Text game
Encyclopedia
A text game or text-based game is a video game that uses text characters instead of bitmap
ped or vector graphics. Text-based games were common from 1970 to 1990, but are still used today.
s are still in use today, and people continue playing MUD
s (multi-user dungeon) and exploring interactive fiction
. Many beginning programmers still create these types of games to familiarize themselves with a programming language
, and contests even now are held on who can finish programming a roguelike
within a short time period, such as seven days.
While many of the earliest computer games (Adventure
, Zork
) relied on language parsing due to the command line
-driven, teletype
-terminal mainframe environments in which they were developed, the phrase "text-based" is taken to refer not to the user input (though generally keyboard-based) but rather to exclusive use of the fixed-width character display mode, an important distinction to maintain in light of curses based games such as Rogue
and their successors, which employed the characters in the text mode as map symbols rather than as parts of words. Despite enormous differences in display and user interface, the text adventure game
s and roguelike
s both make exclusive use of the text mode
, and hence are both to be considered text-based.
Though punctuation and the alphanumeric symbols can be considered standard in most text modes, many of them contain additional symbols and variant attributes (colours, blinking, lines / columns per screen, etc.) that differ between operating environments: the text mode of a Commodore 64
would be substantially different from that of an IBM PC
, though despite an absence of standardization in the text display (until implementation of later text mode terminal display standards such as VT100
and ANSI
), they would both be considered to be text modes. These later standards also contain numerous characters, largely blocks and lines, specifically intended to be used for fast, low-bandwidth display of crude block graphics in the text mode.
Some games would "redraw" undesired characters to take on the appearance of desired specialty characters (often to indicate the accents, diacritical markings or currencies of foreign countries) otherwise unavailable; though utilising a customized sub-set of it, these games would still be considered to be text based games.
is a multi-user
real-time
online
virtual world
. Most MUDs are represented entirely in text, but graphical MUDs are not unknown. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash
, interactive fiction
, and online chat
. Players can read or view depictions of rooms, objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions performed in the virtual world. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language
.
video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death
, and turn-based movement. Many early roguelikes featured ASCII
graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawl
s, with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Computer roguelikes usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment. The name of the genre comes from the 1980
game Rogue
.
Bitmap
In computer graphics, a bitmap or pixmap is a type of memory organization or image file format used to store digital images. The term bitmap comes from the computer programming terminology, meaning just a map of bits, a spatially mapped array of bits. Now, along with pixmap, it commonly refers to...
ped or vector graphics. Text-based games were common from 1970 to 1990, but are still used today.
Overview
Text games are typically easier to write and require less processing power than graphical games, and thus were more common from 1970 to 1990. However, terminal emulatorTerminal emulator
A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty for short, is a program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture....
s are still in use today, and people continue playing MUD
MUD
A MUD , pronounced , is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, with the term usually referring to text-based instances of these. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat...
s (multi-user dungeon) and exploring interactive fiction
Interactive fiction
Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video games. In common usage, the term refers to text...
. Many beginning programmers still create these types of games to familiarize themselves with a programming language
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
, and contests even now are held on who can finish programming a roguelike
Roguelike
The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many...
within a short time period, such as seven days.
While many of the earliest computer games (Adventure
Colossal Cave Adventure
Colossal Cave Adventure gave its name to the computer adventure game genre . It was originally designed by Will Crowther, a programmer and caving enthusiast who based the layout on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky...
, Zork
Zork
Zork was one of the first interactive fiction computer games and an early descendant of Colossal Cave Adventure. The first version of Zork was written in 1977–1979 on a DEC PDP-10 computer by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, and implemented in the MDL programming language...
) relied on language parsing due to the command line
Command-line interface
A command-line interface is a mechanism for interacting with a computer operating system or software by typing commands to perform specific tasks...
-driven, teletype
Teleprinter
A teleprinter is a electromechanical typewriter that can be used to communicate typed messages from point to point and point to multipoint over a variety of communication channels that range from a simple electrical connection, such as a pair of wires, to the use of radio and microwave as the...
-terminal mainframe environments in which they were developed, the phrase "text-based" is taken to refer not to the user input (though generally keyboard-based) but rather to exclusive use of the fixed-width character display mode, an important distinction to maintain in light of curses based games such as Rogue
Rogue (computer game)
Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game first developed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman around 1980. It was a favorite on college Unix systems in the early to mid-1980s, in part due to the procedural generation of game content. Rogue popularized dungeon crawling as a video game trope, leading...
and their successors, which employed the characters in the text mode as map symbols rather than as parts of words. Despite enormous differences in display and user interface, the text adventure game
Adventure game
An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenge. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media such as literature and film,...
s and roguelike
Roguelike
The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many...
s both make exclusive use of the text mode
Text mode
Text mode is a kind of computer display mode in which the content of the screen is internally represented in terms of characters rather than individual pixels. Typically, the screen consists of a uniform rectangular grid of character cells, each of which contains one of the characters of a...
