complexity

I recently picked up my battered copy of Peter Killworth’s How To Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron (1984) from my bookshelf. This was intended to allow the reader to write text adventure games of the style “GO NORTH”, “TAKE SWORD”, “THORIN SITS DOWN AND STARTS SINGING ABOUT GOLD” - a genre nowadays generally referred to nowadays as interactive fiction. But looking at it now reminded me of the challenges of writing these adventures then, and prompted me to explore how these have changed in the intervening decades (especially with increasingly sophisticated authoring tools) - and how these challenges relate to the concepts of accidental and essential complexity in system design.