Text Adventure Games and Reading

You had to be around in the early days of text adventure games to really appreciate them.
Unlike today's graphic intensive games, your imagination was key. If you didn't read carefully, you usually ended up dead. There were no graphics, just rich textual description of where you were and what was happening. "Read or bleed" was the directive. Here's a sample of a screen from Zork, one of the early text adventure games, showing the first few actions:

Note: > is a computer prompt where the game user is expected to input text. Text typed by the user is in cap letters. Lower case letters show the computer's response.

Welcome to Zork. This version created December 8. West of House. You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

>GO NORTH
North of House. You are facing the north side of a white house. There is no door here, and all the windows are barred.
> EAST
Behind House You are behind the white house. In one corner of the house there is a small window which is slightly ajar.
> OPEN THE WINDOW
With great effort, you open the window far enough to allow entry.
> GO IN
Kitchen You are in the kitchen of the white house. A table seems to have been used recently for the preparation of food. A passage leads to the west, and a dark staircase can be seen leading upward. To the east is a small window which is open. On the table is an elongated brown sack, smelling of hot peppers. A bottle is sitting on the table. The glass bottle contains: A quantity of water.

How does this help teachers?

We'll add some more information about text adventure games, but it's obvious that one MUST read to be successful at these games. You've got reading practice and motivation at the same time.

For more great information on text adventure games and sources for them, try this site:

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/