history
Andrew Plotkin
going to instigate some killing myself.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
M. St. Bernard
People are saying this? I love, Myst, but it hasn't changed my
opinion of text adventures one bit...they're different breeds of game,
in my opinion. Same species, but different breed. :-) Sometimes you
like to see a beautiful graphical representation of a landscape, and
sometimes you'd rather visualize it in your mind.
Muffy.
BrenBarn
>going to instigate some killing myself.
--BrenBarn (Bren...@aol.com)
(Name in header has spam-blocker, use the address above instead.)
"Do not follow where the path may lead;
go, instead, where there is no path, and leave a trail."
--Author Unknown
Andrew Plotkin
>>I swear, if I read one more time that Myst killed text adventures, I'm
>>going to instigate some killing myself.
>
> Actually, I'm more of the opinion that Myst killed graphical adventures.
That's a much more reasonable position (although not one I hold).
Daryl McCullough
bren...@aol.comRemove says...
>
>>I swear, if I read one more time that Myst killed text adventures, I'm
>>going to instigate some killing myself.
> Actually, I'm more of the opinion that Myst killed graphical
>adventures.
In my opinion, Myst killed Oswald and Jimmy Hoffa. Perhaps it was
the second gunman on the grassy knoll, as well.
Daryl McCullough
CoGenTex, Inc.
Ithaca, NY
BrenBarn
>>>going to instigate some killing myself.
>> Actually, I'm more of the opinion that Myst killed graphical
>>adventures.
>
>In my opinion, Myst killed Oswald and Jimmy Hoffa. Perhaps it was
>the second gunman on the grassy knoll, as well.
somehow. . .CONNECTED.
Text Adventures -- killed in his apartment for no apparent reason. His
brother, Graphical Adventures, shot dead in alley two weeks ago. Oswald --
shot after being apprehended by the police. Jimmy Hoffa -- missing and
presumed dead.
And then it hit me like that fuzzy static-electricity thing you get when
you brush the back of your hand across a CRT. Myst. Myst was everywhere, on
every shelf, in every software store, hiding in his box, with his best-selling
CD shiny and ready to strike at his next victim.
He had to be stopped.
Paul O'Brian
> I swear, if I read one more time that Myst killed text adventures, I'm
> going to instigate some killing myself.
What brought this on? Did I miss something?
--
Paul O'Brian obr...@colorado.edu http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~obrian
SPAG is starving! Show your compassion by feeding it your interactive
fiction reviews -- deadline for issue #22 is September 10, 2000.
Jason Peter Brown
what did kill text adventures? I suppose it could be argued that they aren't
dead (Again, I'm not sure about this but it seems like more text adventures
have been produced over the last few years, since free compilers became
available, then in their "heyday"), but they are almost certainly
commercially dead (or at the very least in a coma). So what did them in?
Possibilities:
1) The graphics in games (of all sorts) continually got more and more
detailed, achieved higher and higher resolutions, and added more and more
colours. It gave gamers something to yearn for (and be impressed by),
whereas text adventures remained more or less stagnant.
2) Not only did text adventures stagnate visually, but they also didn't
advance much technologically. A few more verbs, and slightly bigger worlds,
but the underlying technology remained the same (or very similar), while the
AI in other video games continued to advance, continually surprising and
amazing gamers (okay, maybe thats an exaggeration in most cases, but there
are some new games that come out with AI (or illusion thereof) and
playability that amazes me, and I haven't played a text adventure in ages
that amazed me with its AI (or illusion thereof), and the playability of
TA's has remained relatively stagnant).
3) The major demographic of video game buyers is probably no longer the same
demographic that would be likely to buy text adventures (which require a
certain amount of patience, education, and intelligence compared to the
popular first person shooters of today). Many computer users during TA
heyday were techies (or wanted to be), or at least geeks/nerds (excuse me
for the poor choice of words, absolutely no insult intended), whereas now,
the techies are probably (again, I have no hard stats on this) vastly
outnumbered and underrepresented in the gamers market.
Anyway, I don't know how much any of the above factors are involved, they're
just some ideas I'm throwing around. But I am interested in some insight as
to why text adventures have "died".
"Andrew Plotkin" <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in message
news:8njijk$32t$1...@nntp9.atl.mindspring.net...
> I swear, if I read one more time that Myst killed text adventures, I'm
> going to instigate some killing myself.
>
Adam J. Thornton
Jason Peter Brown <x@x.x> wrote:
>I've got very little knowledge/opinion on this topic, but out of curiosity,
>what did kill text adventures? I suppose it could be argued that they aren't
>dead
Commercial text adventures essentially died with Infocom, and I'd argue
that Cornerstone killed Infocom.
Adam
--
ad...@princeton.edu
"My eyes say their prayers to her / Sailors ring her bell / Like a moth
mistakes a light bulb / For the moon and goes to hell." -- Tom Waits
Doug Lennox
I presume commercial text adventures were born, or at least nurtured with
them). Many (I think) of us are here because of our direct experiences with
Infocom (although it was Magnetic Scrolls that really sucked me into text
adventures, and led me to discover this newsgroup). I do not, however, have
any knowledge of Cornerstone...any links to point me in that direction?
Adam J. Thornton wrote in message <8nl88l$q8u$2...@cnn.Princeton.EDU>...
Stephen Granade
> I can certainly agree that commercial text adventures died with Infocom (as
> I presume commercial text adventures were born, or at least nurtured with
> them). Many (I think) of us are here because of our direct experiences with
> Infocom (although it was Magnetic Scrolls that really sucked me into text
> adventures, and led me to discover this newsgroup). I do not, however, have
> any knowledge of Cornerstone...any links to point me in that direction?
I don't know of any beyond the Infocom fact sheet
(http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/info/fact-sheet.txt), but the
gist of it is this: Cornerstone was a relational database which used
Infocom's adventure game parser for communication. It was released in
late 1984, but went nowhere. A little over a year later they cut the
price from around $500 to $100, to no avail. The product killed
Infocom's nascent business division, and shortly thereafter Infocom
merged with Activision, itself not a bastion of financial strength in
those days.
Stephen
--
Stephen Granade | Interested in adventure games?
sgra...@phy.duke.edu | Visit About Interactive Fiction
Duke University, Physics Dept | http://interactfiction.about.com
Stefano Gaburri
"Adam J. Thornton" wrote:
> Commercial text adventures essentially died with Infocom,
This is too simple. What about Legend? And all the other great commercial houses?
The fact is that, quite suddendly, text adventures have not been commercially viable anymore. We can talk about the
causes of this phenomenon (and why it's still so), but the truth is that demand started to lack before (or at least
toghether with) offer.
ciao
S
Adam J. Thornton
Stefano Gaburri <ste...@xenia.it> wrote:
>
>"Adam J. Thornton" wrote:
>
>> Commercial text adventures essentially died with Infocom,
>
I said "essentially", and what other great commercial text adventure
houses? Legend was doing graphical adventures. Adventuresoft had
vanished years earlier, basically because the Scott Adams parser was
really cool on a 3K VIC-20 but kind of silly on a 64K Apple //e. I
can't think of any other company that made great *text* adventures,
offhand.
Carl Muckenhoupt
ad...@princeton.edu (Adam J. Thornton) wrote:
> Commercial text adventures essentially died with Infocom, and I'd
argue
> that Cornerstone killed Infocom.
