Pumped for PAX Spotlight: Jason Scott, Get Lamp and Text Adventures

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Remember how on Monday I talked about the serious amounts of geek cred that Wil Wheaton has? Sure ya do. Now think about how there are no “gamer achievements” in a game like Donkey Kong. That doesn’t make getting a kill screen any less cool, does it? Well, if Wil Wheaton’s cred is like getting gamer achievements on a modern console, Jason Scott’s gamer cred is like getting a kill screen in Donkey Kong (no, not that Jason Scott). He’s old school.

And he made (another) movie about being old school, Get Lamp. Get Lamp is a documentary about the birth, rise and (presumably) fall of text-based adventure games. If you know me, you know I’m a sucker for documentaries, so when I heard there was a doc about text adventure games, I had to look into a little more. When I found out that it was being made by Jason Scott, it made me even more interested.

So, who’s Jason Scott and why should you care?

Jason Scott is the proto-geek. He was busy laying the foundations for geek culture while many of us probably weren’t even born. You see, Jason was born in 1970, this puts him nicely in the 80s as a teenager. A teenager with a computer. Jason at some point got into (as many of his contemporaries did) BBS culture, and in fact, would go on to make a documentary about this awesome phenomena called BBS Documentary, which, if you’re at all into such things will give you a pretty good idea of what things were like back in the day. Jason has also made it even easier to get into that BBS mindframe by creating and up keeping the internet’s secret time waster: textfiles.com. This page documents and archives every textfile Jason can get his hands on that were circulating BBS’s back in the day (the collection is insanely impressive, cataloguing 58,227 textfiles on even the most obscure topics).

This has already set him up as an authority on 80s internet culture, but he’s gone on to even further this credibility. How? How does being a speaker at DEF CON, Notacon and PhreakNIC grab you? Not enough? Fine. How about working for over a decade as the UNIX administrator for the gaming company Psygnosis?

Let’s just say that when it comes to the techy side of geekiness, Jason Scott knows what he’s talking about.

5 years ago he decided to turn his documentary making lens on the world of text base adventures, and has seemingly scoured the world to find the people who made, make and enjoyed these games. Judging from the kind of digging that was done for BBS Documentary and the fact that 5 years have gone into this film, the research and quality of contributors for Get Lamp will be top notch. I think anyone who’s ever played an old time text adventure has a secret (or not-so-secret) soft spot for them. There’s something completely captivating about partaking in what is more or less an interactive book. Of course, these adventures were often completely insane word puzzles, and the clues to figure out what to do next often border on impossible. But they all had their charm (the part that got me in the trailer was showing the hand drawn story ‘maps’, it completely blew my mind)

It might even surprise you to find out that people are still making these games at all, but apparently, they are. The Get Lamp website sums it up rather nicely: “Before there was the first person shooter, there was the second person thinker.” Nice.

The version being shown at PAX is going to be a shortened version of the full length film (and by shortened I mean an hour and half, the full length DVD is likely to run at over 2/1/2 hours) and is going to be followed up with a panel consisting of many of the contributors to the film. Basically, if you’re thinking of spending your Friday doing something a little more “low key” at PAX, I think that checking out Get Lamp might be a nice chill way to do so.

Text Adventure PAX Bonus: If you’re suddenly completely enamored with text adventures (or maybe always have been) there’s also a panel on Saturday afternoon regarding their importance “Storytelling in the World of Interactive Fiction” and on Sunday morning there’s a special treat for fans of the genre: Action Castle! Which is basically an interactive live text adventure where you control a human instead of a cursor! Sweet deal.