User:Thijshijsijsjss/Human Parser/About Parsing

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About Parsing, 1

The term 'text-adventure' breaks down into two parts: text, and adventure.

Adventure refers to an exciting experience, much like the quest to find a dragon's treasure and make it back alive, or the quest to buy groceries and make it back alive. [Nice opportunity for a quote not from game studies. Adventures are...] But aside from this definitional meaning, the 'adventure' in text-adventure reveals some history of the genre, referring to the 1976 game Adventure[1]. In this game, the player explores a cave system through basic instructions, like 'GO NORTH'. The game then narratres the results of these actions. Seen as a pioneer of the genre and a milestone in interactive fiction, literary critics Niesz and Holland note in a 1984 review:

In the development of interactive fiction, the original Adventure with its legion of imitators and successors is important because, for the first time, the game let the reader answer with words instead of numbers.

The 'text' in text-adventure also carries history of the genre. Not just the extent to which interaction with the computer was possible when the first text-adventure games came to be, and not just the natural link to literature and other fictions, text has proven to be a powerful, natural and honest way of interaction.

And if there were some technology which could enable you to talk straight to your imagination... well there is. It's called text. [...] And when you're typing, the output that you're typing is in words, same as the input. There's no shift. It's not that you're looking at a picture and typing in words, looking at a picture and moving the mouse around. It's the same environment, it's all words, it's all thoughts, it's all the imagination. (Richard Bartle in Get Lamp, 2010)

For the 'same environment' to exist, for a player to talk with semi-natural language to the game, part of program behind the game needs to interpret the inputted words: the parser. "The parser is that part of the program that accepts natural language input from the interactor and analyzes it." (Montfort, 2003) For example (I might change this to a more thematic example), a player might say: 

> ASK UNCLE OTTO ABOUT MOSCOW AND WATERLOO

To which the parser might produce the reply: 

[You can't use multiple objects with the verb "ask."][2]

So the parser takes a close look at an inputted sentence, tries to figure out what the human might mean, and hopes to respond in a way the human understands. The parser is that part of the experience that suggests an understanding between human and machine.

About Parsing, 2

So, putting text and adventure together, we see: text-adventure. "Such works are able to understand natural language input to some extent and, based on such input, to effect action in a systematic world that they simulate." (Montfort, 2003) To Nick Montfort, poet and professor of digital media, the simulated world seems to be very important. In Get Lamp (2010), he notes about text-adventures:

It's like virtual reality that exists in words.

If parsers are such a big part of these virtual realities, it begs the question of the role of parsing in non-virtual realities.

Of course, a virtual reality is still a reality, and any virtually real interaction is still a real interaction. So, the mechanisms for interacting are our very real, very human mechanisms. Just like the parser interprets the player's words, the player interprets the parser's words. Some might call this reading.

In an essay about illiteracy's susceptibility to oppression, Ismatu Gwendolyn describes reading as a powerfully real act, inciting powerfully real imagination (2024). Maybe parsing is much more about imagination than it is about reading. Parsing, analyzing in hope of understanding, as an exercise in imagination. As an exercise in empathy.

You might say: (example would change with the above ZIL example) 

> HOW IS YOUR UNCLE OTTO? DID HE NOT VISIT WATERLOO LAST MONTH?

To which I might produce the reply: 

> I'M APPRECIATIVE OF THIS QUESTION. UNCLE OTTO HAS NOT BEEN GOOD. YOU SEE, THERE WAS A SITUATION MUCH LIKE YOUR SISTER'S.

And you might say: 

> I UNDERSTAND. MY SISTER HAS RECOVERED. HOPEFULLY YOUR UNCLE OTTO WILL RECOVER, TOO.

To which I might produce the reply: 

> THAT IS JOYOUS NEWS, I AM GLAD. MAYBE HE WILL BE OKAY, INDEED.

Your world is different from my world, and your words don't mean the same as my mine. You cannot read my mind, and I cannot read yours. Parsing is that part of the human experience that bravely attempts understanding. It's the generosity of trying, of listening. It's the continuous asymmetric act of conversing, the performance we make together.

In Dimensions of Difference (2020), Dinah Murray notes that in conversation, there is no such thing as 'mind reading', and thus, we shouldn't consider it that way:

[Dialogue] is not much like reading, it is a lot more like dancing or sailing or improvising music together, and concerns reciprocal noticing, intuition, engagement and attunement.

Maybe it's the same for a text-adventure, maybe it's not much like reading. You're dancing with the parser, engaging in imagination, sailing through the fantastical. Hoping to understand. To understand the game you're playing, and maybe to understand yourself.

Notes

  1. ↑ Nowadays more commonly referred to by the retronym Colossal Cave Adventure. (Woods, 2011)
  2. ↑ About Zork This example is taken from Learning ZIL (1989), an instruction guide to the ZORK Implementation Language that calls parsers 'a notorious part of every IF program'. Inspired by Adventure, Zork was released in 1977 and was massively influential in bringing text-adventures to the emerging scene of home computers. This was done by way of a custom interpreter to the Zork Implementation Language, the Z-machine, that enabled ZIL games to be played on any machine by just writing Z-machine implementation for that machine (Blank, Galley, 1980). To this day, there is a community around writing for Z-machines, decompiling them and writing new interpreters. How curious it is that after almost 50 years, it's humans parsing the computer.

References


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