Another, somewhat depressing, aspect of this theory: Infocom killed
commercial text adventures outside of Infocom. Other companies that
produced text adventures - and there were quite a few; outfits like
Broderbund and Sir-Tech used to have text-adventure arms - found that
they couldn't compete with Infocom. The thing is, towards the end,
Infocom *wasn't* stagnating - they were consistently introducing
technical innovations: the "oops" command, Spellbreaker's dynamic
vocabulary, Beyond Zork's on-screen mapping, Nord and Bert's
experiments with directionless movement, etc. Other companies couldn't
keep up, and eventually stopped trying. So when Infocom went down for
reasons not fundamentally related to the success of their text
adventures, there was essentially no one else left.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Andrew Plotkin
> In article <Nvkn5.164719$Gh.28...@news20.bellglobal.com>,
> Jason Peter Brown <x@x.x> wrote:
>>I've got very little knowledge/opinion on this topic, but out of curiosity,
>>what did kill text adventures? I suppose it could be argued that they aren't
>>dead
>
> Commercial text adventures essentially died with Infocom, and I'd argue
> that Cornerstone killed Infocom.
I doubt Infocom would have lasted much longer as a producer of text
games. Nobody else did, and they weren't developing relational databases.
As far as I can tell, the "culprit" -- and I use sneer quotes advisedly --
was ongoing expansion of the computer game industry. And the expansion in
the number of people *buying* games -- people who were not (mostly)
hyperliterate geeks and tech-heads, as (most) computer owners were in the
mid-80's.
A game that sold well to the old Infocom audience was considered a flop.
No company wanted to make flops. End of story.
kevin and emma
kevin
"Adam J. Thornton" <ad...@princeton.edu> wrote in message
news:8nmfrd$a2k$1...@cnn.Princeton.EDU...
> In article <399EB2A3...@xenia.it>,
> Stefano Gaburri <ste...@xenia.it> wrote:
> >
> >"Adam J. Thornton" wrote:
> >
> >
houses?
>
> I said "essentially", and what other great commercial text adventure
> houses? Legend was doing graphical adventures. Adventuresoft had
> vanished years earlier, basically because the Scott Adams parser was
> can't think of any other company that made great *text* adventures,
> offhand.
>
Carl Muckenhoupt
released in 1985. 1984 saw the advent of the Macintosh: suddenly, you
couldn't sell a command-line application to the common user on the
basis of its ease of use. 1986 brought us the publication of the first
ISO SQL standard, which nailed the lid on the coffin for relational
databases with proprietary query languages. Perhaps Cornerstone would
have been a success a few years earlier, when Infocom began the
project. Or at any rate, tt almost certainly would have fared better.
Matthew T. Russotto
Adam J. Thornton <ad...@princeton.edu> wrote:
}In article <399EB2A3...@xenia.it>,
}Stefano Gaburri <ste...@xenia.it> wrote:
}>
}>"Adam J. Thornton" wrote:
}>
}>
}
}I said "essentially", and what other great commercial text adventure
}houses? Legend was doing graphical adventures.
So was Infocom, towards the end. I don't think Infocom's demise
killed the commercial text adventure, though it may have shortened
it's suffering.
--
Matthew T. Russotto russ...@pond.com
"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in pursuit
of justice is no virtue."
BrenBarn
>was ongoing expansion of the computer game industry. And the expansion in
>the number of people *buying* games -- people who were not (mostly)
>hyperliterate geeks and tech-heads, as (most) computer owners were in the
>mid-80's.
in which graphical IF was gradually replaced by shoot-em-ups, flight sims, etc.
In fact, I'm optimistic enough to think that this is still going on (i.e.,
good graphical IF is not dead).
I'm using the term "graphical IF" to refer to games whose intentions and
aspirations are similar to those of text IF (e.g., good stories, characters,
etc.), but which employ a graphical interface. For me, the best examples of
this are the various LucasArts adventures: Indiana Jones and the Fate of
Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, etc.
It seems that these kinds of games are becoming fewer and farther between,
as most games sold these days are either 3D-shooters, flight sims, Myst-style
puzzle-fests, or real-time strategy. (Of course, this is just my perspective
from wandering around in software stores and computer fairs; I have no actual
statistics. :-)
Just as text IF phased into graphics slowly, with games that mixed
graphics and text, so graphical IF slowly took on characteristics of these
other genres. Thus we have games like Inca II, which was part flight sim, part
Myst-style puzzles, and part graphical-IF.
Arcum Dagsson
bren...@aol.comRemove (BrenBarn) wrote:
Well, Monkey Island 4(http://www.lucasarts.com/products/monkey4/) is
supposed to be coming out next fall, so the genre isn't quite dead
yet, though it may involve emulation if you're not on windows...
--
--Arcum Dagsson
"You say there's a horse in your bathroom, and all you can do is stand
there naming Beatles songs?"
BrenBarn
>Well, Monkey Island 4(http://www.lucasarts.com/products/monkey4/) is
>supposed to be coming out next fall, so the genre isn't quite dead
>yet, though it may involve emulation if you're not on windows...
true that graphical IF is still being produced with moderate regularity -- for
which I'm thankful :-).
Monkey Island 4 is an interesting example. Although I have no definitive
information, I read somewhere that it's going to have one of those "one click
fits all" interfaces (like Myst). Also, the LucasArts website indicates that
the game will be "in 3D". Thus, they seem to be continuing the tradition of
the story and character part of graphical IF, but are moving in new directions
as far as graphics and interface.
Duncan Stevens
adventures aren't dead, since they certainly aren't. If the discussion is
about commercial viability, yes, it seems like they were in trouble long
before Myst came around, for a variety of reasons. Infocom's release of
Journey (when it was still Infocom) and the subsequent production of stuff
like Battletech and such reads like a statement that "hey, this text stuff
doesn't sell anymore." Presumably whoever decided to steer the Infocom name
in that direction was looking at the sales figures, and you don't try to use
the name to sell a whole different line of products and ditch the original
line unless the original line isn't going anywhere anymore. I suppose you
can also argue that the people at Activision who inherited Infocom were
lunkheads, but that seems a sweeping assumption. Ergo, text adventures were
in their last throes in 1989-90 or so, well before Myst.
--Duncan
Stefano Gaburri
"Adam J. Thornton" wrote:
>
> In article <399EB2A3...@xenia.it>,
> Stefano Gaburri <ste...@xenia.it> wrote:
> >
> >"Adam J. Thornton" wrote:
> >
> >> Commercial text adventures essentially died with Infocom,
> >
> >This is too simple. What about Legend? And all the other great commercial houses?
>
> I said "essentially", and what other great commercial text adventure
> houses?
Magnetic Scrolls?
Also, I wouldn't call a game like Gateway "graphical". Ok, you can click on them pictures, but you can also solve the
whole thing without ever leaving the text-only screen. Not to (re)open the can o' worms, obviously...
ciao
S
Chris Charla
> argue
> > that Cornerstone killed Infocom.
>
> commercial text adventures outside of Infocom. Other companies that
> produced text adventures - and there were quite a few; outfits like
> Broderbund and Sir-Tech used to have text-adventure arms - found that
> they couldn't compete with Infocom. The thing is, towards the end,
> Infocom *wasn't* stagnating - they were consistently introducing
> technical innovations: the "oops" command, Spellbreaker's dynamic
> vocabulary, Beyond Zork's on-screen mapping, Nord and Bert's
> experiments with directionless movement, etc. Other companies couldn't
> keep up, and eventually stopped trying. So when Infocom went down for
> reasons not fundamentally related to the success of their text
> adventures, there was essentially no one else left.
