adventure in the action-adventure genre comes from it.  Back then, such computer games were called adventures and when graphics finally were introduced to dillute the whole experience, text-adventure was coined to separate them.  Or interactive fiction (IF), as the influential company Infocom began marketing it.

Adventure, Adventureland, Zork and all such text-adventures were outside of my gaming diet back then.  I was a kid, born just a year before Crowther began writing Adventure.  My usual fare were atari 2600 arcade ports in the early 80's.  Luckly, I never played the inane Adventure for it, where the vivid prose was substituted for buttugly blocky pixels and all your adventuring was just maneuvering a dot around twisty little 2D mazes -  the most infamous part of Adventure is the one part that spawned the most copies and tributes.

Anyway, I first learned of text adventures in the second wave of creative boom the genre experienced in the 90's, when a hobbyist community gathered around the then new-fangled authoring tools on usenet allowed them to recreate infocom-level parsers and level of detail.  The early days of the web led me hunting down for the past of gaming, and among console emulators I found text-adventures.  Many talented authors flourished back then and created games that focused on story and content more than the big sprawling map of mostly empty rooms, all alike, of early commercial text-adventures.  Curses, A Change in the Weather, Anchorhead, Varicella, Savoir-Faire are higher watermarks to me than even Infocom's best.  Because I experienced them first?  Not quite, I played most of these, including infocom games, well into the 2000s and I'm still to finish most of them.  Back then, I started with easier entries, most from IFComp and its "beatable under 2 hours" rule.  I fondly remember Uncle Zebulon's Will as the first IF I actually finished back then, Photopia being another.  It left in me an enduring taste for the genre - the only one in gaming where graphics don't grow old and neither does gameplay: text never grows old, nor does turn-based gameplay focusing on exploration and puzzle-solving (even if it's just figuring out the puzzling story and your role in it).

I guess I went through all of that just to state my immense joy of simply playing anywhere, anytime on mobile hardware.  It's an experience so remotely associated to the genre and to the usual fare of dumb tap-based mobile games that at first it seems highly unlikely, but it works wonders.  In these last few days of vacation with no gaming aparatus other than a 7" android tablet, I've been able to complete quite a lot of IF I've been playing on and off for years on desktop PCs. I am now led to believe one of the reasons I was so sluggish is that sitting down in front of a screen and keyboard is definitely not my definition of fun.  I can finally read IF like a book, think for a bit the situation and turn on the screen whenever a solution creeps into my mind.  Writing short commands on a virtual keyboard one-handed is also nothing terribly unusual to someone used to whatsapp and other such text messengers.

In short, this is undoubtfully my preferred environment for IF.  iPoney fans have iFrotz, but I'm using the android app Son of Hunky Punky , and despite its title being a marketeer's nightmare, it's Android's best for IF, supporting both zcode games and TADS (through frotz and tads backend interpreters).  Sadly, no glulx and worse yet, it seems to be receiving no more updates, but it's pretty featureful and stable - one of the best features being saving the whole game state, complete with whole playthrough so far, when you leave it and restoring it when you choose the game again (not working fine with TADS).  For games itself, it's just a matter of accessing the venerable ifarchive, or user-friendly ifdb.

"But wait, interactive fiction these days only requires tapping on choices, you old fart."  yeah, kid, and none of those choices nor those thin hipster twitter plots or irrelevant stats are for me.  more rants on that soon...