"Adventure games like Zork and its many imitators invited players to explore a virtual world, often a Tolkien-esque cave, that existed only as words. "You enter a dark room. A Goblin pulls a rusty knife from its belt and prepares to attack!" was a typical moment in such games. Players, usually armed with imagined medieval weapons, might respond "Hit Goblin" in the expectation that phrase would see them draw a sword to smite the monster."
"But the game might respond to "Hit Goblin" by informing players "You punch the Goblin." The Goblin would dodge the punch and stab the player with the rusty knife. Game over... until the player tried "Hit Goblin with sword" or "Stab Goblin" or whatever other syntax the game required, assuming they didn't just give up out of frustration at having to guess the correct verb/noun combination."
"I'm less tolerant of AI making me learn its language. For example, I recently prompted Microsoft's Copilot chatbot to scour data available online and convert some elements of it into a downloadable spreadsheet. The bot accepted that request and produced a Python script that it claimed will write a spreadsheet. In other AI experiments, I have found that the same prompt produces different results on different days."
Microsoft opened source the text-adventure game Zork, prompting reflection on the genre's reliance on precise player commands. Text-adventure games presented worlds entirely in words and required exact verb-noun syntax, causing frequent failures when players guessed the wrong phrasing. Contemporary AI chatbots demand similarly specific prompts and produce inconsistent or unexpected results. Microsoft's Copilot generated a Python script to create a spreadsheet but can return different outputs for the same prompt on different days. A proofreading prompt yields varied formats across uses. Multiple Copilot variants across Office and other platforms add further inconsistency and increase user frustration.
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