I’ve always seen playing computer games as educational (in admittedly quite a variable way), and interactive fiction particularly so because of its (mostly) text format.
I’ve been thinking for a while that IF is great for picking up new words. This was especially the case when I was younger, but it’s still true today. Yeah I STILL don’t know all the words.
A lot of the time, as a Brit, it’s been picking up what Americans call everyday stuff. Despite the ubiquity of American culture in film, TV, literature, some of the objects that come up in text adventures just don’t get mentioned much in more visual formats.
For example, when playing Moondrop Isle this year, there’s a ‘tide pool’ on the beach. Now, I’ve never heard that term and the first time I read it I just skipped over it thinking… What is that, some kind of water feature on the beach? (Dumb, I know.) The second time I played I realised it’s a rock pool!(actually tide pool is probably a more logical and descriptive term).
Another one I had to look up last year was ‘patina’ which was new to me and a lovely term but I’m starting to think it’s maybe used quite a lot now and it just passed me by for a while. That was playing A Train to Piccadilly (I don’t think that’s referencing my local station Manchester Piccadilly, sadly ).
If I go back and think about some of the early adventures I played I can still pick out some words I learned when I was a kid:
Crevasse (playing Blizzard Pass)
Flashlight (playing Aftershock)
Spinney (playing Phoenix)
Port, starboard, fore and aft (playing Magnetic Moon)
Vista (playing Zork)
Equilibrium and gyroscope (playing Kaptain Kook)
Plimsoll line (playing Jinxter)
Picket line (playing I think Monty Python and quest for the Holy Grail)
And there’s US stuff like wrench (it took me ages to realise that a wrench is just a spanner and not some other tool )
It’s funny how I remember some of this stuff. But what about you? Do any words you learned while playing IF stick in your head?
A bunch of British words from Jigsaw. I’m sure I’d read them somewhere before, but needing to actually use them to play the game makes them stick differently.
I still remember “Stiletto” from the original “Zork”. I’d never heard that word before. There have been plenty of others since then, I’m sure, including a large vocabulary for literary criticism which I’ve learned reading messages on this board (just used the word “pastiche” in something I was writing the other day).
“Stiletto” was also new to me in that context, but I was already familiar with stiletto shoes (which I just learned are actually named after the dagger!)
I started learning English by myself to play Questprobe 1: The Hulk, and later on Gruds in Space. Then it was songs. But I already knew how to BITE LIP.
I learned many English words thanks to text-adventures. For example “river bed”, “rupees”, “rhinoceros horn”, “gold nugget”, but also many regular words, used in English. Plus “description”, “verb”, “noun” and much more. Such games are so educational and valuable.
stiletto is a loanword from Italian, and is a thin dagger, easily conceivable. That is, a tool of trade in the deadly environment of medioeval & Renaissance Italian politics, but I digress…
The thing I couldn’t stand about Danger Mouse was that it felt like half the running time of each short episode were the opening and ending credits.
When I was tennish, I made a brief attempt to compile some story-length VHS recordings of Danger Mouse sans credits, but it was too painful to remain vigilant about it – because it had the side-effect of forcing me to watch all the credits.
Scott Adam’s The Count? That’s where I learned DUMBWAITER. I spent several turns trying to talk to it, though I’m not sure what sort of response I was expecting!
From Scott Adams I also learned CHIGGERS (Adventureland) and CONTRAPOSITIVE (Ghost Town).
Haha. No, as @J_J_Guest was alluding, it was probably about a decade earlier than Curses, give or take.
I think I first met DUMBWAITER in Cranston Manor (1981). I didn’t play the The Count until the mid 1980s, but that game is actually from 1979. Both are reasons why I put a dumbwaiter in my game Leadlight.
Ah yes, chiggers! I kind of took them at face value as a kid, what with their bitey quality in the game. I didn’t look them up in a dictionary or online until the internet age.
I’m impressed that so many of you remember where you learned words from. I’ve learned a lot more words from fiction than from interactive fiction, but I rarely remember them as being connected to particular stories. Maybe because a lot of sci-fi and fantasy was big on showing off the author’s vocabulary, so it was common enough to find new words that it wasn’t as remarkable? Although you’re giving a lot of mundane but maybe archaic/historical terms? I read a lot of that kind of stuff too. Dunno.
I started playing text adventures when I was six years old, so I learned a lot of words from IF! 20+ years ago I made a list of the ones I could remember learning, and some of those memories are gone now, so I’m glad I wrote them down.
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For example “river bed”, “rupees”, “rhinoceros horn”, “gold nugget”, but also many regular words, used in English. Plus “description”, “verb”, “noun” and much more. Such games are so educational and valuable.