{"id":7427,"date":"2017-03-16T08:19:04","date_gmt":"2017-03-16T12:19:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7427"},"modified":"2017-03-16T13:37:31","modified_gmt":"2017-03-16T17:37:31","slug":"an-apologia-for-terminal-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7427","title":{"rendered":"An apologia for terminal games"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, to a certain segment of the population I suppose I define myself as a relic of ancient times when I insist that one can write good and absorbing computer games that <em>don&#8217;t have a GUI<\/em> &#8211; that throw down old-school in a terminal emulator.<\/p>\n<p>Today I&#8217;m shipping a new release of the game <a href=\"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/esr\/greed\/\">greed<\/a> &#8211; which is, I think, one of the better arguments for this proposition.  Others include roguelike dungeon crawlers (nethack, angband, moria, larn), <a href=\"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/esr\/vms-empire\/\">VMS Empire<\/a>, the whole universe of text adventure games that began with ADVENT and Zork, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/esr\/super-star-trek\/\">Super Star Trek<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I maintain a bunch of these old games, including an improved version of the BSD <a href=\"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/esr\/bs\/\">Battleships<\/a> game and even a faithful port of the oldest of them all: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/esr\/wumpus\/\">wumpus<\/a>, which I let you play (if you want) in a mode that emulates the awful original BASIC interface, all-caps as far as the eye can see.<\/p>\n<p>Some of these I keep alive only because somebody ought to; they&#8217;re the heritage grain of computer gaming, even if they look unimpressive to the modern eye. But others couldn&#8217;t really be much improved by a GUI; greed, in particular, is like that.  In fact, if you ranked heritage terminal games by how little GUIfication would improve then, I think greed would probably be right at the top (perhaps sharing that honor with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/esr\/ski\/\">ski<\/a>).  That in itself makes greed a bit interesting.<\/p>\n<p>Much has been gained by GUIfying games; I have my own favorites in that style, notably <cite>Civilization II<\/cite> and <cite>Spaceward Ho!<\/cite> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wesnoth.org\/\">Battle For Wesnoth<\/a> (on which I was a developer for years).  But the very best terminal games retain, I think, a distinct charm of their own.<\/p>\n<p>Some of them (text adventures, roguelikes) work, I think, the way a novel does, or Scott McCloud taught us minimalist cartooning does; they engage the user&#8217;s own imagination as a peripheral, setting up a surprisingly strong interaction between the user&#8217;s private imagery and the bare elements of the game.  At their best, such games (like novels) can have a subtle imaginative richness that goes well beyond anything this week&#8217;s graphical splatterfest offers.<\/p>\n<p>More abstract puzzle games like greed don&#8217;t quite do that. What they offer instead is some of the same appeal as tiling window managers.  In these games there is no waste, no excess, no bloat, no distraction; it&#8217;s all puzzle value all the way down.  There&#8217;s a bracing quality about that.<\/p>\n<p>Ski is kind of hermaphroditic that way.  You can approach it as a cartoon (Aieee! Here comes the Yeti! Flee for your life!) or as a pure puzzle game. It works either way.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, maybe it&#8217;s just me, but one thing I think these old-school terminal games consistently do better than their modern competition is <em>humor<\/em>. This is probably the McCloud effect again.  I&#8217;ve laughed harder at, and retained longer, the wry turns of phrase from classic text adventures than any sight gag I&#8217;ve ever seen in a GUI game.<\/p>\n<p>So, enjoy. It&#8217;s an odd and perhaps half-forgotten corner of our culture, but no less valuable for that.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: I probably shouldn&#8217;t have described wumpus (1972) as &#8220;the oldest of them all&#8221;, because there were a few older games for teletypes like <cite>Hammurabi<\/cite>, aka  <cite>Hamurabi<\/cite> (with a single &#8216;m&#8217;) aka <cite>The Sumer game<\/cite> from 1968. But wumpus is the oldest one that seems to be live in the memory of the hacker culture; only SPACEWAR (1961) has a longer pedigree, and it&#8217;s a different (vector graphics) kind of thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, to a certain segment of the population I suppose I define myself as a relic of ancient times when I insist that one can write good and absorbing computer games that don&#8217;t have a GUI &#8211; that throw down old-school in a terminal emulator. Today I&#8217;m shipping a new release of the game greed&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7427\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">An apologia for terminal games<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,12,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-new-on-my-website","category-software","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7427"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7435,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7427\/revisions\/7435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}