GET LAMP

[jazzfish]

Jason Scott (dir.), GET LAMP

GET LAMP is a documentary about interactive fiction. You know, text adventures. "You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door" kind of things. Popular during the eighties and for a couple of years on either side. Jason Scott's made a documentary about them. It's pretty cool.

At least, I think it's pretty cool, but then I would. I'm a fan of IF from way back. The official Best Christmas Ever was, I think, 1987, when I was presented with a whopping /four/ Infocom grey boxes (Spellbreaker, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Suspect, and Suspended).

The documentary as such is mostly comprised of interviews with a whole bunch of people: not just the people who made the classic games, but also fans, contemporary game designers, academics who've made it their work to study games... it covers quite a broad spectrum. Some very nifty history, some interesting analysis, and in general a bunch of people who clearly love these games. There's a neat segment on IF's enduring popularity in the blind community, which (of course) makes /perfect/ sense. (Although one guy mentioned that he had some obvious conceptual objections to "light source" puzzles.)

Probably my favorite of the interviews was one with Richard Bartle ("the father of MUD"), in which he talks about how you can have an immersive environment: you can have graphics, and 3D graphics, and some sort of cocoon for tactile feedback, and maybe a neural jack so that you're directly experiencing and interacting with your virtual world... or you can just have text, which is already a pipeline straight to your brain. (Doubtless I'm mangling his argument.)

The main disc also includes a short feature on Bedquilt, the real-life cave that Adventure was based on, and a longer (45 minutes?) piece devoted to Infocom. Both were excellent, in quite different ways. The second disc has a bunch of snippets of interviews that didn't quite fit in with the documentary, but were too cool to just toss entirely. The clips of Warren Robinett talking about Atari Adventure and of a whole bunch of people discussing the near-future political SF game "A Mind Forever Voyaging" made the biggest impression on me, but they were all worth watching. Even the seven and a half minutes that prog aptly dubbed "the Chris Crawford rantathon."

Honestly, if you've any interest in the history of computer games from about 1975 through the late eighties, you could do a lot worse than picking this up. It is jam-packed full of history, trivia, and sheer fun, often all at once.

(The main feature is supposedly "interactive," so that you can choose one of several paths through the feature, but the interactivity didn't work on my low-end DVD player, so I had to content myself with the non-interactive version. Still quite well done.) (UPDATE: In comments, Jason Scott notes that I'm not the only one to have had this problem, and provides some solutions.)

Additional recommended reading: Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc.

Comments

[mikailborg.livejournal.com]

One of the applications I carried on my Newton was a Z-machine interpreter, and there's one on my iPhone as well. I still have some funny (to me, anyway) stories of trying to complete the occasionally insane Hitchhiker's Guide text game.

[jazzfish]

I /have/ Frotz for iPhone but I'm not doing anything with it at this point: I can't stand trying to type on the iKeyboard for any length of time.

Honestly, the ability to play thirty-year-old games may be the thing that convinces me to get an iPad sooner rather than later, since from all accounts I can hook my Neo up to it as a real keyboard...

One of the more amusing (or possibly sadistic) moments in GET LAMP was a professor who said "I give my [game design? interactive media?] class Hitchhiker's for the first week or two... and if they can't solve the babel fish puzzle, they won't get better than a C for that assignment."

[mikailborg.livejournal.com]

The iKeyboard is certainly best in small doses. I once wrote a complete short story on the Newton with the stylus (I had the last of the hardware and software releases, so handwriting finally worked well); I'm not sure I could manage that on the phone.

[(Anonymous)]

Jason Scott here. Thanks for the review.

There's technical support for the interactive part here: http://www.getlamp.com/techsupport

Hopefully that'll help.

[jazzfish]

Hey, thanks! It hadn't even occurred to me that the menu might still be working even if the selector wasn't visible. Excellent (And thanks for such a wonderful documentary, as well.)

[psilan.livejournal.com]

As someone who spent an unhealthy amount of time with Zork as a middle- and high-schooler, and who wrote his own text adventures briefly - this is relevant to my interests.

And why I should have a Netflix account. Someday...

[jazzfish]

I have no idea if it's Netflixable. I'd be a little surprised, since as far as I know it's only available direct from the, er, director.

I had no idea you'd written any IF! Neat.

[(Anonymous)]

Jason again. It will not be on Amazon, Netflix or iTunes for the forseeable future. Sorry about that.

[jazzfish]

Regrettable, but understandable. I'll just have to continue talking it up to get people to buy their own copies!

[rbandrews]

This is not actually on Netflix, so I bought it. Which is a funny story:

Last night Cassie and I went out to Target to buy bookcases, so we could unpack the rest of someone's massive book collection (okay, mine). We bought all the bookcases the Westheimer Target had, so we went to the Target on Fry to get two more, and they only had one. A little bummed, I decided to buy a lamp and a decorative cube, since I was spending less than I planned on.

The lady at the checkout first forgot to scan the bookcase, and I reminded her, because it was like $70. In the process of getting it scanned, she un-scanned the lamp, so we got a $40 lamp for free.

And then I get home, read this, and suddenly want to spend $40 ordering a DVD called... GET LAMP. God has spoken, I figured, and wants me to watch this documentary. So it's a little expensive, but it comes with a nifty coin totem, and I had just saved an equal amount of money. :)

[jazzfish]

That is quite possibly the most awesome thing I've read all day. (And the coin /is/ rather nifty, although I've yet to find a detotemizer to put it through.)

[rbandrews]

Thank you! :)