I both played Adventure as a kid and went on a tour of Mammoth caves in grad school. Never knew there was a connection.
The caves are pretty amazing, although the appeal of real caving is totally lost on me.
There's a body of water in the caves fairly far down called Crystal Lake, and I remember the guide, whose name was Jason, making a joke about whether we really wanted to follow someone named Jason to a place called Crystal Lake.
We went to Mammoth Caves a couple years ago, and our guide was the grandson of one of those original guides! Some interesting things he told us included:
1. His grandfather (or maybe great-grandfather?) was born free in the UK working as a servant, but when his master moved to Nashville he became enslaved.
2. When Mammoth became part of the park system the black guides who had houses within the park limits were kicked out of their houses.
3. During the Great Depression there were government jobs doing stuff to improve the caves, and they were very unusual in that white and black workers were paid the same, but the difference was that the black workers had to do all the most dangerous work.
There's a NYTimes article about him!
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/travel/in-kentucky-a-family-at-the-center-of-the-earth.html
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
the appeal of real caving is totally lost on me.
When I was a kid -- 20 years old or so -- we did what you might call real caving several times. That is to say, we knew the locations of caves you weren't supposed to go into, and circumvented the barriers.
I had friends who were both risk-taking nuts and charismatic enough to cajole a skittish person like me to do stupid things. I remember watching a friend enter a passage that was narrow enough that he couldn't turn around, and filled with water high enough that he had to submerge his face to keep going forward. Of course, he had no idea what was going to be on the other side, or if there even was an other side.
He got through to a broader cavern, and was able to talk the rest of us into doing it.
I don't suppose I've thought about this in years. Now I'm sitting in a chair shivering at the thought of the insane risks I could be talked into. I remember visiting that cave -- we were hiking and had no intention of spelunking that day -- and watching water gushing from the entrance, apparently from a storm the prior night. The entire cave had to have been submerged for water to be forced out of the entrance that way.
8:
That sounds nightmarish. Just watching The Descent was enough to spook me (even before the monsters showed up).
I take it you didn't encounter any monsters.
I don't even like to go into crawl spaces.
Not for the squeamish. He's still down there. They sealed the cave off permanently.
Apparently everything is on the internet. There are other locations called "John Brown's Cave," but this is the one I'm talking about. I haven't found anything from inside the cave.
Being trapped in a cave has been a fear of mine since reading "Tom Sawyer."
I never played Zork. I think my first game of that kind was Hitchhiker's Guide.
There's a semi-professional indy text-adventure scene (they usually call it "interactive fiction") that continued after the big companies stopped making them, that are often really interesting. Some of my favorites are Counterfeit Monkey, Metamorpheses, and Violet.
re: 8
When I was about 14, we went into a cave once, a few miles from where I grew up, that was a little like that. We never went completely underwater, but we did make our way round a circular tunnel with fast flowing water that was maybe thigh deep, and the tunnel was low enough that you had to crouch right down to get around. We could easily have found a spot where the water suddenly got deeper or we'd have dropped into a hole. That said, we never reached a point where we didn't have at least 18-24 inches or so of clear air above the water surface.
The Scottish Cave and Mine Database doesn't list it, but it's near the Torwood Blue Pool, and I'd guess it's part of the same mine workings, or some earlier precursor, as there was definitely signs of human excavation.
https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/denny/bluepool/index.html
Mayan creation myths are set in caves. Rivers in the Yucatan lowlands are underground, run through limestone caves, farming means dealing with lifegiving water being underground there. Also these guys being underground, I guess ritual guides need to know about them: http://research.mayavase.com/kerrmaya_hires.php?vase=1490
Went here in the 90s, when it wasn't nearly as organized as it is now. My curiosity about caves is completely satisfied.
Like many others, caving gives me the fear, and I can't ever imagine going anywhere underground where there wasn't a good amount of clear space around me.
One of the last things we did before leaving Pittsburgh was to take a tour of Laurel Caverns; we only had time to do the upper section, which is still below the show cave. It was fun, but it didn't involve going into anything too tight and there were only a few scrambles. Caves easily get nightmarish. 11 was painful to read.
I've never been there. I drove by before.
I felt like the most implausible thing about Dark, above the time travel and the alternate worlds, was that every character was immediately willing, upon the least suggestion, to crawl through a network of caves and tunnels so narrow and low they couldn't sit up or turn around.
