Chinese Text Adventures

Text adventure games, also called Interactive Fiction, precede the current batch of visual and reflex-based games. It was invented in the mid 1970s when graphical computing power is not commonly available. It reached its zenith, in the eighties, the “Zork” trilogy and anthology probably sold over millions of copies.

Text adventure games are software gaming environment utilizing text and players interact in the environment by typing text commands. The software uses verb-noun parser to understand such commands, such as “go north”, “take weapon”, “read notice board”, and display the respond to such command as text to the user. In a typical game, a user will be required to explore the environment and solve various puzzles.

Currently the text adventure enthusiasts have coalesced as a niche online community where many freely available authoring tools and games are available. However most of these tools are targeted to Western languages; none specifically designed for East Asian languages and as such there are almost no Hanzi-based text adventure games, as far as the authors can discover.

Therefore we have developed a prototype using Hanzi-based adventure text gaming and authoring tool for learning Chinese, simply called Zhongwen Adventure Text (ZAT).

ZAT includes both an authoring system and a gaming mode. In the authoring mode, it can be used to create the virtual world environment used in the game. The description of each location in the world is created and typed in using the authoring interface. In addition the description of each objects in the world and the command it responds to are also defined in this mode. These descriptions and definitions are then saved.