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jazzfishJason 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.