, and hence are both to be considered text-based.
Though punctuation and the alphanumeric symbols can be considered standard in most text modes, many of them contain additional symbols and variant attributes (colours, blinking, lines / columns per screen, etc.) that differ between operating environments: the text mode of a Commodore 64
Commodore 64
The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...
would be substantially different from that of an IBM PC
IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
, though despite an absence of standardization in the text display (until implementation of later text mode terminal display standards such as VT100
VT100
The VT100 is a video terminal that was made by Digital Equipment Corporation . Its detailed attributes became the de facto standard for terminal emulators.-History:...
and ANSI
ANSI art
ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on BBSes. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS and Unix environments...
), they would both be considered to be text modes. These later standards also contain numerous characters, largely blocks and lines, specifically intended to be used for fast, low-bandwidth display of crude block graphics in the text mode.
Some games would "redraw" undesired characters to take on the appearance of desired specialty characters (often to indicate the accents, diacritical markings or currencies of foreign countries) otherwise unavailable; though utilising a customized sub-set of it, these games would still be considered to be text based games.
MUD
A MUD (originally Multi-User Dungeon, with later variants Multi-User Dimension and Multi-User Domain),is a multi-user
Multi-user
Multi-user is a term that defines an operating system or application software that allows concurrent access by multiple users of a computer. Time-sharing systems are multi-user systems. Most batch processing systems for mainframe computers may also be considered "multi-user", to avoid leaving the...
real-time
Real-time computer graphics
Real-time computer graphics is the subfield of computer graphics focused on producing and analyzing images in real time. The term is most often used in reference to interactive 3D computer graphics, typically using a GPU, with video games the most noticeable users...
online
ONLINE
ONLINE is a magazine for information systems first published in 1977. The publisher Online, Inc. was founded the year before. In May 2002, Information Today, Inc. acquired the assets of Online Inc....
virtual world
Virtual world
A virtual world is an online community that takes the form of a computer-based simulated environment through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects. The term has become largely synonymous with interactive 3D virtual environments, where the users take the form of...
. Most MUDs are represented entirely in text, but graphical MUDs are not unknown. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash
Hack and slash
Hack and slash or hack and slay, abbreviated H&S or HnS, refers to a type of gameplay that emphasizes combat. "Hack and slash" was originally used to describe an aspect of pen-and-paper role-playing games , carrying over from there to MUDs, MMORPGs, and video games in general...
, interactive fiction
Interactive fiction
Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video games. In common usage, the term refers to text...
, and online chat
Online chat
Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver, hence the delay for visual access to the sent message shall not hamper the flow of communications in any of the directions...
. Players can read or view depictions of rooms, objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions performed in the virtual world. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
.
Roguelike
The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playingRole-playing game (video games)
Role-playing video games are a video game genre with origins in pen-and-paper role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, using much of the same terminology, settings and game mechanics. The player in RPGs controls one character, or several adventuring party members, fulfilling one or many quests...
video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death
Permanent death
In role-playing video games , permanent death is a situation in which player characters die permanently and are removed from the game...
, and turn-based movement. Many early roguelikes featured ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawl
Dungeon crawl
A dungeon crawl is a type of scenario in fantasy role-playing games in which heroes navigate a labyrinthine environment, battling various monsters, and looting any treasure they may find...
s, with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Computer roguelikes usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment. The name of the genre comes from the 1980
1980 in video gaming
-Notable releases:* May 22, Namco releases Pac-Man, which is their biggest selling game of all time* December, Nintendo releases the Radar Scope arcade game...
game Rogue
Rogue (computer game)
Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game first developed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman around 1980. It was a favorite on college Unix systems in the early to mid-1980s, in part due to the procedural generation of game content. Rogue popularized dungeon crawling as a video game trope, leading...
.
See also
- List of text-based computer games
- BBS door gameBBS doorA door is a computer program, on a bulletin board system, that runs outside of the main bulletin board program. Sometimes called external programs, doors are the most common way to add games, utilities, and other extensions to BBSes. From the 1990s on, most BBS software had the capability to...
- Online text-based role-playing gameOnline text-based role-playing gameAn online text-based role playing game is a role-playing game played online using a solely text-based interface. Online text-based role playing games date to 1978, with the creation of MUD1, which began the MUD heritage that culminates in today's MMORPGs...
- ANSI artANSI artANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on BBSes. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS and Unix environments...
- ASCII artASCII artASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters...
- RoguelikeRoguelikeThe roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many...
- Text user interfaceText user interfaceTUI short for: Text User Interface or Textual User Interface , is a retronym that was coined sometime after the invention of graphical user interfaces, to distinguish them from text-based user interfaces...
External links
- http://www.lon2.co.uk
- http://www.textmodegames.com/
- Oss-Game