Good article. There's a longer piece somewhere, which I can't find right now, that went into even more detail about Pat's discovery. She was really one of the leading cavers of the era. (Her husband was a great climber and found a lot of the best Gunks routes.)
I remember when Adventure exploded onto the ARPANET. All work at each site that got it stopped for a couple of weeks, as mentioned in the OP article. Not knowing it came from there originally, I asked my D&D friends at BBN if they'd heard of it. They said, "Oh, that's Will's game. Played it last year. Probably still around here somewhere..." This was the original version, of course. Don Woods (at Stanford) added all sorts of additional rooms, magical stuff, and lots more prose. Will's descriptions were usually very terse.
5. Plugh!
Did I ever mention back in the pre-Internet days when I got three college friends together to type in the source code to Adventure on the Brown computer system so we could play it?* We split up the source listing so that no one person would know all the secrets. The bit about the narrow passage brought the memory back - in the game, there's a narrow passage that you can't carry the light through which you have to solve. In our first version we had entered a bug where you could just walk in carrying everything - "What's the problem here?"
*After I first got the source listing from a friend at MIT who printed it out for me.
It's odd, when I was playing Adventure in college around 1980 I never thought about how new it was. But it was. Fir me it was just there, on the computing cluster. Reading this and other pieces over the decades has helped me be a bit skeptical when some people say that the old people can't understand the internet, modern applications, etc. The internet was invented by people in that very age group such as Crowther. Heck it was conceived by people (such as Davies, Taylor, and Licklider or even Bush and Leinster) who were even older. Huh, I see that Licklider was also a founder of Infocom.
That's before me. I can remember playing EAMON (sp?) games, which were interactive fiction of some kind. You'd send them like $2 and they'd send you a catalog of various games that were either free (except you had to mail them a blank disk plus return postage) or like $5.
28. Crowther was about 40 when he wrote Adventure. Licklider was about 40 when he envisioned what became the Internet, and 50-something when he helped make it happen.
I am really enjoying comments 26 and 27, and others who intersected this game at the time.
31. True. What I'm thinking of more is the view that unless you're a member of a digital native generation the whole thing will be soo unfamiliar and unfathomable. But Boomers, Silents, Greatest, etc. weren't inherently clueless or unable to learn how to function in the digital world. It's just that they (and I am one of them) are now old or very old. When Xers, Millenials, and Zoomers get old they'll have similar issues.
I already know what the issue is going to be. Twenty-somethings and their R Stat making fun of SAS.
That's the kind of common problem everyone can relate to.
This was making the rounds a few weeks ago https://twitter.com/J_Motoki/status/1286442685004484608
Broad Band, the book the link is excerpted from, is really good.
re: 33
But it's about exposure and familiarity, isn't it? The number of boomers and silent generation people involved in early computing and the early internet was tiny. There's nothing intrinsically special about any generation that makes them more or less likely to "get" a particular piece of technology. However, on average, the average person in their late 60s or early 70s now, has had much less exposure to certain kinds of technology (as a function of their overall life experience) than the average 35 or 40 year old.
I suspect that the average Xer or millennial will not suddenly stop getting a load of tech when they get old, because that's just part of the sea in which they've swum their entire life. That is, unless some radically new form of media or technology arises--which is entirely possible, of course--I suspect the average person who is 40 now will still be pretty technologically literate in 20 or 30 years time.
38:Maybe. I know 30-somethings who didn't get used to 3D game spaces when they were young and so find them unbearable to navigate in, although 2D games are fine. I suspect something similar might happen with VR. In these cases the technological interface issue isn't conceptual, it's sensory, and that does become more difficult with age. (It'll be really annoying when they release the first perfect-pitch-based interface.)
re: 39
Yeah, I guess that's right.
How would a perfect-pitch-based interface work? Curious? There's so few people who have perfect pitch.
I was at a thing when they showed us VR specs. It was a roller coaster simulation. I thought it was fine. The woman who went after me insisted that she would rather stand. The fell over pretty quickly.
Herman Cain is so versed in technology that he's still tweeting after death.
1: Spoilers!
I was on the first caving group put together by a fairly popular Budapest youth hostel. Our cave also had a Birth Canal; I guess it's a common name. There was another area that we dubbed the Sandwich of Death. I'm guessing that the real spelunkers didn't think it was that big a deal, but I went back to the hostel years later, and the name had become part of their sales pitch for cave tours.
I tried a VR skiing game and ended up lunging around the room trying to keep my balance. Same results on a second attempt. I couldn't reconcile seeing myself slipping on a slope with the feeling of standing on a level floor. I was literally forced to take a knee.
