In Pursuit of the Typing Angel

The record I hold is 96 wpm. That's words per minute for the uninitiated. Now that is a score. If you're writing something up and you're on a roll, you can churn out 15 pages in 30 minutes with that bad boy. I should know. I did it once. :breathes on knuckles: :rubs knuckles on shirt:

In elementary school, they attempted to teach us typing skills. Well, they attempted to teach ME typing skills, but by the time I hit the third grade, their recommendations actually retarded my skills. Yes, I remember being forced, FORCED, to glue all five of my fingers to the start positions. After I came in near-last in my first bout of typing racer, I said FUCK THIS, got sent to the principal, came back from the principal, then dominated everyone by going rogue.

How did I do it? Simple. I had a shitload of high-quality practice. I played Sierra adventure games.


Back in the late 80s and early 90s, Sierra churned these bad boys out on a fairly regular basis. Sierra adventure games usually had the player control a dude (occasionally a dudette) in a psuedo-3D environment. You would walk around areas using the arrow keys (num lock off if you were pro), and to interact with the environment, you'd have to type out commands.

There basic ones, like LOOK, or TAKE [object], or FUCK. FUCK usually didn't do anything but the Sierra guys were creative enough to admonish you for your nasty language.

The three main franchises were Police Quest (pictured above), King's Quest and Space Quest. Pretty fairly obvious what motifs were going on in those games. Sierra games were challenging in two ways:

1) They could be esoteric as hell. Here's an example of a puzzle from Police Quest. It's a fairly simple one, but if you screw it up, you lose:

When you first get your police cruiser, you have to literally walk around it in a circle to perform your car check. Then you can get in it and safely drive away. Failure to walk around it will lead to the car getting a flat tire as soon as it pulls out of the police station, and your game is over. Yup. Mercifully, this puzzle comes near the very beginning.

(Of course, Police Quest was written to reflect real-life police procedures, so if you were a cop, you wouldn't be caught off-guard by some of the shit you'd have to do in the game to progress.)

And that's only a simple example. Try to get through a game like King's Quest without a manual, and you are up shit creek my friend. And we were expected to get through those games WITHOUT shit like GameFAQs (though for a small fee you could call Sierra's tipline).

The other challenge w-- oh, forgot I'm doing the number thing

2) Typing speed!!


Once in a while you'd run into a situation in the game where you needed to think fast. Sometimes it'd be as simple as a monster appearing on screen, and you'd have to just run off the screen to get away from it. Other times, though, you'd have to do something, which meant you'd have to type something, and fast!

I remember the early days of trying that shit out. Uh oh, the Labion Terror Beast has appeared, and there's no escape! I better THROW CUBIX RUBE! Uh oh, hurry up, he's coming!

Hunting and pecking was not gonna cut it. Yes, in more than a few areas, Sierra brought the pain, and if you couldn't at least type at 30 wpm, you were deader than dead.

And that is how I really honed my typing skills, through sheer survival. None of this "type the words in to make your car go faster, but avoid mistakes!" When I was 6 years old, I was in the trenches, learning not just typing itself, but words and rudimentary sentences. I'm pretty sure Sierra did more to improve my syntax, spelling and vocabulary than my kindergarten teachers did. Sorry Sr. Margaret Mary!


The ultimate test is depicted above. In this scenario, Roger Wilco (you) is stuck in a trap. The floor panel is slowly sliding away, revealing a vat of acid for you to fall in. The only chance you have is to use your plunger on the near wall (but not too early, or else Roger's grip weakens and he falls in) and hang on for dear life until the trap deactivates.

The first time I encountered this trap I-- well, I freakin' died because I didn't know what to do. But the SECOND time I encountered it, I figured using the plunger would work. Except the game wouldn't take PUT PLUNGER ON WALL, STICK PLUNGER TO WALL, PLUNGER WALL, USE PLUNGER, JUST FUCKING PUT THE PLUNGER ON THE WALLL FUCK YOU as acceptable answers. But I think it was that particular moment that my fingers finally, through sheer panic-induced survival instincts, memorized the location of the keys and became automatic. After that scene, my typing became less a conscious act and more an extension of my thoughts, no different than speaking or giving the finger.

This method of training, though, is pretty much completely gone from the video game landscape, which I guess is not a surprise. Sierra adventure games persisted throughout the 90s, but they became a bit less challenging in certain key respects (Space Quest 3 would pause the game and summon a command prompt whenever you started tpying, removing those tense life-or-death speed-typing situations). Then they became outright point-and-click adventures, which introduced their own challenges.

Modern games still force players to use hand-eye coordination and logical thinking, but the death of the command-line adventure game has dismantled an overlooked way of teaching kids typing skills. Now that texting is here to stay, kids don't need to spell properly and shit. You wouldn't get anywhere in King's Quest if you kept trying to TK TO WTCH. Then again, kids don't need proper syntax anyway, so screw them.

So that's at least ONE thing my generation has over the next. I look forward to running into those bastard whippersnappers on the battlefield someday. Then we'll see who's laughing when it comes time to USE PLUNGER ON WALL.