Somewhere around that time, when I was in either second or third grade, my parents got me the game "Return to Pirate’s Island," written by Scott Adams. This game is the reason I got addicted to playing on a computer. According to his Web site, located at http://www.msadams.com, he is the first person to put an "interactive fiction" adventure-style game on a personal computer. He did this in 1978, which coincidentally is the year I was born.

"Return to Pirate’s Island" is a text-based game that could also be considered a very lightweight role-playing game, where you play the game from the first-person point of view in the character’s shoes. I absolutely loved the interaction with the computer. I was just head-over-heels fascinated by the fact that I could type a word into the computer and watch the story line change based upon what I typed. I was determined to figure out one day how the computer knew what to do, how it worked, how it could read English, and so forth.

There was one slight problem with me playing the game. I wasn’t quite old enough to read completely on my own. I needed an adult to read at least one word per sentence in the game. So the adult would read the text—something like, "You are in a kitchen. Obvious items are matches and broken glass." And I would instruct the adult to instruct the computer to open the refrigerator. Of course, the adult would have to say, "There is no refrigerator in the kitchen." But I would be quick to point out the contrary to the adult, saying "Of course there’s a refrigerator in a kitchen." Annoyed, the adult would type, "open refrigerator," to which the computer would reply, "I don’t know what a refrigerator is." I was just absolutely fascinated that in the computer’s world a kitchen didn’t have a refrigerator. I was determined to figure out why. And for the poor adult (I use a generic description here, because people would alternate translating for me quite frequently), this game went on and on, night after night after night. Even at an early age, I was obsessed with problem solving.

The significance of this story is that it introduced me very early on to the ideas of deterministic algorithms and finite state machines, fundamental concepts for how computers work. To me, it wasn’t about winning the game, but rather a challenge to figure out the rules of the computer’s world, like why a kitchen didn’t have a refrigerator or why I had to wear Scott Adam’s "safety sneakers" when I was perfectly safe walking around barefoot in my front yard.

But don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say I understood college-level computer concepts back then. I also clearly remember reading the introduction and asking my mom what an "armchair pirate" was. Obviously, the author wrote it in the context of stealing software, but as a second-grader, I was quite perplexed why it was a requirement to know how to sail a boat and rob people in order to write a computer game.

It wasn’t until my junior year in college that I finally decided I would beat this game once and for all. Thanks to the Internet, I was able to download a version of "Return to Pirate’s Island," and after nearly 15 years, I finally got past those crocodiles, built the sailboat, and found the treasure.

Thanks, Scott Adams, for the game and for the safety sneakers!