Colossal Cave Archaeology
Epigraphy, FORTRAN Code-Artifacts, and the Ur-Game
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4587879 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Andrew Reinhard (0000-0001-7987-8227, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 84 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 86-92 |
| Publication date | 2021-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Near Eastern Archaeology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1094-2076 • E-ISSN: 1557-5594 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/713375 |
| OpenAlex | W3135244961 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther 1975) is the Gilgamesh of video games, communicating the very first-known epic of interactive digital software through lines of an ancient language—FORTRAN IV—inscribed upon paper punch cards that, when assembled, recount a questing hero’s journey into the underworld and back. The game’s popularity and audience grew until it became a cultural touchstone and foundational text for many of the games that followed. The 1975 code has become a text-artifact, spinning off dozens of iterations, all of which recall the original. In 2021, can this software code be studied through the lens of epigraphy? Can digital humanities tools be used to trace the evolution of the game’s underlying text through stylometry and text analysis? This article proposes that both questions can be answered in the affirmative, spawning an epigraphy of twentieth- and twenty-first-century digital media
Adventure · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Epigraphy · HERO · Inscribed figure · Linguistics · Literature · Programming language · World Wide Web · Classics · Computer Science · Digital Games and Media · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Artificial Intelligence
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |