Anyone who played the old Adventure game on VM should be interested in
the email exchange below.
A project at the University of Maryland (Maryland Institute for
Technology in the Humanities -- MITH) is exploring preserving this sort
of virtual world for academic research.
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009.html is a
fascinating article about Adventure and how the virtual cave somewhat
mirrors a real cave in Kentucky.
The blog entry linked below describes a recent meeting about and reading
of Adventure.
The researchers were interested that Adventure ran on mainframes in the
1970s and liked my suggestion that someone might have source code and
data for this early version archived and perhaps still runnable.
Matthew Kirschenbaum's email address is below -- please respond
directly to him and copy me if you have any Adventure resources. Packrat
that I am, I was sure I still had my original maps of the cave,
including the two twisty-passages -- all different and all the same --
but couldn't find them. Maybe someone else does.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Adventure: The Movie
Date: Sat, 31 May 2008 10:47:38 -0400
From: Matt Kirschenbaum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Gabe Goldberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
CC: Neil Fraistat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hi Gabe,
Apologies for the belated reply. Besides the travel Neil mentioned,
I've been crushed by end of the semester business here.
Here is a paragraph describing the Preserving Virtual Worlds project.
Any assistance you could give us in reaching out to persons with
knowledge of ADVENTURE or other early virtual worlds/interactive
environments would be much appreciated. Best, Matt
Interactive media are highly complex and at high risk for loss as
technologies rapidly become obsolete. The Preserving Virtual Worlds
project will explore methods for preserving digital games and
interactive fiction. Major activities will include developing basic
standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a
series of archiving case studies for early video games, electronic
literature, and Second Life.
One of our first case studies will be ADVENTURE, utilizing the source
code for the original Will Crowther version of the game recently
recovered from backup tapes of Don Woods' account at Stanford
University. See
(http://blog.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2008/05/colossal_cave_adventure_lives.html?nav=rss_blog
)for a writeup of a recent "reading" of ADVENTURE at the University of
Maryland. We would be interested in hearing from anyone with either
memories or actual digital artifacts associated with the game. (You
may write to Matt Kirschenbaum, mgk at umd dot edu ).
Project partners are the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(lead), the University of Maryland, Stanford University, Rochester
Institute of Technology and Linden Lab. Second Life content
participants include Life to the Second Power, Democracy Island and
the International Spaceflight Museum. The Preserving Virtual Worlds
project is funded by the Preserving Creative America initiative under
the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program
(NDIIPP) administered by the Library of Congress.
On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 4:42 PM, Gabe Goldberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I enjoyed your Adventure party, wondered whether you'd seen this.
Send me a paragraph or two on what you're researching, what you'd like from
the VM community; I'll see whether folks still have the Adventure program,
maybe runnable, and whether we can arrange a live demo.
-----
GET LAMP: THE TEXT ADVENTURE DOCUMENTARY
http://www.getlamp.com/
or
http://snipurl.com/29tjs
--
Gabriel Goldberg, Computers and Publishing, Inc. (703) 204-0433
3401 Silver Maple Place, Falls Church, VA 22042 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Associate Professor of English
Associate Director,
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)
University of Maryland
301-405-8505 or 301-314-7111 (fax)
http://www.mith.umd.edu/
http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/
http://mechanisms-book.blogspot.com/
