One of Textfyre‘s marketing claims is going to be that interactive fiction teaches literacy: vocabulary, reading comprehension, that sort of thing. (It also teaches typing — I have long claimed that Infocom taught me how to touch-type, because I was too absorbed in the game to look down at the keyboard.)
The vocabulary claim is certainly true for me. I always suspected that Infocom had a hidden agenda to broaden our vocabularies, because there were always a few words in their games that sent me to the dictionary. When I wrote my first game, I tried to inject a little tribute to this tradition, with a peninsular location I called “Chersonese.” I was reminded of this recently as I thumbed through a thesaurus given to me as a gift.
In that spirit, I present an incomplete list of the words I learned from Infocom games:
EBCDIC (Zork I)
gnomon (Trinity)
menhir (Zork II)
oubliette (Spellbreaker)
reliquary (Beyond Zork)
reticule (Plundered Hearts)
skink (Trinity)
topiary (Zork II)
These are just the ones that turned up in a cursory search of my brain. Anybody else got others?
jrw
Heh, I’m with you on topiary and EBCDIC. But I learned menhir from Asterix books.
paulobrian
Yeah, “Words comic books taught me” could be the subject of another post. “Prehensile” springs to mind — always makes me think of Nightcrawler’s tail, thanks to the tics of Mr. Claremont.
isquiesque
I definitely learned to touch type playing Infocom. And learned a great deal of vocabulary to boot. Menhir and topiary, as well as phosphorescent, sceptre, brandishing… hard to say how many. Eight years old was probably a touch on the young side to be playing Zork, so I picked up a lot of words playing that on my C64.
fourcoffees
Playing English-language adventure (not necessarily text) games was, I’m sure, an important way to build vocabulary for me as an ESL speaker.
kansasjenny
I learned oubilette from The X-Files. I have learned many words from World of Warcraft, most of which are related to armor, such as pauldron.
kansasjenny
However, The X-Files did not teach me to type. 🙂
paulobrian
Hey, there’s potential for a whole series here! “Words TV taught me” (like “tontine” — thanks M*A*S*H!) “Words Dungeons & Dragons taught me” (halberd! greaves! thaumaturge!) Not to mention the oft-overlooked “Words Books taught me.”
soul_diaspora
Okay, now I really need to replay the Infocom games…I’m drawing a blank.
The games that are coming to mind are all non-Infocom, e.g. “plover” in Adventure and “ichor” in Gateway.
radiotelescope
Epicene! (Zork 2)
drl909
Bacteriophage. (Stationfall)
trrishp
Words Ann Rice taught me (over and over): prescient and preternatural.
trrish
paulobrian
Heh, preternatural. Yeah, she is huge on that one.