>
>
>
The sad reality is that no Infocom games ever sold as well as Zork I-III.
Infocom continued to innovate, of course, but even without Cornerstone,
or Activision buying them and then the people responsible for the
purchase at Activision immediatly being fired and replaced by people who
had no clue what Infocom was about, it isn't likely that Infocom could
have continued as a text adventure company for more than another product
cycle.
When Zork first arrived, it enabled your puny micro to do things that
were simply amazing -- and that got tons of people to buy it, who might
not have been into text adventures for their own sake otherwise (and the
numbers bear this out, because even as the number of computer owners
grew, the number of text adventure buyers slowly shrunk). By the time
Shogun limped out the door, if you wanted something amazing for your
computer, you bought Ancient Art of War (if you had a PC) or Marble
Madness (if you had a C64 or AII), or Defender of the Crown (if you had
an Amiga), or just sat around and played with MacPaint (if you had a
Mac).
One of the driving forces in the sales of "breakthorugh" titles is the
ability of the titles to impress the people who buy them, but who aren't
really clued in as to what makes a good game versus a bad one. Look at
MYST -- it sold great, but I would argue that the sales weren't because
of the gameplay (which sucked, IMO), but because it used this relatively
new technology -- CR-ROM, it was super pretty, and it ran on nearly any
system you could throw at it.
Anyway, the last paragraph was totally off the point, but, um, well, just
read the first and second paragraphs.
Oh yeah, how cool would it have been, though, to see whether or not the
Infocom crew could have hacked it in another genre. WHat would the
Infocom Doom have been like?
-Chris
Trevor Barrie
BrenBarn <bren...@aol.comRemove> wrote:
> Monkey Island 4 is an interesting example. Although I have no
>definitive information, I read somewhere that it's going to have one of
>those "one click fits all" interfaces (like Myst). Also, the LucasArts
>website indicates that the game will be "in 3D".
<shrug> Grim Fandango used a 3D polygonned graphics style. It completely
failed to detract from the game's quality as an adventure game.
(And I can't remember whether GF was one-click or not. It certainly
didn't have as varied an interface as the earlier LucasArts classics,
but right- and left-clicking on an object may have had different
semantics.)
Trevor Barrie
Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>I swear, if I read one more time that Myst killed text adventures, I'm
>going to instigate some killing myself.
So have you, in fact, read that somewhere? Or is this just a roundabout
way of saying that reading it even once is enough to set you off?
(I swear, if I read one more time that Britney Spears is a more
significant historical figure than Gandhi...)
Andrew Plotkin
> I assumed that the point of Andrew's original statement was that text
> adventures aren't dead, since they certainly aren't. If the discussion is
> about commercial viability, yes,
Actually, my point was that their commercial viability is dead.
(I would love Bedouin to demonstrate otherwise, but this has not yet
occurred.)
> Ergo, text adventures were
> in their last throes in 1989-90 or so, well before Myst.
Yes, exactly.
Lucian Paul Smith
: Adam J. Thornton <ad...@princeton.edu> wrote:
: >
: > Commercial text adventures essentially died with Infocom, and I'd argue
: > that Cornerstone killed Infocom.
: I doubt Infocom would have lasted much longer as a producer of text
: games. Nobody else did, and they weren't developing relational databases.
: As far as I can tell, the "culprit" -- and I use sneer quotes advisedly --
: was ongoing expansion of the computer game industry. And the expansion in
: the number of people *buying* games -- people who were not (mostly)
: hyperliterate geeks and tech-heads, as (most) computer owners were in the
: mid-80's.
: A game that sold well to the old Infocom audience was considered a flop.
: No company wanted to make flops. End of story.
Well, that's the question, isn't it? Would Infocom have consented to make
'flops' according to industry standards at the time?
The thing about text adventures is that they're *cheap*. Extremely cheap,
as our little group has so amply demonstrated. Graphical IF has been in
trouble the past few years because they're expensive to make, and the
returns aren't all that great.
This is all sheer speculation, of course, but I think it's a not
unreasonable scenario to imagine that had Infocom not tried to develop
Cornerstone, they could have continued to make text adventures cheaply and
make money off of them. Sure, they might never had developed a
blockbuster. They would have been catering to a niche market. But had
they been able to keep their core audience, they could have continued to
make money. I have three data points to back up this speculation: The
sales figures for 'Masterpieces', the continued existence and sales of
games like 'Solitaire', and the 'Deer Hunter' phenomenon.
One problem plagued them--accessibility. Brian Moriarty explained this to
me when I got to meet him. You couldn't set a person down in front of an
Infocom game without prior IF experience and say, "Here, play
this." Invariably, they'd type things like, >HELLO. or >WHAT DO I DO
NOW? or >TRY THE DOOR. or >CHECK TO SEE IF THE DOOR IS LOCKED. or any of a
thousand thousand variations thereof. We haven't really worked too hard
on this, choosing instead to say, "Well, natural language parsing is nigh
impossible, so here, read this tract and come back when you
understand." I think Infocom would have (continued to) attack this
problem, which would help their market even more.
But, of course, we'll never know.
-Lucian
(sniff)
Mike Kozlowski
BrenBarn <bren...@aol.comRemove> wrote:
> Interestingly, a similar phenomenon seems to have occurred more recently,
>in which graphical IF was gradually replaced by shoot-em-ups, flight sims, etc.
> I'm using the term "graphical IF" to refer to games whose intentions and
>aspirations are similar to those of text IF (e.g., good stories, characters,
>etc.), but which employ a graphical interface.
Graphical IF is alive and well -- but the adventure game that was its
traditional home is climbing into the casket. These days, graphical IF
has become the province of RPGs. A good RPG, like Black Isles' _Torment_,
has the character- and story-driven focus that used to drive adventure
games, but without the increasingly arbitrary puzzles that have become
synonymous with graphical adventure games as that genre has grown more
stylized and ritualized.
--
Mike Kozlowski
http://www.klio.org/mlk/
Giles Boutel
due to the fact that once you finish them they're not exactly replayable.
In fact, each game's longevity is almost entirely dependant upon it's
ability to frustrate your efforts. RPGs, which could be considered to have
the same innate drawback, at least extend the time it takes to complete them
through numerous combat and travel elements, and FPS games always have the
challenge of shooting stuff (not much variety, but at least it's still a bit
of a challenge). Adventure games, even the prettiest, are almost always
CONA (complete once - never again, or a least not for a couple of years).
Just a (not terribly considered) thought - and obviously not one applicable
to everyone, or this group wouldn't exist.
-Giles
BrenBarn
>Infocom crew could have hacked it in another genre. WHat would the
>Infocom Doom have been like?
your Super-duper Rammaframma Blast-em-all-to-kingdom-come Gun -- and instead of
a click you hear a menacing computerized voice saying "I don't see any SHIFT
here."
BrenBarn
>me when I got to meet him. You couldn't set a person down in front of an
>Infocom game without prior IF experience and say, "Here, play
>this." Invariably, they'd type things like, >HELLO. or >WHAT DO I DO
>NOW? or >TRY THE DOOR. or >CHECK TO SEE IF THE DOOR IS LOCKED. or any of a
>thousand thousand variations thereof.
these days, with cruddy "one click fits all" interfaces that never do what you
want or "big red button" interfaces where all you really have to do is shoot.
