What's been considered a superb model for good coding (in 1960's-style FORTRAN, no less!) for some thirty years? It's Will Crowther's Adventure, a game in the tradition of Dungeons & Dragons, but based on a real cave. His source code has recently been released online, and an article in Digital Humanities Quarterly, cited widely around the Internet (including Slashdot) analyzes it from many perspectives.

I guess it's appropriate that one of the early classics of programming is a game, because play is essential to invention (I'll put a plug for my short story Fair Players here in passing). The beauty of Crowther's work seems to be replicated at several levels:

  • The elegance of the game's design, which drew in players and kept them fixated on the task at hand
  • The careful breakdown of data, layering several tables on top of a simple form of state transition to take people between places and activities
  • An evocative writing style that brought the mixture of reality and fantasy to life for the player
So even Donald Knuth felt the game was worthy of commentary (in his WEB style), perhaps the highest compliment any programmer could get.

I'll end with a marginally related anecdote. As a high-school student in 1977, I heard from a friend about a game he played at MIT, where his father was a professor. At this time in computer evolution, printing out a game of Life on successive sheets of paper at the teletype machine (our school was a fairly advanced one, and offered students time on a time-sharing system) was a pretty impressive experience. As my friend described spaceships circling around a computer screen shooting at each other, always being careful not to be sucked into the gravitational field of a star, I thought he was making it all up. It was the stuff of science fiction. It was also the real game Space War, as I later discovered. Within a decade, the Amiga made it seem a lot less exotic.