LIRPS, they're called. Playing one is LIRPing -- like LARPing but much more sedentary.
Back in the early home-computing days, there was actually a genre of games that didn't have any animation, or art, or music. The only interaction you did was typing words on the keyboard, and getting words back from the computer in response. It was interactive fiction at its most basic, where you played an active role in the story, but the story unfolded primarily in your imagination, as though you were reading a novel.
Planetfall was the first game of this style that I played. Like most of my software collection from the 1980's, I have no idea where I got it from. Perhaps I pirated it from a friend of school; perhaps I downloaded it as a disk image from some dial-up bulletin board. I can almost visualize the disk, a 5.25-inch square with a paper sticker on it, labeled "PLANETFALL" in sloppy block letters with a felt-tip pen. What I definitely remember, even 30 years later, are the scenes I imagined while playing the game.
To get a summary of the plot you can read about it on Wikipedia, but the plot doesn't really matter, because it's not why the game was influential to me. The lasting impact of Planetfall was to inspire me and my friends to recreate the text-based interactive fiction format that it used, using live humans instead of a computer. We called it a "Human Adventure Game" (kind of a stupid name in retrospect) and it went something like this:
Zach: "You are standing in room with a large bay window to the north, showing a sparkling lake in the distance. Most of the floor is taken up by an enormous persian rug. There is a desk on the western wall, and a door to the south, currently closed."
Me: "Look on desk."
Zach: "You see a few crumpled scraps of paper resting next to a typewriter. A bottle of 1920 LaGrange Firewater is next to the typewriter, with a cork jammed in it."
Me: "Throw bottle out window."
Zach: "With a hideous crash, the bottle explodes against the bay window and the fragments rain to the carpet. The bay window is made of thick plate glass however and is unharmed, except for a huge splotch of Firewater dribbling down the inside, reeking like car exhaust. You hear a surprised shout from the south."
Me: "Open door"
Zach: "The door opens easily. To the south you see..."
And so on. You get the idea.
Since playing a game took the form of a dialogue, we could play any time or place. We would often strike up a game while walking in the woods, or sitting in a restaurant gulping endless refills of soda. Other times we would play on computers, connected over the modem, or hot-seat style on a single computer, socializing or tinkering with electronics between turns. I managed to preserve some of those games and put them online.
It was an interesting cross between co-writing a story, where everyone shared in the creative process equally, and directing a play, where one person could impose their vision and the others worked within it. The idea is simple but we took it in a number of surreal directions. For example, we would often add each other as characters into the game:
Zach: "To the south you see Alex, blocking the doorway and looking alarmed. He is wearing an apron and holding a spatula. The smell of pancakes drifts into the room. Alex says, 'what the hell was that?'"
Me: "Tell Alex, 'I was just testing the window.'"
Zach: "Alex looks over your shoulder and sees the huge stain on the window. 'Well the next thing you can test is a mop and some water. And pick up all that glass.' He walks back over to a stovetop and flips a pancake in a frying pan."
Sometimes we would add ourselves into the game, and then make blithe commentary about how the game was going. In this game with Alex, I appear as myself, operating a refreshment stand. I also throw in our graphic arts teacher from high school, and for no reason at all I make Alex female without telling him. In this game, Scott has me playing the part of Charles Darwin, commanding an expedition of Warcraft peons to parts unknown. Looking back, it's telling how so many of these games started with a defiant escape of some kind - Darwin jumping out his own window, Alex smashing his way out of his room - fulfilling a desire to escape our own lives and feelings of conformity.
For a while I was naïve enough to think we had created a novel art form, even though we had really just re-invented Dungeons And Dragons - with the concept of a DM and players - under more relaxed rules. Still, it was a great creative outlet for us, and deepened our relationships at the same time it refined our senses of humor. The built-in emphasis on the comedy rule of "yes and" turned us into better collaborators, I think.
Eventually we all got too busy and preoccupied to play. The last recorded game I have is of Alex and I playing over the internet, set in a Harvey Mudd College women's dormitory since I had just gone on a date with a woman who lived there and the visit was fresh in my mind. It co-stars Jodie Foster and ends with a psychic battle. Of course.
I predict that in about ten years - or perhaps less - when VR becomes mainstream enough to really work - there will be a kind of revival (or perhaps re-re-revival) of this idea. Young people will don a pair of sunglasses with earphones, put on some fingerless gloves, and architect their own sets and theaters, with enough interchangeable parts and props to build an adventure on-the-fly for their friends to roam around in, and the concept of the DM will morph into the VM - the Virtual Master. Imagine the fun of it: Even if you're all spread across different cities working your day jobs, you and your friends can get together after work and participate in a murder mystery, locked together in a creepy victorian mansion with a thunderstorm outside, making it up as you go along while the VM whispers direction in your ear and queues up scripted events like the chandelier crashing onto the dinner table or the lights going out.
(Also, William Gibson will get another round of well-deserved applause for predicting this back in the 80's.)
-2016