People want to be able to jump straight into a game and play it, without having
to learn any commands. It's the same philosophy that has led to
"plug-and-play" sound cards that detect the wrong IRQ and render your computer
mute.
Not that this is a bad thing in itself. I sometimes crave the same thing:
quick, cheap entertainment. But I think most modern gamers would quickly
disregard a given game if they couldn't figure out how it works in a few
minutes of untutored playing.
One thing I know for sure is that whenever I try to get some non-IF person
to play one of my games (okay, okay, my ONE game :-), they quickly become
frustrated when the game doesn't understand their commands. In fact, if I even
MENTION that the game has no graphics, they usually express a total lack of
interest. I can only feel sorry that they will not be able to experience
interactive fiction.
BrenBarn
>due to the fact that once you finish them they're not exactly replayable.
get more enjoyment out of a good adventure game that I can't play again (at
least, not if I want to be challenged) than out of a good strategy game that I
get bored with.
>Adventure games, even the prettiest, are almost always
>CONA (complete once - never again, or a least not for a couple of years).
It's true. But if they have a good story, I often play them again just to
experience that story. Of course, this philosophy is not as valid for people
who like tough puzzles (unless they also have poor memories :-).
Right about here is where I would normally launch into another rant about
how games with multiple endings and transparently variable storylines could do
a lot to overcome this problem. But this isn't the right thread for that. :-)
R. Alan Monroe
>doesn't sell anymore." Presumably whoever decided to steer the Infocom name
>in that direction was looking at the sales figures, and you don't try to use
>the name to sell a whole different line of products and ditch the original
>line unless the original line isn't going anywhere anymore. I suppose you
>can also argue that the people at Activision who inherited Infocom were
>in their last throes in 1989-90 or so, well before Myst.
Was the original Infocom a publicly traded company?
What about Activision? Just curious.
Have fun
Alan
k denton
of IF replayability.
Firstly, IF is a synthesis of two mediums: the adventure/ puzzle game, and plain
ol' everyday printed page fiction. Often much like a short story, the games
which utilize story telling have something to say, something to show to the
players. The replayability of a game, viewed in this light, is almost the same
attribute as the re-readability in a good short story or novel. What's gonna
bring players back are things like a well structured story, awesome prose style,
and anything else which makes reading a joyful thing. How many of us here have
read the Lord of the Rings more than once? Or watched Star Wars more than 10
times? We know how it's gonna turn out every time, but it's simply a happiness
to watch it unfold.
And then there's then interactive aspect of these things. It's a very powerful
technique, forcing the player to act through the eyes of a character, even more
so than the first person perspective in print. If it's disturbing to, say,
watch the Blair Witch kiddies being chased from the prey's-eye-view, how much
closer would you be to those characters if you were controlling their actions
personally?
Of course, true interactivity will probably lead to branching storylines (or at
least, plenty of ways to cut the story short), which leads to another kind of
replayability...
Well, I ramble plenty, but ultimately I'm trying to say that the replayability
of the game rests completely on the designer's ability to understand and execute
in the medium.
Giles Boutel wrote:
> I wonder how much of the (alleged) death of adventure games in general is
> due to the fact that once you finish them they're not exactly replayable.
> In fact, each game's longevity is almost entirely dependant upon it's
> ability to frustrate your efforts. RPGs, which could be considered to have
> the same innate drawback, at least extend the time it takes to complete them
> through numerous combat and travel elements, and FPS games always have the
> challenge of shooting stuff (not much variety, but at least it's still a bit
> of a challenge). Adventure games, even the prettiest, are almost always
> CONA (complete once - never again, or a least not for a couple of years).
>
Lucian Paul Smith
: >One problem plagued them--accessibility. Brian Moriarty explained this to
: >me when I got to meet him. You couldn't set a person down in front of an
: >Infocom game without prior IF experience and say, "Here, play
: >this." Invariably, they'd type things like, >HELLO. or >WHAT DO I DO
: >NOW? or >TRY THE DOOR. or >CHECK TO SEE IF THE DOOR IS LOCKED. or any of a
: >thousand thousand variations thereof.
: I think this is the main reason why we see such cruddy games coming out
: these days, with cruddy "one click fits all" interfaces that never do what you
: want or "big red button" interfaces where all you really have to do is shoot.
: People want to be able to jump straight into a game and play it, without having
: to learn any commands. It's the same philosophy that has led to
: "plug-and-play" sound cards that detect the wrong IRQ and render your computer
: mute.
Not to pick on you, but this is exactly the attitude I was talking
about. Frankly, it's elitist. Just because the opposite tack can be done
badly doesn't mean that it's not worth doing. Plug and play interfaces
are an absolute godsend to millions of people, when they work. And they
work a lot of the time.
There is indeed a method of solving the problem of complexity by recasting
the problem itself so it's not complex--hence one-click interfaces. There
is a place for these, especially when designing for them in the first
place. The sonnet and symphony--heck, the haiku and limerick--have rigid
strictures that impose limits on what an author can do within them, but
that didn't stop many people from coming up with wonderful examples of
each.
But I'm not convinced the only solution to translating user input into IF
commands is the modern parser. We just haven't really attacked the
problem, because of the attitude we posess. It's a shame, because we're
the ones with the technical expertise to actually do something about it.
For example--here's an idea I came up with when writing my above
post. What would happen if you took the Inform library, and re-wrote the
debugging messages in plain English? And what if you set up a new window
(say, in glk or some such) with a friendly interface that would contain
all this information, explaining to the user what their commands were
doing and how they were being interpreted by the computer? Essentially,
I'm saying: Drastically increase the *feedback* the user gets when
playing the game. Teach them how to play by showing them what all their
commands were doing.
This comes from a drastically different context, but read
http://iisd.ca/pcdf/meadows/feedback.html and you'll see where I'm coming
from.
This isn't necessarily the only solution, either. I remember someone's
comment that perhaps the parser watch for several errors in a row near the
beginning of the game, and cut in, saying "You seem to be new at
IF. Here's some information you might find useful..." With some
tweaking, this could be a great idea. It's several years old and still
vaporware.
If a company like Infocom were working on this stuff, an idea like that
would have been siezed upon, and experimented with. This isn't
necessarily better or worse than the current state of IF--a company
perhaps wouldn't feel as free to experiment as we have--just different, is
all.
-Lucian
k denton
Lucian Paul Smith wrote:
<snipsnipsnip>
> For example--here's an idea I came up with when writing my above
> post. What would happen if you took the Inform library, and re-wrote the
> debugging messages in plain English? And what if you set up a new window
> (say, in glk or some such) with a friendly interface that would contain
> all this information, explaining to the user what their commands were
> doing and how they were being interpreted by the computer? Essentially,
> I'm saying: Drastically increase the *feedback* the user gets when
> playing the game. Teach them how to play by showing them what all their
> commands were doing.
>
<snip>
Actually, if you look at the vast majority of graphical games, there are usually at
least something of a tutorial available. It's really a requirement in most flight
games and any first person game with an interface more complex than the iD
three-button standard. I've got a copy of the Jane's Fighters Anthology keybard
reference in front of me, which has what looks like more than 50 seperate keyboard
commands listed. Not putting a tutorial in a game with this degree of complexity is
suicidal.
This quite tempts me to sit down and write a quick 10-minute play-through explanation
of the basics of Interactive Fiction.... If you've ever played around on a large
MUD, you'll know what I'm talkin' 'bout.
wo...@one.net
Hi Chris,
>Look at
>MYST -- it sold great, but I would argue that the sales weren't because
>of the gameplay (which sucked, IMO), but because it used this relatively
>new technology -- CR-ROM, it was super pretty, and it ran on nearly any
>system you could throw at it.
Myst is still on top of the best selling games list. Like the great
text adventures before it, Myst's real genius is setting the mood and
sucking you in.
Sure the game engine is next to non-existant but that isn't the
*point*, the point is the story. Just as with all good text
adventures. :) And I would argue any computer game that's still a best
seller after 6 years is a great game by anybody's standards!
Respectfully,
Wolf
"The world is my home, it's just that some rooms are draftier than
others". -- Wolf
Arcum Dagsson
tba...@cs.toronto.edu (Trevor Barrie) wrote:
Well, the same day Zarf posted that, Slashdot had a story up referring
to the following article:
< http://gamecenter.com/Features/Exclusives/Deadburied/index.html>
Presumably, that or in the Slashdot comments is where he read it...
Daniel Barkalow
> I think this is the main reason why we see such cruddy games coming
> out these days, with cruddy "one click fits all" interfaces that never do
> what you want or "big red button" interfaces where all you really have
> to do is shoot. People want to be able to jump straight into a game and
> play it, without having to learn any commands.
There's actually been a split recently in FP games; there's Quake 3, where
they finally ditched all concept of a story and just had shooting and
nifty architecture, because that's all they were doing well. But then
there's the games Looking Glass (and an ex-LG team leader) was putting
out: System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, and one whose name I'm blanking
on. Some of these involve a bunch of shooting (although Thief, at least,
makes it advantageous to avoid foes), but they involve a lot of items for
various purposes, non-shooting/jumping puzzles, etc. They don't involve
people with realistic levels of ability like IF tends to, and they tend to
be "use item on target" sorts of things, but there's a reasonable ammount
of thought about puzzling, and a lot of thought about how you're going to
get through a section. Also, there's at least a reasonable quantity of
plot, with twists and such, and characters with histories and
personalities (which you don't interact with significantly, but read
messages from). Also, you get to choose abilities and personalize your
character significantly.
None of these have do quite as much of the sort of interaction which
affects the plot that IF often has; usually each section is independant,
as far as plot goes, and thus you will have to have the same effect on the
world as you pass each section each time you play the game. But there's no
clear reason that a FP game couldn't include an interaction early in the
game with consequences later where you actually choose what you do at the
beginning. And, of course, the first few generations of games didn't do
the interesting plot thing, because the only people who could write the
engines to make 3-d graphics fluid enough to play with didn't have time to
write good plots. Plots showed up when computers got fast enough that
normal-quality engine programmers could support what a story writer wanted
to do.
I think we haven't seen anything with a story as involved as some IF is
that it's hard to experiment when you have to build 3-d models of every
place you want to include and every item and character you want the player
to interact with. Also, there's not quite the level of standard tools that
IF has, so it's only the companies on tight budgets who can make games,
and not the risk-taking individuals.
> Not that this is a bad thing in itself. I sometimes crave the same
> thing: quick, cheap entertainment. But I think most modern gamers
> would quickly disregard a given game if they couldn't figure out how it
> works in a few minutes of untutored playing.
There are actually FP games with substantial tutorials these days. The
mere fact that these games are trying to not only have substantial
interaction, but do it in real time, at least theoretically in dangerous
locations, makes it necessary to teach the interface to newbies.
Oddly, I can picture So Far as a FP game. I think it would be doable with
a one-button interface, if you could hold up items and interact with their
parts. I'm not sure if it would even lose anything in the translation,
although it likely wouldn't gain anything, either.
-Iabervon
*This .sig unintentionally changed*
Paul O'Brian
> I envision games where the various outcomes are not specifically designed
> to make the player feel like he has "won" or "lost", but rather to convey a
> meaning or message from the author. For example (albeit a strange and
> arbitrary example), a given ending might be designed to plant in the player's
> brain the notion that Communism is evil.
This seems to me to be a much worse idea than the win/loss dichotomy. I'd
rather feel that I have two choices (winning or losing) than feel I have
one choice (to be preached at by the author by any given ending.) To put
it another way, I'd rather play a game than read a purely didactic tract.
Of course, I'm aware that some players felt LASH did the very thing I'm
decrying above. What I was shooting for (setting aside, for the moment,
the difference between what I shoot for and what I hit) in LASH, though,
was a situation where the player could make any one of several choices at
either level of the game, choices at the inner level affecting the outcome
of choices at the outer level, resulting in an array of available endings.
What ending a player reaches depends on how that player portrays the
character of the robot controller in a particular session, and those
endings are not simply wins or losses. Some of them fit better than others
into the modern conceptions of good or evil, and some of them (I hope)
differ in ways that are not so easy to assign such value judgments.
Granted, the situation in LASH doesn't exactly lend itself to unbiased
interpretations. But I don't see it falling into either of the two
categories you describe -- it is neither a clear win/loss division nor is
it an attempt on my part to deliver a particular message with each ending.
My own feeling about the various endings in LASH is that while some of
them are clearly superior to others, each has its own pros and cons.
Interestingly, my experience with player feedback in the case of LASH was
that many players really want to know what the *right* ending is. Messages
on rgif made presumptions about the goal of the game, even going so far as
to say that LASH offers three metrics of success and that the most
"winning" ending was the one that ranked the highest on all three ladders
(even though some measures couldn't be maximized without others being
drastically reduced.) I genuinely didn't expect that response to develop,
though in retrospect I can certainly see why it did. I certainly didn't
intend it -- though I'm of the school of thought that suggests it doesn't
matter one iota what the author of a work *intends* (and indeed, that
information isn't ever purely available, even to the author), only what
experience that work produces in conjunction with a particlar reader. But
that's a discussion for anther post.
Anyway, you may find, even with your theoretical "all-didacticism" game,
that players are so conditioned to look for the winning ending, they will
construct one with whatever materials you give them, even if the notions
of winning and losing are completely absent from your mind when you design
the game. I think this is part and parcel of IF's history as computer
games. The culture of IF, at the moment, is such that even authors
who want to create a work of interactive literature with sophisticated,
ambiguous multiple endings have little alternative but to refer to their
work as a game and its consumers as players. "Solving" and "winning" are
the dominant paradigms in many players' approaches to IF, and if your work
wants to defy those paradigms, it had better be *damn* good, much better
than a work that stays within them.
Something's not completely worked out, or a little askew, or something, in
that last bunch of statements I made, but I don't have time at the moment
to figure it out. Any help anyone can offer would be appreciated -- I'm
sort of thinking out loud here.
--
Paul O'Brian obr...@colorado.edu http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~obrian
SPAG is starving! Show your compassion by feeding it your interactive
fiction reviews -- deadline for issue #22 is September 10, 2000.
okbl...@my-deja.com
lps...@rice.edu (Lucian Paul Smith) wrote:
>
> This is all sheer speculation, of course, but I think it's a not
> unreasonable scenario to imagine that had Infocom not tried to develop
> Cornerstone, they could have continued to make text adventures
cheaply and
> make money off of them. Sure, they might never had developed a
> blockbuster. They would have been catering to a niche market. But
had
> they been able to keep their core audience, they could have continued
to
> make money. I have three data points to back up this speculation:
The
> sales figures for 'Masterpieces', the continued existence and sales of
> games like 'Solitaire', and the 'Deer Hunter' phenomenon.
