Zarf Updates

"What is the first computer game that you played?" One of those social forum threads which is really about reader demographics rather than games. Still, I tried to remember.

No, my answer wasn't Adventure. I played Adventure in '79 or so -- but before that, I probably ran into Oregon Trail or Lemonade Stand or one of those other BASIC games on a school PET machine. And I definitely played one of the Star Trek variants on a neighbor's Apple 2 (not a II+, this was way early).

But there's also a game that I played at the Ontario Science Center in... man, I really don't remember when. Certainly 1980 or earlier. It might have been before or after my initiation into Adventure.

I will describe the game. You tried to contain a firest fire. The game was built in an arcade-like cabinet, but it was not a commercial arcade game. You had a graphical map of a forest, done in colored ASCII art. You had a cursor controlled by d-pad-style buttons. There was an info display showing wind speed and direction.

A fire got started. (One red square!) You had to control the spread. Your tools were water-bombs -- very limited supply -- and setting back-fires. Maybe you could drop firefighters as well; I don't remember.

I do remember that if you were fast and lucky, you could bang the cursor over to the initial spark and water-bomb it before it spread. That was the ideal outcome. Otherwise, things got out of control real fast. I didn't grasp the scenario well enough to use backfires effectively, but I understood the cheese-it solution.

A couple of months ago I referred to a quote from Infocom's internal ZIL manual:

That post was about the social context in which Steve Meretzky wrote those words. So I didn't get into what the ZIL tokens meant.

But this week the question came up on the Visible Zorker Discord. Let's get technical!

(This post is also available on my Patreon.)

The common thread this time is "the id". I don't mean the games are horny; they're not. (Although PSI has "flirt" dialogue options.) I mean somebody wanted a specific thing and made a game that catered to it. You want a style of puzzle that videogames don't do much, or you want a building-climber with zero risk of falling, or you want 3000 books piled on the floor. Here you go.

• Puzzle Spy International
• Murder at the Birch Tree Theater
• Gecko Gods
• Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!
• Legacy of Kain: Defiance: Remastered

Three months ago, I launched the Visible Zorker Patreon with a promise: fund me and I will create a new Visible Infocom game every month.

You did! And now the tree bears fruit.

I decided to put the games on a two-month delay, so that Patreon supporters would have a leg up. I worked on Visible Zork 3 in February; I made it available on the Patreon page on March 1st.

Two months have passed. (Happy Workers' Day!) And thus Visible Zork 3 is now live on the project page. The source code repository is also live, licensed under the open-source MIT license.

Enjoy the lonely, shadow-lit, eerily silent world of Zork 3... It's a bit of a tonal shift from the first two games, isn't it? The cartoonish treasure-hunts have been replaced with a somewhat philosophical meditation on virtue. (One might compare the route Ultima 4 took a few years later.)

To be sure, there are still some brightly-colored puzzles left over from the original MIT Zork. The blend isn't entirely smooth. But it's the wrap-up we have for the world of Zork... well, until Enchanter crashes back in. That will be another episode.

The 2026 Hugo Award finalists are up. Awkward for me: I really like many of the nominees, but I haven't read (seen, played) a majority of any category. So I can't give a useful overview or say that any given work is "best of the year".

I'll just recommend a bunch!

I know I haven't done a game-review wrap-up since... January? Yikes. And those were mostly reviews I wrote back in the November. (Fall is IGF judging season.)

Infocom stuff has taken up most of my free time -- not to mention GDC travel and NarraScope planning. But I have played a few games. I mean, new Nosgoth lore, I can't turn that down.

Here's some stuff that's been going on:

• The Séance of Blake Manor
• Intelligence
• The Artisan of Glimmith
• Blippo+
• Kevin's Playing in Berlin
• Planet of Lana 2
• Legacy of Kain: Ascendance

I'm going to tell this one out of order, because it's not April Fool's Day any more.

Tara McGrew, the author of the modern ZILF compiler, has released Linchpin, a brand-new implementation of Infocom's "mu machine". That's the virtual machine which powered Cornerstone.

...You all know about Cornerstone, right? Infocom's first and last business product? Ate up all their game profits at exactly the point when the company couldn't afford it? Go read the Digital Antiquarian article; Jimmy tells it better than me.

Anyhow. Since the 1990s, Infocom fans have put uncountable nerd-years into supporting the Z-machine. Almost nobody has looked at Cornerstone. It just wasn't a fun idea. John Elliott did some reverse-engineering work (see his comments in the DA post) but didn't get very far.

As of last week, that has changed. It's a new age for aficionados of failed 1985 database products! Linchpin includes a working interpreter for Cornerstone's VM. It also includes an assembler, so you can create new programs for that VM.

(My first title for this post was "The Mystery of the Missing Adverbs". That was just too trite. Instead I spun the ol' Stratemeyer Syndicate title wheel and picked different words. Now it's trite and clunky; sorry.)

Adverbs are one of the great Bad Ideas of interactive fiction. Imagine this sort of interaction:

We can parse verbs, adjectives, and nouns, so why not adverbs? They provide an additional axis of choice for the player's command. They can be situationally appropriate. (Note how I'm cueing the player to consider alternatives: "At a glance", "at your touch".) Is this a good idea?

Well, no. It's bad. The standard reply is that this is too much choice. It can't be connected to meaningful game responses. That is: 98% of the time, EXAMINE CAREFULLY is going to do exactly the same thing as EXAMINE, so the player will rapidly learn to not bother.

Hey, remember I was in a game studies essay collection that just came out? I'm in a new game studies interview collection that just came out!

This one isn't about game design, though. It's not lectures at all -- I promise you are in no danger of learning to do anything in particular. The book is about play as a general concept. A bunch of people from different walks of life, talking about play. How we play; how we create play; where we play; how we learned to play; why we play. And on.

The project sprouted from a series of interviews and questions organized by Drew Davidson. I agreed to talk to Drew, and so did a lot of other people, and this book is the result. "A playful thematic oral history of the stories shared," as the blurb page says.

Like the Kaleidoscope, Ludic Narrans messes with the idea of linearity. Two editions are available: Playing it Straight is organized by topic, whereas Playing Around interleaves topical sections in a playful fugue. Same content, variable structure.

Names you might recognize: Jenova Chen, Naomi Clark, Mia Consalvo, James Ernest, Rami Ismail, Jim Munroe, and no doubt others. And me of course.

Both editions are available as free PDFs. (See the "Download" links on the book pages.) The text is under a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-ND).

Or you can pay for either print or ebook editions at Lulu. Note that each print edition is itself available in two forms. The only difference is the interior illustrations, printed in color or monochrome. (They're nice illustrations but I wouldn't call them central to the book's presentation.)

Once again, I'll quote a single line from one of my bits:

never been designed for. This is why tool programming starts out easy and then turns into a

Grab the book to read the rest!

"Haruspicy" in the sense that I'm going to examine the entrails and try to predict the future of GDC. Disclaimer: I cannot predict the future.

Also disclaimer: I don't have any inside info. I've chatted with a lot of people on various Slacks and Discords. And I was there, in San Francisco, last week. But I only saw a small slice of What Went On. This is an exercise in putting together a coherent picture from a lot of scraps. Maybe the exercise is more interesting than the results! You decide.

I'll admit up front that I'm on the pessimistic end of the spectrum. (That's the "gloom" part.) A lot of people are wondering if GDC is maybe in trouble. I think GDC is definitely in trouble, and the only question is how catastrophic things are. But again, I don't have any inside info.

Let's start with last year's show.