Bizork is a bizarre, Zork-inspired text adventure game that tests players' survival skills, then presents them with a difficult, high-stakes choice.
A Miniature Text Adventure
In 2023, I was fascinated with text adventure games, like Zork, which obviously inspired the name Bizork. The game is fairly simple, and full of easter eggs that encourage trying strange interactions, such as speaking to a pile of tree branches.
Text adventures, by nature, are super constrained. It was a ton of fun finding ways to describe the scene in a restricted interface—in the end, ASCII art ruled supreme. The player can "look" at any interactive object and see a handsome, text-based image.
Feel free to try Bizork here. The remainder of this entry is dedicated to ideas inspired by the project.
Text-Based Games, AI, and Ender's Game
I built this project around the time LLMs arrived in the public sphere. At the time, building a text adventure game felt like a return to the past. On one hand, these games encourage deep imagination thanks to the openness of text-based inputs and our capacity to visualize the written word. On the other hand, text adventures feel so dated—and not just graphically: our inputs are limited to that which has been explicitly programmed to work.
But with the advent of LLM-powered applications, suddenly terminal-based text adventures are relevant again. No longer are developers and players limited by explicitly-programmed commands and actions. To some extent, the game can imagine along with the player, leading to entirely unique experiences.
I am reminded of the book Ender's Game (1985), which features an AI-powered "Mind Game", a supposedly unbeatable training simulation designed to assess trainee soldiers' leadership abilities. In the book, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin nonetheless beats the game by doing something totally unusual, unpredictable, and programmatically unaccounted for. As a result, the AI generates a victory condition. Sounds awfully similar to prompt injection!
Any avid reader of the Ender's Saga knows that AI plays an increasingly large role through each story. In the future, I'd love to write more about these stories in light of the incredible rise in AI adoption since ChatGPT's release in 2022.
Tech: React, JSX, and the React Console Emulator
