When I was a child I had a Commodore VIC-20. It wasn’t a very powerful computer, but it was something. My phone can do more than this thing can, but that has more to say about technology today. I played very simple games on it because the computing power of it was so low.

There were text-only adventure games that I enjoyed. They went under the name “Scott Adams Adventure Games”. They were like the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books but you didn’t have to keep up with which page you were on.

One of my favorites was my first. It was called “Adventureland.” I’d played it for a few months and found only three of the treasures. I knew that there were ten more, and I’d been all over that world trying to figure out what I had missed. Because it was text only, I couldn’t go on any physical clues. It isn’t like today, where I can play a game with my husband and one of us will notice a glint or a shimmer on the side of the screen and know there is something there we need to pay attention to.

We had invited over a neighbor’s daughter for the evening. She was much older than I was, an adult. I’m not sure why I was allowed to put on my adventure game while she was there. It seems kind of rude to have on a game while visitors are present. It was in the living room, hooked up to the television. This was the monitor. As I said, it was a simple computer. The game took up so much computing power the game itself had to supply more RAM to make it work.

Perhaps I wanted to show it off. Perhaps we had run out of ways to entertain her but the evening was not over. I know that she wasn’t expected to play bridge with my parents, possibly because that requires four people and I didn’t know how to play.

I put in the game and explained how it worked. It is a little hard to keep up with where you are in the game, so I had written up a map. N, W, U, D – easy. I had in all the directions of how to get from “room” to “room” with a tiny description of what was in each area so I could re-orient myself if I put in the wrong directions. I showed her how the interface worked, with its simple commands.

And then she noticed the tree. There was a tree that was very prominent in one “room” of the game, and there had been a treasure in it. You had to climb the tree to get it. I’d quickly ignored the tree as a future source of other goodies. Generally you only get one thing in one area. But there was more to be found there – lots more.

Part of the game, like all adventure games, was that you picked up everything that wasn’t nailed down. In this game you could have an inventory of about six things at a time. One of the items that I had was an ax. I had no idea what I needed it for, but I had it, because that is what you do with adventure games.

Perhaps that is a little twisted about adventure games. They teach you to go into every room possible and to pick up everything you can. So they teach you breaking and entering and theft. They also teach you that if you fail, you can just hit the reset button and try it all over again. These lessons aren’t really healthy lessons to be imprinting on a young mind. But I digess.

Our visitor asked me to chop the tree down with the ax. I thought that was the silliest thing ever. That won’t do anything. But to humor her, I did. I put in the command in the way the game needed it – probably “Take AX. Use AX on TREE.” It had very finicky syntax needs. Half the game was figuring out how to talk to it.

The tree fell down. Then we “looked” at the tree again, and there was a rotten stump – the tree had been hollow. And then we went down into the tree – and the rest of the world opened up. There was a whole complex of tunnels and passages under there, filled with more puzzles to solve and treasure to find. That was what I’d been looking for all along and I just didn’t know it. I had the tool to do it, I just didn’t use it because I dismissed it.

It was because of a stranger’s “Why not?” that made it possible for me to solve the rest of the game. It took a few more weeks to solve it because there was so much to it and I had to barter time to use the TV to play my game. If I was playing my game, nobody else could watch TV.

Isn’t that the way it always is? We get set in our ways, thinking that our way is the only right way, and yet we know we are missing something. Then a stranger comes along and suggests something so off the wall that we are sure it has to be wrong. We get stuck up in our pride and we can’t move forward.

I just knew her idea had to be fruitless because she had never played any adventure game. I was showing it to her. It was my game. She was just a passenger, I was the driver. Who was she to tell me how to play this game and where to go? But she was totally right. Thank goodness I got over my pride and tried her suggestion. If it weren’t for her I would have probably just decided the game was too hard and given up.