Programming Logic and Design, Introductory 7th Edition by Joyce Farrell

Exercise 23

In 1952, A. S. Douglas wrote his University of Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation onhuman-computer interaction, and created the first graphical computer game—aversion of Tic-Tac-Toe. The game was programmed on an EDSAC vacuum-tubemainframe computer. The first computer game is generally assumed to be Spacewar!, developed in 1962 at MIT; the first commercially available video game was Pong, introduced by Atari in 1972. In 1980, Atari’s Asteroids and Lunar Lander became the first video games to be registered with the U. S. Copyright Office. Throughout the 1980s, players spent hours with games that now seem very simple and unglamorous; do you recall playing Adventure, Oregon Trail, Where in the World Is Carmen

Sandiego?, or Myst?

Today, commercial computer games are much more complex; they require many programmers, graphic artists, and testers to develop them, and large management and marketing staffs are needed to promote them. A game might cost many millions of dollars to develop and market, but a successful game might earn hundreds of millions of dollars. Obviously, with the brief introduction to programming you have had in this chapter, you cannot create a very sophisticated game. However, you can get started.

Mad Libs is a children’s game in which players provide a few words that are then incorporated into a silly story. The game helps children understand different parts of speech because they are asked to provide specific types of words. For example, you might ask a child for a noun, another noun, an adjective, and a past-tense verb. The child might reply with such answers as table, book, silly, and studied. The newly created Mad Lib might be:

Mary had a little table

Its book was silly as snow

And everywhere that Mary studied

The table was sure to go.

Create the logic for a Mad Lib program that accepts five words from input, then creates and displays a short story or nursery rhyme that uses them.