Zork taught computers to talk back to rude players

A closer look

When given the ultimate freedom of a text-based universe, humanity's first instinct is to hurl expletives at it. In the late 1970s, the interactive fiction game Zork revolutionized parser design. While earlier games only understood two-word commands like 'GO NORTH,' the Infocom team built an advanced syntactic parser that could understand complex sentences. But they quickly realized they had a massive problem: frustrated players were typing out elaborate curse words and insults. Instead of crashing, the developers programmed the parser to recognize profanity and sass the player back, creating some of the earliest emergent dialogue systems simply to handle human toxicity in a text box.