[Dailydave] You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike

[Dave Aitel]

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Geek culture has its own literature. Adventure, the text game, is one of 
these canons, as is Zork and all the Infocomm games [1]. For a lot of 
us, Adventure was the first game we ever played. It turns out that 
someone went and did a big documentary on them, and then gave a talk 
about it at Shmoocon. He found out that the Adventure game was written 
by a caver, and based on a real cave in Kentucky. And then he took a 
video camera and shot some footage down in the original cave, where the 
birdcage room is, near the twisty little passages, all alike.

During his talk, he shows you some of the stills of the cave, and as he 
goes through them, if you've played enough Adventure, your brain can 
reconstruct the geography. From just the experience of playing a text 
game, you feel like you know your way around the cave as he goes through 
the photos. It's uncanny. You've never been there, or even seen 
drawings, but your brain tells you that you recognize the places. Yes, 
here's the hall of the mountain king, here's the birdcage room, here's 
the stream you go down to find the cave where the lamp sits. Anyways, he 
has his site up at takelamp.com. It's worth a look-see. Sometimes the 
talks you go to in a conference that are not technical are the ones you 
remember.

- -dave
[1] http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/
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