Hmmm. I don't think so. It isn't simply a matter of "Well, it cost $Y
to make, and X number of people bought it for $Z, and as long as X
times Z is greater than Y, they could've kept going."
The sales model for software has changed pretty drastically since
the '80s. In the early '80s, anybody with a floppy and a zip-loc(TM)
bag could call themselves a game publisher and sell stuff. By the time
the name of Infocom was buried, shelf-space was an issue. The stretch
between 1990 and 1995 would've been difficult to survive, as text-only
games would've been difficult to place.
The Web might've helped. But might've hurt, also. (The "core audience"
would have included people who had their attention diverted to Web-
based time-wasting.) TADS and Inform probably would've really wreaked
havoc.
Not to say that clever marketing might not have found a way, but
Infocom's staff would have had to continue to work just as hard for an
ever-decreasing return. How long would the best and the brightest have
persisted under those conditions?
--
[ok]
BrenBarn
>text adventures before it, Myst's real genius is setting the mood and
>sucking you in.
while because I heard it was great, but after a while of not getting hooked, I
dropped it.
BrenBarn
>seller after 6 years is a great game by anybody's standards!
personally, will like a game.
BrenBarn
>which utilize story telling have something to say, something to show to the
>players. The replayability of a game, viewed in this light, is almost the
>same
>attribute as the re-readability in a good short story or novel.
>Or watched Star Wars more than 10
>times?
Or more than 50. Or more than 100. :-)
>Of course, true interactivity will probably lead to branching storylines (or
>at
>least, plenty of ways to cut the story short), which leads to another kind of
>replayability...
Yay! I love this kind of thing. I haven't played very much IF, but most
of what I've played seems to follow the "one way to win, many ways to lose"
pattern of endings -- there is one "desired" outcome ("*** You have won ***"
:-), and many other "undesirable" outcomes ("You have died", "You have been
impaled", "You have been thrown into a dungeon", etc.). Although these various
"deaths" may have different messages, they are all essentially designed to
communicate the same message to the player: "You have failed."
I envision games where the various outcomes are not specifically designed
to make the player feel like he has "won" or "lost", but rather to convey a
meaning or message from the author. For example (albeit a strange and
arbitrary example), a given ending might be designed to plant in the player's
brain the notion that Communism is evil.
But, for once, I am not just going to TALK about this (gasp!). Yes,
strange as it may seem, I am actually WRITING a game with multiple endings,
which are not divided into "wins" and "losses", but many intermediate and
utterly different types.
When this game is released, then you'll see! :-) (And, of course, now
that I've mentioned it, it'll probably wind up being a piece of crap, making me
look like more of a blowhard than I already am, but that's life. . .:-)
BrenBarn
>out
>: these days, with cruddy "one click fits all" interfaces that never do what
>you
>: want or "big red button" interfaces where all you really have to do is
>shoot.
>: People want to be able to jump straight into a game and play it, without
>having
>: "plug-and-play" sound cards that detect the wrong IRQ and render your
>computer
>: mute.
>
>Not to pick on you, but this is exactly the attitude I was talking
>about. Frankly, it's elitist.
an opinion that was not my own but an exagerrated version of my own, mixed with
some hunches. I deserve it :-).
>Just because the opposite tack can be done
>badly doesn't mean that it's not worth doing. Plug and play interfaces
>are an absolute godsend to millions of people, when they work. And they
>work a lot of the time.
True. I use them myself. I'm not trying to say that people who use
plug-and-play and one-click interfaces are evil (nor do I think that you though
I meant that); everything has a use.
>There is indeed a method of solving the problem of complexity by recasting
>the problem itself so it's not complex--hence one-click interfaces. There
>is a place for these, especially when designing for them in the first
>place.
Yes. As you said above, though, it can be done badly. I've played good
and bad. I suppose it's just that the bad one's I've played were worse than
the good ones were good.
>For example--here's an idea I came up with when writing my above
>post. What would happen if you took the Inform library, and re-wrote the
>debugging messages in plain English?
<snipped most of the example>
>Drastically increase the *feedback* the user gets when
>playing the game. Teach them how to play by showing them what all their
>commands were doing.
Great idea. I'm sure it would draw in many of the people who, though
interested in the genre, were frustrated by the interface.
>This isn't necessarily the only solution, either.
THIS is really what I try to remember whenever I'm thinking about almost
any issue, including this one.
>I remember someone's
>comment that perhaps the parser watch for several errors in a row near the
>beginning of the game, and cut in, saying "You seem to be new at
>IF. Here's some information you might find useful..." With some
>tweaking, this could be a great idea. It's several years old and still
>vaporware.
Another good idea. Now, without making any generalizations (for once :-),
I'll say that the reason I personally don't do this is just 'cause I'm lazy.
That's all. Sure, I might not have some of the technical knowledge, and maybe
I'm missing some experience, but if I really had the gusto, all that would
come.
And now I'll solidify the absurdity of this post with a (perhaps
irrelevant) quote from _The Great Gatsby_:
"Gatsby believed in the green light, in the orgastic future that day by
day recedes before us. It eluded us today, but no matter; tomorrow we will run
faster, stretch our arms out farther. And one fine morning. . ."
Somehow this seems, to me, connected.
J.D. Berry
designed
> > to make the player feel like he has "won" or "lost", but rather to
convey a
> > meaning or message from the author. For example (albeit a strange
and
> > arbitrary example), a given ending might be designed to plant in
the player's
> > brain the notion that Communism is evil.
>
I'd
> rather feel that I have two choices (winning or losing) than feel I
have
> one choice (to be preached at by the author by any given ending.) To
put
tract.
>
BB wasn’t implying there should be no game elements (puzzles,
exploration, NPC interaction, “fun” stuff in general) involved or no
choices.
I think “Galatea” achieves one part of what he’s driving at. There’s
not really a won or lost with that game, but it was successful not only
as a literary work but as a game as well. Perhaps one play session
conclusion in that work had the theme of “does something not alive as
we know it have rights/feelings?” Perhaps another was the “Wizard of
Oz” ending. Each delivered some sort of message and in none did the
player *win*.
The main element required for a game is entertainment—fascinate, amuse,
evoke emotions. However the IF author can pull this off should be
completely open. It may be easier in the short term for an author to
fascinate using conventional objectives. A built-in goal of winning
can be reason enough to play a game. But I’ve abandoned many a game
before I’ve won simply because I wasn’t entertained sufficiently.
Right, but this is why I think you’re not really in disagreement with
him, Paul. Perhaps you interpreted “sending a message that Communism
is evil” as a blanket and forced ending with the whole game being an
indoctrination. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be that way. Though
that example does strike me as rather difficult to pull off. :-)
> Interestingly, my experience with player feedback in the case of LASH
was
> that many players really want to know what the *right* ending is.
Messages
> on rgif made presumptions about the goal of the game, even going so
far as
> to say that LASH offers three metrics of success and that the most
> "winning" ending was the one that ranked the highest on all three
ladders
> (even though some measures couldn't be maximized without others being
> drastically reduced.) I genuinely didn't expect that response to
develop,
> though in retrospect I can certainly see why it did. I certainly
didn't
> intend it -- though I'm of the school of thought that suggests it
doesn't
> matter one iota what the author of a work *intends* (and indeed, that
> information isn't ever purely available, even to the author), only
what
> experience that work produces in conjunction with a particlar reader.
