This is Aaron A. Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games (2023, I love that this came out the same year as Monsters, Aliens and Holes in the Ground). As you might suspect from the title, it is an exhaustive look at text adventures and other similar sorts of interactive fiction. He casts a wide net which often expands my understanding of the games and their descendants. Why do I accept games like Dragon Pass and Dwarf Fortress as text adventures more readily than Hack or Trade Wars 2002 or even dnd on the old Plato computers? There are lots of reasons, perhaps, but the bottom line is that I am grateful for all their inclusions, because they challenge my preconceptions. For the most part, it’s a bracing tour through the annals of what I deem to be an underappreciated (text has always been unsexy when compared to visual art) yet vastly important facet of videogames.

My lone bone of contention is Reed’s appraisal of AI Dungeon. I played that when it first appeared, before I was really cognizant of LLM “a.i.,” I assumed the game was procedurally generated and was rather dull rather than revolutionary. None of the developments in the plot were terribly exciting or unexpected and despite playing several times, the action always seemed to curve back to the same loops.

That’s a quibble, though, for a book that is 600+ pages of meaty insight. It’s surprisingly well-illustrated, too, for a book about text. Lots of logos and advertisements and photos of floppy disks. If you’re a fan of text games and you can find a copy of this, you’ll get lost inside for weeks, guaranteed.

Oh, funny thing, maybe. I kinda roll my eyes when someone asks why I didn’t include a given game that is important to the questioner in MAHG. But I have to admit, one of the first things I did when my copy of this arrived was to look in the index for mentions of Anchorhead, the Lovecraftian horror text game that got me back into text games more broadly in the late ’90s. It’s not in there. Is that a petard I’ve just been hoisted by? Is it my own?