40: I could easily imagine a rhythm (err, pitch) game based on that: easy mode, play the same note as what's played. Hard mode, play the harmony. Extra hard mode: serialism. As an interface, I dunno, specific pitches could imply things the way colors do. B flat is an error, D is a success, F gives some warning info with the details in the overtones. Chromaticism for the win, although it'd suck if you had synesthesia and your color mapping was different from that of the interface.
Since it's somewhat culturally determined--people whose first language is tonal are significantly more likely to have perfect pitch, it's 4x more prevalent in China than the US among childhood music learners--I could maybe see it being A Thing in some future culture. Not today, though.
re: 46
Those exist, basically. There's ear-training games for musicians that feature those sorts of games. You get a note, and have to play the interval. Or you get a note, then a delay, and then another note, and you have to identify the pitch or the harmony, etc. For example, the "Functional Ear Trainer" app.
Those don't need perfect pitch, though. Good relative pitch is fine.
I have good relative pitch. Perfect pitch is a mystery to me though.
I've always wanted to do a biofeedback video game. Surely there must be home versions available by now; it hasn't occurred to me to check. I suppose they might require extra equipment.
I have relative pitch for sheet music.
I've used those, but I think you could come up with sufficiently awful 12-tone stuff that you'd need perfect pitch. (It would be a very different culture where anyone would want to use this, mind you.) And if you were using it as an interface and the notes come rarely enough, I assume you'd lose the context that makes relative pitch work. Or maybe not? Has anyone ever done any research into that, like if you hear a C at time 0 and a G at time t, how large can t be and the G still be heard as a dominant? How is that a function of musical ability, environmental distractions, etc.?
re: 52
That'd be interesting. I've seen some people who have perfect pitch talking about it, and it does seem like it's an entirely different thing from the kind of excellent relative pitch that many musicians have.
I know, for example, that my own relative pitch isn't that great. I can tell, for example, when a guitar is even microscopically out of tune--drives me crazy with youtube guitarists, many of whom are emphatically not in tune--but my ability to play back melodies by ear, or to identify intervals over a span of time isn't that great. I've played music with friends who are vastly better than me. I expect the difference between t 0 and t 1 for me is quite short.
I have excellent relative pitch, I think, or whatever allows one to pick out songs on the piano after hearing them, but my music theory is weak in that I don't have "this interval" mapped to a fifth or third or what have you. I suspect if I had more of a singing background I'd be better at hearing fifths instead of notes that I can recognize as fifths once I've played them in the piano.
The guy I know who has perfect pitch has said it's weirdly different, but still a function of his musicianship. It really only works for him within the range of his instrument, the violin.
I'm the opposite of you, I'm pretty good at figuring out melodies but I'm sloppy at tuning within a half step. It took me embarrassingly long to even hear beat frequencies. Of the two, I think I'd rather have it your way for being able to actually produce music.
D&D friends at BBN
My dad's whole career was at BBN (in LA). If you know BBNers, I'm sure you know people in common.
I remember the office well, including the refrigerated room that had walls of computers and the anechoic chamber where we could scream as loud as we wanted.
26, 27: I thought I recalled discussing early Adventure-playing before. And yes, here it is.
DaveLMA responding to bob and in turn responded to by Dave W. who in turn is responded to by me..
The trigger was much more interesting this time around.
I did continue to use "throw bird at snake" as a general response to seemingly arbitrary and/or counterintuitive actions you had to take to do various things on computers and networks.
56. Cool but confusing. My friends were at BBN (Bolt, Beranek & Newman: a nerd hive) in Cambridge (it is now part of Raytheon). There's another BBN in Cambridge (Buckingham, Brown & Nichols: a tony prep school). I didn't know there was a BBN in LA. Maybe it's not the same BBN I knew? (All TLAs are overloaded.) I know ISI (Information Sciences Institute: another nerd hive) is in Marina del Rey.
58. I don't think "throw bird at snake" would work in Adventure; it was purely verb-noun. It would have worked in Zork and other later games.
Maybe you just opened the cage. Not sure now. There were a number of "hard=-coded" commands that were not just verb-noun IIRC.
the anechoic chamber where we could scream as loud as we wanted.
I so need one of these where I work.
Relatedly, my dog does NOT like it when I get frustrated while working from home. He is also not a fan of zoom meetings.
My cat, otoh, likes my ever-present pre-beard.