Article by Matt Brennan

Last week, I played through the game Colossal Cave Adventure for class, and in my playthrough and the subsequent discussion we had as a class, one specific topic popped up with regularity: the text parser. The text parser was no small innovation for its time, but returning to it nearly 50 years later was an exercise in frustration. The parser was extremely simple, as it had to be for its time, and thus only accepted a very small—and very specific—list of inputs. This confused every player, myself included, and led to the game becoming a tug-of-war between the player and the controls, with the game itself, while never quite becoming secondary, taking a very clear back seat to the struggle to play at all.

For movement, the parser of Adventure accepts cardinal directions (though not the command to “go” or “move” in these directions), as well as up and down. Everything else gets more arcane from there, as the parser allows for “get” and “take” but not “use” or “investigate.” “Look” is allowed but only gives a description of the room around the player character, and “throw” does the same thing as “drop,” preventing any chance at lobbing objects at enemies as weapons. Eventually, it occurs to the player that their best bet at succeeding is to input only the exact thing they want to interact with and no other words, and allow the game to fill in the rest of the data. This works more often than not, which is its own issue. In a game like Dungeons and Dragons, which was brought up in discussion and was a clear inspiration for Colossal Cave Adventure and every other early text adventure of the day, it’s a reflex for the players to describe what they do in great detail so that the game’s adjudicator, its Dungeon Master, knows exactly what the players want to attempt and how to judge them on the fly. That level of detail, necessary in D&D, becomes an active hindrance in Adventure, and the player must rely on simple, often one word, inputs to move the game forward.

The important distinction between a game like Dungeons and Dragons and a game like Adventure is the level of freedom in both. D&D is nearly pure improv; the players work together and keep each other focused and up to speed on how the game is working at any given moment, but nothing is set in stone in terms of story, and anything can change on a whim or an unexpected die roll. Adventure, for how much it’s inspired by D&D, is nearly the exact opposite; the single player is completely alone, has to figure everything out themselves, and is working to advance the single plot down its defined tracks until it reaches the ending, which is always the same. If the plot of a D&D campaign is an adventure, the plot of Adventure is a train ride with a sticky handbrake. There are interesting and clever moments—for instance, the player needs to keep their inventory clear, but if they don’t set down a porcelain vase in the same room where they set down a decorative pillow, the vase will fall and shatter—but those are hard-coded into the game, not the result of a clever piece of judging by another person. The mechanics can be interesting, but there’s a certain attempt to make Adventure something it isn’t, and the text parser makes this abundantly and uncomfortably clear.

Not to say I didn’t enjoy playing Adventure. I thought it was a very solid game for its age, and the fact that the most frustrating thing about a game over twice as old as I am was that its controls were counterintuitive does say a lot of good things about the game. A lot of it holds up really well, but at every turn when I played, the text parser became a more and more pressing issue. Thankfully there were a handful of passwords to skip most of the long walking sections (where the game has the most chances to screw up and dump the player somewhere in an endless forest), but that was only a workaround, hardly a solution. A text-based MUD I have some experience with, Discworld MUD, also uses a text parser to control the game, but this parser is much more sophisticated and, more importantly, flexible than the parser used in Adventure, and as a result the game experience feels much more akin to D&D and other roleplaying games than to the old text-based adventures we played for class. While this is certainly an unfair comparison between the two, I find it fascinating how far the technology for text-based games has developed even amidst the advent and growth of graphical games. It’s a far fairer comparison between the two, I think, to bring up how beloved and propulsive for the genre both games have been.