Louking murr English dedges
The seventh annual Interactive Fiction Competition has concluded. I normally don't pay much attention to this contest; I like text adventures, but in my experience they're mostly more about puzzle-solving than storytelling, and even the ones that (in my experience) go furthest in the storytelling direction (specifically Infocom's classic Trinity, the only text adventure that's ever given me a moment of literary epiphany, when I understood in a flash of insight where the umbrella came from) leave me wishing I was playing a roleplaying game, where you have more freedom of action. I still have an inordinate fondness for the original text adventure, Colossal Cave; I can still recite chunks of it from memory. But mostly I don't play these games these days.
But this time Sarah B. pointed us to a specific entry in the contest. It's called "Gostak," and it's written by the brilliant Carl Muckenhoupt, whom I've been hearing about (and even sporadically chatting with in email) for coming up on 15 years, but still haven't met in person.
It caught my attention because Carl's notes on the game referred to a column of mine on the mysterious phrase "the gostak distims the doshes." I figured it couldn't hurt to check out the game.
It turns out to be well worth the trouble if you like this sort of thing. (And not at all if you hate this sort of thing; the game got the widest spread of scores of any game in this year's contest.) Carl has replaced most of the English words you might normally use in playing a text adventure with vaguely English-like nonsense words. For example, the jallon system explains:
This is a halpock. As in all halpocks, you doatch at it about what to do in a camling by louking murr English dedges, and the halpock louks back.
You can download all the files you need from the competition-entries downloads page; if you have a high-speed connection, grab the whole set by clicking the appropriate link for your computer among the "Comp01" files listed halfway down the page. Then grab the interpreters for your computer by clicking the appropriate link down below that. If you just want to try "Gostak," go to the "Gostak" page, and download that, and then get the Z-code interpreter (which comes on lots of platforms, including the "frobnitz" interpreter for the Palm). You can get jallon for the halpock by louking "jallon" when the halpock starts; it's a menu-driven jallon system, slightly confusing at first but gradually things begin to become clear.
I don't know that I'll play all the way through this—though I might give it a try later in Thanksgiving weekend. But I'm delighted by the concept.
"The halpock recognises many other dapes! Try anything. If the halpock louks a dape, maybe you can louk it back."
(Note: if you've never played a text adventure, you'll probably be completely at sea. Sorry.)