My nephew plays Zork

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Episode One: New Beginnings

Today was the day. I started up Zork through Steam. He was next to me as I read the opening screen to him. The last thing the first screen says is, "There is a small mailbox here." I read that to him and then asked him, "What do you want to do?"

His reply was, "I want to go hit baseballs."

This concludes Episode One.

[Da King]

STOP LEAVING US HANGING. HOW DID THE GAME RESPOND?!?

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I feel that is rather Zen of it.

[Da King]

I'm literally here LOLing. Well played.

[AArdvark]

Q: is there a way to have some sort of script file fed into Zork with all the exact inputs in order so the game is solved in say, five minutes? Sort of like a walkthrough but with a computer playing.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Yeah, a lot of interpreters that play Inform games (and these interpreters can also play Infocom games can do it) - only problem is that there are some random events like getting in a fight with a thief that a script could not handle.

However, I would think by now there is some way to interface an AI LLM with Zork and account for that, a "if the thief is around" section.

Do ya want us to see if we can figure something like that out??

[AArdvark]

It would be an interesting experiment to see if Flack's car can beat the game

[Da King]

It would be an interesting experiment to see if Flack's car can beat the game

... before he gets to the Casino!

[Roody_Yogurt]

Various interpreters like Frotz and Bocfel let you set the random seeds so random calls are predictable from game to game. Once the seed has been set, one could record a walkthrough that will work on any game where the seed has been set to the same value.