But
> that's a discussion for anther post.
>
Interesting, indeed. Although I am a bit surprised this surprised
you. :-)
> Anyway, you may find, even with your theoretical "all-didacticism"
game,
> that players are so conditioned to look for the winning ending, they
will
> construct one with whatever materials you give them, even if the
notions
> of winning and losing are completely absent from your mind when you
design
> the game.
> I think this is part and parcel of IF's history as computer
> games. The culture of IF, at the moment, is such that even authors
> who want to create a work of interactive literature with
sophisticated,
> ambiguous multiple endings have little alternative but to refer to
their
> work as a game and its consumers as players. "Solving" and "winning"
are
> the dominant paradigms in many players' approaches to IF, and if your
work
> wants to defy those paradigms, it had better be *damn* good, much
better
> than a work that stays within them.
>
As The Firm might have sung,
Better hold on tight
If the game’s elastic
And it’s even worse
When it’s all-didactic
> Something's not completely worked out, or a little askew, or
something, in
> that last bunch of statements I made, but I don't have time at the
moment
> to figure it out. Any help anyone can offer would be appreciated --
I'm
> sort of thinking out loud here.
>
Your points were clear. My take was just that you were actually in
agreement with Bren but took a different route to his conclusion.
Thinking out loud, too,
Jim
kayce
>
> When Zork first arrived, it enabled your puny micro to do things that
> were simply amazing -- and that got tons of people to buy it, who might
> not have been into text adventures for their own sake otherwise (and the
> numbers bear this out, because even as the number of computer owners
> grew, the number of text adventure buyers slowly shrunk). By the time
> Shogun limped out the door, if you wanted something amazing for your
> computer, you bought Ancient Art of War (if you had a PC) or Marble
> Madness (if you had a C64 or AII), or Defender of the Crown (if you had
> an Amiga), or just sat around and played with MacPaint (if you had a
> Mac).
>
> One of the driving forces in the sales of "breakthorugh" titles is the
> ability of the titles to impress the people who buy them, but who aren't
> really clued in as to what makes a good game versus a bad one.
I think this might be the actual reason. I don't have any actual
historical data to back this up, but usually top selling games often use
the latest technology:
- The first computers were text only or with silly graphics at best
- Newer computers learned B/W graphics, suddenly a game had to have B/W
pictures to appeal, text adventures became less sought after, instead
games like Tron, PAC MAN or Aldo became hits
- The first colour computers came out. Games like Maniac Mansion used
the first colour images
- True colour came out: Games like Myst impressed with naturalistic images
- 3D accelerator chips became cheap enough to ship them with computers:
Everybody begins jumping the 3D wagon.
I think Adventures will survive. Just like strategy games (Myth is a
good example, compare that to C&C or SimCity for a line of ancestors).
They will just look different. As to why TEXT adventures aren't that
sellable anymore? Well, books have been suffering from recession, too.
People who would read a book and appreciate its advantages will also
consider text adventures. Those who do not like books and prefer TV or
the movies will very likely prefer 3D adventures in the future.
That's my theory. Time to shoot it down <g>
--
Raven Kayce
Writer's block impersonated
BrenBarn
>> to make the player feel like he has "won" or "lost", but rather to convey a
>> meaning or message from the author. For example (albeit a strange and
>> arbitrary example), a given ending might be designed to plant in the
>player's
>> brain the notion that Communism is evil.
>
>This seems to me to be a much worse idea than the win/loss dichotomy. I'd
>rather feel that I have two choices (winning or losing) than feel I have
>one choice (to be preached at by the author by any given ending.) To put
>it another way, I'd rather play a game than read a purely didactic tract.
didn't intend to suggest that the author would (necessarily) be preaching some
"higher truth" to the player.
As another example, maybe the game has a character called Joe, another
character called Bill, and somewhere in the story there is, say, a secret
underground organization of some kind. Maybe one of the endings is designed to
make the player think that Joe and Bill are long-lost brothers, while another
is designed to make him think that Joe and Bill are both members of the secret
organization, while another is designed to make him think that Joe is a member
and Bill is not, etc. The "meaning" given by the ending may or may not have
significance outside the context of the game.
>What I was shooting for (setting aside, for the moment,
>the difference between what I shoot for and what I hit) in LASH, though,
>was a situation where the player could make any one of several choices at
>either level of the game, choices at the inner level affecting the outcome
>of choices at the outer level, resulting in an array of available endings.
Well, I haven't played LASH (although after reading this, it's on my list
of games to play). This is, essentially, what I'm talking about. I don't
think that the various "levels" should necessarily be clearly delineated in the
player's view, but, since I haven't played LASH, I'm not sure whether that's
the case there.
>My own feeling about the various endings in LASH is that while some of
>them are clearly superior to others, each has its own pros and cons.
This is pretty much what I was trying to say, but you said it better.
Replace "LASH" with "a game" and you'll have a pretty good idea of what I was
attempting to say.
I don't think that any of the various endings should necessarily be
"superior" to another, but that's largely (as you mention below) up to the
player, not the author.
>-- though I'm of the school of thought that suggests it doesn't
>matter one iota what the author of a work *intends* (and indeed, that
>information isn't ever purely available, even to the author), only what
>experience that work produces in conjunction with a particlar reader.
I agree. As you say, I think the author's "intentions" are often unclear
even to the author himself (I know such is the case with my current WIP). So
how the player experiences the game is as much (or more) dependent on his
personality as on the game itself. This makes it well-nigh impossible to
design a game with the aim of conveying a particular sensation (or experience,
or meaning, or whatever you want to call it) to any given player; all you can
do is take your best shot (or even any shot) and see what people think.
But as you say. . .
>But that's a discussion for anther post.
So I'll say no more.
>Anyway, you may find, even with your theoretical "all-didacticism" game,
>that players are so conditioned to look for the winning ending, they will
>construct one with whatever materials you give them, even if the notions
>of winning and losing are completely absent from your mind when you design
>the game.
Aside from the part about didacticism (which I addressed above), I think
this is true. Any one game would have to be stupendous and powerful in some
way to singlehandedly overcome this conditioning. It can only be truly
overcome with time (reverse conditioning).
And I don't mean to sound like the win/loss dichotomy is a bad thing, or
that players have been "brainwashed" into zombies chanting "Win! Lose! Win!
Lose!" :-) Far from it. Neither way is inherently better; I'm just
interested in non-win/loss games because I personally haven't seen as many of
them.
>The culture of IF, at the moment, is such that even authors
>who want to create a work of interactive literature with sophisticated,
>ambiguous multiple endings have little alternative but to refer to their
>work as a game and its consumers as players.
An interesting point. It reminds me of a discussion here some months ago
(I think) about what to call, um, shall we say, examples of the IF medium :-).
The predominant term is obviously "game", but there was also some talk about
calling them "works" or some such, or even creating some entirely new term.
>"Solving" and "winning" are
>the dominant paradigms in many players' approaches to IF, and if your work
>wants to defy those paradigms, it had better be *damn* good, much better
>than a work that stays within them.
True. But, referring to the above comments about the player
self-determining his reaction to the game, and also noting that "good" is a
subjective term, which may mean different things to different people, one could
also say that the author's intention to "defy those paradigms" may be totally
invisible to the player.
