Dennis Jerz, professor at Seton Hill University presented a paper on the history of Adventure, which I believe is acknowledged as the first text-based computer adventure game.
I found many concrete suggestions in Jerz’s presentation for those of us looking to develop software to teach expert bodies of knowledge. Adventure was developed by a hobbyist spelunker as a way to introduce his daughters to the practice of caving. As such, the game scaffolds and models an expert’s ways of seeing and exploring a cave.
Jerz pointed out that because they are limited to text written by the caver who developed the game, players only “see” the environment the way an expert caver would, noting salient features like exits, dangerous situations, etc. He interpreted other elements of the game, such as the disappearance of corpses of snakes and other “enemies,” as representing elements of caving culture (take little and leave little behind), though these were more incidental to the demands of programming a simple and functional game at the time.
Modelling a domain of social knowlege in this way would be harder to do in a graphic game. Most of the RPGs I play have ways of denoting what’s important, such as pointer icons, flashing objects, etc; you might also do something like highlighting salient objects or regions of the screen in yellow, gradually dimming them. However, my guess is it’s more difficult to try to teach someone to develop an expert’s way of looking at the world when you present them with a more detailed and confusing visual image than it is with carefully written text. One way or another I find it an interesting question to consider whether either a graphic or a text-based game can ensure that players are aware that they are receiving real-world expert information without having a human being there to explain it to them.
Jerz also described simulated caving rescues — a practice which is a part of learning safety in the hobby — as being sort of games in themselves, and described a puzzle within the game that revolved around assembling a brass lamp designed like one used in caving. I thought this was sort of an interesting thing to consider: which parts of an expert domain are already significantly gamelike enough to be turned into a game or puzzle onscreen?
Jerz made text-based games sound like an excellent way to model expert knowledge. Sadly, I just don’t think text-based games are of interest to anyone but us old fogeys who played them as kids because there wasn’t much else to play back then. Maybe if they were presented as something other than a game — something more like a book — maybe then bookish kids might go for it… I don’t know. Maybe I’m also underestimating the potential of graphic games to accomplish the same things.
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