Lift Up Your Hearts!

Thirty years ago we entered the world of adventure gaming.  We had graduated by that point, so I believe it was my brother who first hooked us up to the University of Rochester's computer system, on which was installed ADVENT, the one, the true, the original computer adventure game—running on a DEC-10, I'm pretty sure, though my memory is misty on the details.  After ADVENT we moved on to the original Zork, which was just as much fun.  No devotee of today's high-action, graphic-heavy, semi-realistic games will ever understand the delight of those simple, text-based games.  (The links will take you to Wikipedia's description of the games, but I'd avoid them if you ever think you might play them yourself.  The ADVENT—Adventure—entry especially gives too much away.  And if you're wondering why the name was ADVENT rather than Adventure in those days...believe it or not, it's because "Adventure" has too many letters.

What was truly wonderful about the games was the social interaction.  One of my favorite memories is of the houseful of relatives who had come to share Thanksgiving with us.  We had a borrowed terminal and the old-fashioned type of modem—new technology then—into which one fitted the telephone handset after dialing in and hearing the carrier tone.  We took turns typing commands into the computer, and everyone participated in solving the puzzles, each person contributing his own special knowledge and way of thinking.  The idea of "cooperative games" leaves a bad taste in my mouth, being associated with the misguided self-esteem movement in public schools some years ago, but these, truly, were cooperative games, in which we all won and to which everyone had something to contribute.

The game went on well into the night—that is to say early morning—though we were not all of us fully conscious the whole time.  I, for one, had a month-old daughter to tend, and retreated upstairs for whatever sleep I could get, though I stumbled back downstairs with her every time she awoke to nurse.  My father, too, tended to fall asleep, though he chose to doze in the living room chair with the game going on around him.  This rarely hampered his puzzle-solving abilities.  During one game (this may have been during the Zork years), the crew was stuck on this riddle:  What's tall as a house, round as a cup, and all the king's horses can't draw it up?  Dad was asleep, and they didn't want to disturb him, but they'd grown desperate.  This was well before the days when one could google the answer to nearly everything.  So they shook him gently, and when he showed signs of consciousness asked him the riddle.  Immediately he responded with the correct answer, and went back to sleep.  In some ways life was more fun before Google. 

On the other hand, it was through Google that I discovered that the original (or close to it) ADVENT and Zork are available to play online!  (Along with many other classic games, some good, some decidedly not.)  I'm not exactly recommending them, as even a brief trip down memory lane sucked up more time than I can afford, at least for solitary play.  Worse, the "save/restore game" feature doesn't seem to work.  That may be the fault of my computer settings, but I'm not working to solve the problem because it leads me away from temptation.  Other than that, however, ADVENT is all I remember—I haven't tried Zork yet—and I highly recommend it as a party game for a group of three to eight people.  On the condition, that is, that they agree not to resort to the Internet for hints and puzzle answers.  The joy is in the process; rushing to the end only subverts and diminishes the fun.

One more thing, which I hesitatingly offer to those who have absolutely no time for computer games but welcome language study:  There's a German version of ADVENT.  And a Spanish one, too.