Trigger Happy
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
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