Get Lamp

Get Lamp is a documentary by independent filmmaker Jason Scott stitches together some eighty interviews with people from the world of text adventures and interactive fiction. I had encountered text adventure games in the 1980s, but didn’t find them as interesting. However interactive fiction is now on my radar screen since reading Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages. That led me to playing A Dark Room, and I was pleasantly surprised at how immersive the experience I had with no fancy graphics.

 

Get Lamp begins with the game that started it all – Adventure. Created by Will Crowther and expanded by Don Woods, it was followed-up by a bunch of MIT folks with the more well-known Zork and its descendants. While Crowther declined to be interviewed, it was interesting to hear Woods and others discuss those early exciting times in the 1970s that eventually led to the founding of Infocom – a computer game company specializing in text adventures that was very popular in the 1980s. But it wouldn’t last. Leaps and bounds in computer graphics (and memory) meant the demise of text-only games.

 

The interactive fiction community today is small but still active. When asked whether they thought if a commercial comeback was possible, most of them demurred. Some folks remarked that as a hobby or side-gig that you just loved doing personally, it was fine, but you couldn’t leave your day job if you wanted to pay the bills. An annual competition still draws interesting and creative entries, but these have become shorter and with an artistic bent – rather than the long sprawling adventures of old. Mazes, long a staple of such adventures, is now a bugaboo. As one interviewee remarked, the first few are fascinating but after a while it gets old and repetitive – especially since the main reason to include them was to “lengthen playing time” so consumers felt they were “getting their money’s worth”.

 

The wide range of interviewees and Scott’s ability to ask them questions that elicited interesting responses gave me plenty of food for thought. Blind folks talked about how playing the game increased their feel of what it might be like to be sighted. One person made an analogy to what it might feel like to wield magic (in your inner being, not like a limited LARP). Those of us sighted folks who rely on vision for much of our experience and interpretation of the world around us may find it harder to “see” such experiences in a different light, so to speak. A non-blind interviewee commented on how being solely in text mode – reading words and typing words in response – was more immersive than switching between graphics and text. Until we get to the level of Ready Player One, there might be something to be said about immersion without mode-switching. It made me think about my classroom and how students take notes and interact with the material, some on tablets and others with pencil and paper.

 

Old-school gamers talked about the joy of “banging your head against the wall” trying to solve a puzzle and then the elation of coming up with the answer. There is always an answer, and in the best games it’s creative and clever – and you feel creative and clever coming up with it as long as you don’t short-circuit the process by finding it on the internet (today). But the same folks didn’t think most of today’s young gamers had the patience or desire to crunch through such experiences, given the wealth of other possibilities they could spend time (and money) on. I suppose old-school puzzle solving is a little like my experience with research. Try lots of things that don’t work before you eventually hit on a solution – and it’s a great feeling when you do.

 

Listening to the interviewees talk about their personal attraction to interactive fiction made me wonder how I could get my students to find chemistry so fascinating they’d want to immerse themselves in it. I chose to be a chemistry major because I was intrigued by its puzzles and its blend of visual data and mathematical modeling: infinite possibilities with just a few idiosyncratic building blocks! I feel that my students today are much more instrumental and practical about their choices. They’re also much more aware about issues such as social impact and sustainability, things I did not envision and played little role in my choice of major or career. Most students in my class likely see chemistry class as something they have to endure towards some other future goal. The present goal seems to be to get an ‘A’ or in some cases just pass the class. I’m not if sure my own enthusiasm and love for the subject makes much of an impact.

 

Watching a bunch of talking heads in Get Lamp sounds like it might be boring – and for someone who isn’t interested would certainly think so – but I found my mind abuzz. The documentary is fifteen years old now. With the advances in AI Large Language Models, is large-scale immersive interactive fiction around the corner? We’ve trained AI to mimic famous dead historical figures as conversational partners. Could an interactive fictional world of magic so that we muggles could imagine what it would be like? And the key is to use text, not graphics, to fire up the imagination – that could open the door to an immersion experience more powerful than fancy graphics. As one interviewee remarked, the dragon imagined in your mind is so much more real than the one you see through a filter that has decided what a dragon should look like. Could I do the same with conveying chemistry? Could imagination help students see the magic of the molecular level better than pretty pictures on a slide or in an animated movie? Could words evoke that experience? The mind’s eye is a powerful thing and perhaps the conduit to deep and meaningful learning. Now that’s an exciting thing to imagine!