<!--
	Title: The Logical and the Dead
	Author: Monte Schulz
	Source: Softline, v3(2)
	Date: Jan-Feb 1984
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

<img class="float-left-half" src="/public/img/articles/softline-the-logical-and-the-dead/tea-party.jpg" alt="The cover image for the story - a table set up for a tea party">

The text adventure game is growing up. It has resisted the appearance
of hi-res graphics and sound-effect gaming and has moved instead
in the direction of legitimate computer fiction, offering true plots,
coherent story lines, and a parser that understands complete sentences.
Yet the heart of every adventure is still its puzzle structure — the
challenge and the reward of slugging it out with a program designed at
once to frustrate and enthrall. Adventure puzzles, done well and fairly,
are things of beauty: the problem of the Giant Room and the Troll
Bridge in *Adventure*, the Oddly-Angled Room and the Bank of Zork in
*The Wizard of Frobozz*, the Red Docking Port in *Starcross*, and the "Translucent"
maze in *Enchanter*. Each of these puzzles provides the adventurer
with everything needed to discover its secret without being so obscure
as to become a turn-off to the rest of the game. Just as a good puzzle can
create a genuine enthusiasm for the game, a bad one — either too easy,
or worse, absurdly difficult — can easily destroy one's interest in the
program.

One of the immediate criteria that might be considered in evaluating
both a game and the individual puzzles within the game is the idea that
the player, as a real-life character in the adventure, ought to have a fair
chance at solving the puzzles (and, in fact, the entire game) on the first
run-through without the use of a save/restore feature—that is to say, no
puzzle is fair that requires the player to go through an exhaustive
trial-and-error period before it will yield a solution, particularly when failure
means either becoming hopelessly mired in a no-win situation or coming
upon a quick and irrevocable death. This does not mean that either the
game or the puzzles within the game ought to be overly simple — only
that the game must have a certain integrity to it, allowing the player to
trust the logic and consistency of the puzzle structure.

The most widely played text adventures today are the three
underground fantasies that make up Infocom's *Zork* trilogy. Anyone paying
close attention to the descriptions of rooms and objects should be
able to tough out the puzzles in these games within a reasonable length
of time.

**((I (Eat What I) See) What I Eat.)** The *Zork* series presents a variety
of problems calling for logical, deductive reasoning as well as creative
thinking. Patience is also a virtue when playing *Zork*, because some
puzzles definitely require extensive thought. No game is perfect, however,
and even in a program as carefully written as *Zork*, there are a few
instances where the player can easily become trapped in a situation
where too much is asked of, and too little provided for, one encountering
the puzzle for the first time.

A good example of this is the "Alice" section of *Zork II*. In this case,
there are two problems requiring as much luck as logic, and to complicate
matters they are interconnected. The first situation is this: Entering
a small room from the west, you find yourself standing in front of a
table apparently set for afternoon tea. On the table are four cakes
singularly colored green, blue, red, and orange. On the green cake is
some lettering that reads simply, "Eat me." The other cakes also have
some lettering, but it is too small to be read with the naked eye. On the
east side of the room is a mouse hole, and to the northwest is a larger
exit. What to do? Ignore the cakes? Play with the cakes? Cut them? Eat
them? Eat a couple now and take the others along on the chance you
might think of a use for them somewhere later on (maybe the unicorn in
the garden will trade you the gold key for the blue cake)? One thing is
certain: Making the wrong decision is certain to affect what comes later,
yet there are no clues provided as to what action is correct.

The second half of this problem finds you standing in a strange room
at the side of a pool of water (salty tears, apparently, although their
origin is never revealed). There is a hazy something under the water at
the deep end of the pool, and a transparent bottle marked with a skull
and crossbones lies at your feet. You want to get whatever it is out of
the pool, and at the same time you are awfully curious to know what is
inside the bottle, even though you suspect that the contents might be
dangerous.

The obvious thing to do here would seem to be to try entering the
pool in order to salvage whatever it is that lies hidden on the bottom. Do
this, however, and you drown. Never mind that nowhere else in the
Great Underground Empire will this happen. (In most instances, a player
will simply be denied access to the water.) Yet here, for no apparent
reason and with no warning, you die. In this case, the solution requires
that you have something in your possession you were expected to have
picked up elsewhere. However, if you don't have what you need when
you enter the Pool Room, you can never get it.

The problem with the Tea Room/Pool Room section is not necessarily
its difficulty. The function and meaning of the four cakes and the solution
to the retrieval of the object in the pool of tears can be deciphered
without too much difficulty through judicious use of that old standby
method of problem solving: trial and error. And that is the problem.
What should be a cleverly written exercise in logic becomes merely a
guessing game whose chief component is the scratch disk for saving and
restoring.

In this case, the construction of the puzzle does no more than confuse
the player. In other instances (and less well-constructed adventures),
where perhaps trial and error is less effective, confusion can easily lead
to frustration and eventual weariness with the game. Certainly there
are players who will let nothing dampen their desire to solve the puzzles
and finish the game. But many other players either run out of patience
or simply lose heart before they complete a game — and thus potential
adventure game players are lost to the genre.

**The First One Won't Kill You.** Programming large numbers of
booby traps in an adventure game can also be a big mistake. The "haha,
you're dead!" kind of writing, setting the player up for dozens of
gratuitous deaths, seems unfair and easily becomes a tedious distraction.
*Planetfall* author Steve Meretzky has stated his dislike for this kind of
hazard in adventures. Besides *Deadline* and The *Witness*, his game is probably
the most playable on a first run-through for just that reason. In only
one place in *Planetfall* does the adventurer run the risk of a surprise
death, and even then, though it is completely unexpected, it can be
avoided quite easily, and most players will probably not even stumble
upon it.

In *Enchanter*, it is quite easy to die time after time in the temple area of
Krill's castle. But since there's something to be learned by these deaths,
and because the novice enchanter is returned quickly to the fray,
spellbook in hand, there is not the same feeling of frustration and anger
at being tricked into entering a hopeless situation as there can be in
several other adventures where bad luck translates into "game over." In
the case of Krill's Temple, though there is no real way to differentiate
between a safe room and a dangerous one, and no time to escape the
trap when it is sprung, constructing the game in such a way that the
deaths become a kind of necessity to solving the adventure completely
changes the meaning and nature of the danger.

Adventure puzzles, after all, ought not to inspire unnecessary feelings
of paranoia. Rather, with the exception of the kind of combat situations
one finds in *Adventure* and the first *Zork*, death in an adventure
game ought to be the result of a player's indiscretion and foolishness, not
simply of chancing upon a random hazard. Such pitfalls detract from the
cleverness of the game and, again, make the use of a scratch-save disk
almost as mandatory as the game disk itself.

Of course, even a logical, straightforward puzzle structure is no
guarantee that a player will be able to race through the game in record
time. Any adventure worth the cost of entry will frustrate players to the
point of irritation before allowing them to reach the end of the game.
But there is nothing wrong with that. Marc Blank himself has said that
it's preferable for games to be too difficult than too easy: at least with a
difficult game, in terms of value (dollar per playing hour) players get
their money's worth.

This last point is possibly the most crucial, because ultimately each
game will be judged not so much on its cleverness as on its pure entertainment
value. When a game is found to be engaging and fun to play
hour upon hour, players feel they've found a good value and may decide
to go back and purchase another, regardless of whether they solved the
first one. A well-conceived and well-produced game will clearly have a
better chance of achieving this final result than a poor one. With adventure
games, the puzzle structure will be the deciding factor.