Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 186)

Trigger Happy
188
And, needless to say, it hasn’t been achieved yet.
There are anecdotal reports of “bots”—little mobile
computer programs that roam the Internet
25
—fooling
people in chat rooms, but given the depressing level of
conversational aptitude in such places, that is hardly
surprising. But a computer that speaks your language,
like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, is still—so far—a
pipe dream.
In fact, videogames deliberately turned their back
on the most promising avenue for success in this field
in the late 1980s, for that is around the time when the
classic text-based “adventure” game was replaced by
versions with pictures alone and no typing required.
(This move was made for two largely commercial
reasons: firstly, videogame manufacturers reckoned
pretty moving pictures sold better than boring old
words; secondly, videogames were increasingly played
on consoles, such as the Nintendo Entertainment
System, which didn’t come with keyboards.) The
adventure game, remember, is a puzzle game whose
static problems are solved by rudimentary textual
“conversation.” The computer says something like,
“You are in a dark cavern. There is a door to the east,
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25 The term “bot” is also used for the speechless but artificially
“intelligent” enemies in games such as Quake III.