Trigger Happy
189
but it is locked. An orc appears, snarling hungrily.” The
player would then type in unlock door. go east, thus
getting out of the way of the monster and calling up the
computer’s stored description of the next environment.
The input language available to the adventuregame
player began as a very rudimentary set of verbs:
ADVENT’s commands involved little more than
directions, compass points, attacking, picking up and
dropping things. Yet by the full bloom of the
microprocessor revolution of the 1980s, the parsing
engines of adventure games had reached a higher level
of sophistication, able to respond accurately to
prepositional and pronoun constructions, and inviting
simple speech exchanges with NPCs. Players of the ZX
Spectrum version of The Hobbit might remember
frustratedly trying to use a wizard’s muscle with the
command: tell gandalf “break door.” At such times, of
course, the bearded one was singularly unhelpful.
Richard Darling specifically remembers one
program, Eliza, which was the fruit of early attempts
to pass the Turing Test. It was originally written in the
1970s but cropped up on several home
microcomputers in the 1980s: several versions of it are
still available on the Internet. It played the part of a
