> get punishment
Pippin is an experimental game developer who has made games about everything from Eurovision to performance art to dystopian post-work futures. He’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal. He is also the associate director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Research Centre, which is part of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology.
In The Text Adventure the player experiences five classic tales of punishment (Sisyphus, Prometheus, Tantalus, the Danaids, and Zeno) in the form of, well, a text adventure. Unlike in previous editions in this series of games, the text adventure edition involves considerably more narrative detail and extra context thanks to the power of words. The player first must navigate an opening scene with Charon in order to cross the river Styx to their chosen punishment experience, then can explore the scene to their heart’s content before getting down to the core business of being punished. The game includes a significant amount of built-in help to make it playable for those who haven’t encountered parser-based interactive fiction before.
Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: The Text Adventure is the thirteenth edition in the Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment series begun in 2011 and comprising: Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment (2011), Art Edition Edition (2015), Limited Edition (2016), CPU Edition (2017), Inversion Edition (2019), UI Edition (2019), Teaches Typing (2019), Chess Edition (2019), The Twine (2019), the Bitsy Demake (2019), Five-in-One (2019), and Competition Edition (2019).
The Text Adventure is part of my ongoing idea of essentially spending 2019 making variations on the base Ancient Greek Punishment set of minigames as a way to remain “productive” while in transition to a life with a new baby. In fact, I’ve ended up making a few other games this year as well, but the punishment series has been my chief focus.
I’ve been interested in text adventures for a fairly long time, at least since playing Zork Zero as a kid. After making my only other interactive fiction game, Kicker back in 2012, the Ancient Greek Punishment series seemed like an excellent way to return to that world and to dust off Inform 7 (the tool used to create it) again. Writing interactive fiction is exceedingly difficult and the games tend to follow a basic concept of narrative plus puzzles that requires great feats design that I had no intention of really following through on, lacking the skills. Instead, I was most interested in using the basic form as a way to reinterpret the myths themselves, to explore what distinctions come up when you make these games in purely textual form (as with the Twine edition). The design and development process thus focused especially on the nature of the tool itself and how it represents a world (Inform 7 is interesting for having some quite specific categories of elements you deploy to represent a world, such as rooms, doors, containers, vehicles, etc.), and how more expansive textual descriptions can be used to color the mythical experiences in question.
Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: The Text Adventure is also another reference point in the detailed process documentation approach called MDMA. In this case, because the game is so simple, there’s less documentation that I usually produce. Nonetheless, you can read a little about the game’s development by reading its process documentation or by going through its commit history.
Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: The Text Adventure was created using Inform 7, a design system for interactive fiction.
Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: The Text Adventure is an open source game licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. You can obtain the source code from its code repository on GitHub.
Do text adventures have trailers? This one doesn’t.
Sisyphus
Bottom of the Hill
A grey, gritty beach meets the edge of the river. A low, bare hill rises gently upward.
You can see a worryingly large boulder here.
> push boulder
Prometheus
The eagle lands heavily beside you. You feel an urge to thrash.
> wait
Tantalus
You're so thirsty.
> drink water
Danaids
> examine basin
A wide basin intended for holding liquid. Let's say water.
> pour water into basin
Zeno
> run north
You run furiously and cover half the distance to the flag!