Text Based Adventures

The first in a series of articles as we gear up for our first Fringe show, Headshots and Healing Potions!! Today, producer and co-playwright D.J. Sylvis talks about his gaming history …

I’ve been a gamer since the very earliest days. Not only some of my earliest days, or at least earliest teens, but the earliest days of gaming. I became a writer as much because of the games I played – and still play, and always play – as because of anything I read, or any classes that I took. I am a writer because I am a gamer.

Actually, those very first games that I played hardcore (as opposed to a quick round of Pong in someone’s living room), where I spent hours making maps and working every last little detail out – they were games that I had to read. And sometimes, that we had to type. I started out with a Commodore VIC-20 my uncle handed down, and very rarely would my mom let us buy games on disk – actually, at that point, on cassette – we had to borrow the Commodore Power Play magazine and type the code in ourselves, line by line in BASIC. 10, 20, 30 – you programmed in multiples of 10, leaving yourself room in between in case you had to add anything later on. Like when you print something out double-spaced so you can revise it.

And the best games at that point weren’t the little 8-bit racetracks or lunar landers – they were the text-based games, stories that you played your way through like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. But you had to come up with the choices and make them yourself, you couldn’t just flip to page 23 if you thought the Abominable Snowman was hiding behind a tree. You had to make maps, and count turns, and pick up things, then forget that you had them and only realize it after you’d died and started all over again. You had to jump into the story and make things happen.

I used to try to get my sister to type in the actual code anywhere I could. Not just because that part was the real pain in the ass – imagine having to reproduce the code for Arkham Asylum or New Vegas before you could play! – and not just because she was less likely to make mistakes. (Even now, let me tell you – without spellcheck, I’d be dead.) I didn’t want to know anything about the plot before I started. Not one hint, one choice – not even a word. I wanted it all to be fresh. I didn’t want to ruin it for myself by having to type in the ending.

In the hours when I wasn’t gaming, or looking over my sister’s shoulder annoying her during her turns, I was just starting to put down a few words of my own – the traditional angsty teenage poetry, and two-page short stories about monsters or death. I even tried writing a game back in those days, but I just didn’t have the patience to learn all the proper commands. That was when I drifted into playing Dungeons and Dragons – it was like Zork or Adventureland without all the messy code. I made maps and argued over choices and lost my way and my equipment and had to start over, and it was still almost completely a bit of text, a dose of imagination, and off we went. I even wrote my own modules and made my friends let me DM while they played through them!

You could trace my life from there as an unbroken path of creating fiction and playing computer games. (I never was much of a console gamer.) When I wasn’t creating my own virtual worlds on the page, I was getting sucked into someone else’s. I remember crying like a baby at the ending of Grim Fandango, and laughing my ass off at Monkey Island. I remember playing Bioshock in the dark and scaring myself silly trying to figure out what was around the next turn. I wanted to find a way to create something every bit as exciting.

Finally, I came around to writing plays, and in collaborating with actors and technicians, it really started to feel like I was accomplishing the same sort of thing. We’re playing a game together – you most of all – and I don’t mind knowing the ending. I’m excited knowing the ending, because I can’t wait to share that with you, to see if you’re as surprised and pleased with what we bring you as when I was twelve, hunkered down over a picnic table in the basement typing two-word commands on the keyboard of my VIC-20 …

Liked it? Take a second to support us on Patreon!