So it seems like whether the author "intends" to do a "paradigm shift"
might not even be relevant. If it's the player who determines how he reacts to
the game, the author's intention may not reach that player, or may reach him in
a warped or altered fashion, affecting his reaction.
Of course, by saying that I seem to imply that the author is shooting in
the dark, blindly trying to grasp the shadowy player and imprint some
proscribed meaning on his brain, which I think is hardly the case. When I
write games, I certainly don't chew my nails in worry, wondering, "How will
this affect the player's reaction?" I just write whatever I think works best
for me, and hope that my intention can, in some degree, reach the player.
>Something's not completely worked out, or a little askew, or something, in
>that last bunch of statements I made, but I don't have time at the moment
>to figure it out. Any help anyone can offer would be appreciated -- I'm
>sort of thinking out loud here.
Actually, I found those statements very profound and thought-provoking.
In fact, you've left ME feeling like MY statements were not completely worked
out, which is great, because it made me reconsider my thoughts more carefully.
This is becoming a very interesting discussion. :-)
k denton
BrenBarn wrote:
> But, for once, I am not just going to TALK about this (gasp!). Yes,
> strange as it may seem, I am actually WRITING a game with multiple endings,
> which are not divided into "wins" and "losses", but many intermediate and
> utterly different types.
> When this game is released, then you'll see! :-) (And, of course, now
> that I've mentioned it, it'll probably wind up being a piece of crap, making me
> look like more of a blowhard than I already am, but that's life. . .:-)
Well then, I guess I can consider you the competition.... The game I've been
working on uses a few branching storylines, and features very heavy character
interaction. Instead of the "Curses" style avoidance of creatures with the LIFE
attribute, the first two "scenes" are built almost completely on interaction and
dialouge, with the courses of the game often determined by how you interact with a
given character.
I started on this a few weeks ago, and (needless to say) I don't think it'll be
done in time for the compo...
-tom
k denton
Paul O'Brian wrote:
>
> Anyway, you may find, even with your theoretical "all-didacticism" game,
> that players are so conditioned to look for the winning ending, they will
> construct one with whatever materials you give them, even if the notions
> of winning and losing are completely absent from your mind when you design
> the game. I think this is part and parcel of IF's history as computer
> games. The culture of IF, at the moment, is such that even authors
> who want to create a work of interactive literature with sophisticated,
> ambiguous multiple endings have little alternative but to refer to their
> work as a game and its consumers as players. "Solving" and "winning" are
> the dominant paradigms in many players' approaches to IF, and if your work
> wants to defy those paradigms, it had better be *damn* good, much better
> than a work that stays within them.
>
One of the things which has attracted my young mind to the IF communitiy is that,
as a medium, it is all but dead and entering that phase of its lifespan where it
becomes almost purely artistic and experimental. Seems like a good place to
experiment with alternate storytelling techniques.
A similar shift can be seen in any "obsoleted" medium, film being one of the most
versatile examples. When film first arrived, it consisted almost purely of very
short features such as "Man Standing on Head," which were purely technical
endeavours, as the technologies involved in creating a film were very, very
primitive. After film became somewhat more established and easily used, the movie
houses opened, and enjoyed a long reign as a news source. The fiction work of this
period is mostly lacking in quality, (I, for one, refuse to admit Citizen Kane as
the greatest film of all time) aiming mostly for the affections of the mainstream
audience, as network television does today. And indeed, once television came into
its own, film began a long road of decline, which ended in bankruptcy for the great
majority of the smaller houses and came very close to the complete death of the
medium. And then, somewhere in the late sixties (Kubrick) but mostly in the
seventies did the directors begin to realize that film had become free of all of
the restraints placed on the mainstream media. Normal people didn't go to the
movies anymore, so there was no need to bend over trying to placate their tastes.
Similarly, the director suddenly found himself able to do things in his films which
would have been completely unacceptable back when the movie-house was as much of a
public meeting house as anything else. And so along comes Jaws and Star Wars to
bring film back to the masses, with an edge of experimentalism which was before
largely impossible.
And this is where IF stands today: in the midst of a steady decline, and
controlled by (what seem to me) to be very tehnically competent and creative
people. Exactly the sort of people who can make great works out of a dying mass.
It's also a great place to just experiment, turn something out, and see how people
react. The compo seems to provide a somewhat captive audience...
I think that, should a major rennaisance occur, IF will need a couple of technical
facelifts, as has been discussed further up in this thread. Although, to add to the
tutorial debate, I think it would be GREAT if we could make some sort of "push" in
the Palm Computing area. Palm is a perfect media for IF to get involved in. The
graphics are still shit and it relies completely on a text interface. If we could
get, say, "Curses" out to more of the people who use these devices, I think we'd
see a lot more people hangin' out with us on these boards (for better or for
worse).
-tom
BrenBarn
>working on uses a few branching storylines, and features very heavy character
>interaction. Instead of the "Curses" style avoidance of creatures with the
>LIFE
>attribute, the first two "scenes" are built almost completely on interaction
>and
>dialouge, with the courses of the game often determined by how you interact
>with a
>given character.
:-). Actually, although I'd REALLY REALLY love to gush about my work in
progress, I think I'll rein myself in until I actually release the game. I
have a tendency to get carried away and to preach more than I practice, which
means I might paint myself into a corner with my tongue as the brush.
Suffice it to say that I see similarities between my game and your
description of your game. I look forward to playing this masterpiece! :-)
>I started on this a few weeks ago, and (needless to say) I don't think it'll
>be
>done in time for the compo...
Oooh, geez, me too. I "started" the game a few months ago, but I only
really started working in earnest about a month ago. I'm moving pretty fast,
though (roughly 750 lines of code written in the past week and a half). . .
I'd really be stoked if I could get it done in time for the Comp.
Which means I'd better stop writing this and get to work on it. :-) I
await your game with bated breath.
BrenBarn
>the greatest film of all time)
>Normal people didn't go to the
>movies anymore, so there was no need to bend over trying to placate their
>tastes.
Hey, I go to the -- oh yeah, you're right. :-)
>And this is where IF stands today: in the midst of a steady decline, and
>controlled by (what seem to me) to be very tehnically competent and creative
>people. Exactly the sort of people who can make great works out of a dying
>mass.
>It's also a great place to just experiment, turn something out, and see how
>people
>react.
You're right. It's really great having such a diverse and open-ended
environment to work (actually, play) in.
Trevor Barrie
Arcum Dagsson <Arcum_...@hushmail.c.o.m> wrote:
>> >I swear, if I read one more time that Myst killed text adventures, I'm
>> >going to instigate some killing myself.
>>
>> So have you, in fact, read that somewhere? Or is this just a roundabout
>> way of saying that reading it even once is enough to set you off?
>
>to the following article:
>
>< http://gamecenter.com/Features/Exclusives/Deadburied/index.html>
>
>Presumably, that or in the Slashdot comments is where he read it...
I haven't checked Slashdot comments, but note that this article talks
about Myst killing off "adventure games", not "text adventures". It
gives no indication at all that the authours were unaware of the fact
that text adventures were commercially dead long before Myst; they're
talking about graphical adventures.
J. Robinson Wheeler
> A similar shift can be seen in any "obsoleted" medium, film being one of the
> most versatile examples. When film first arrived, it consisted almost purely
> of very short features such as "Man Standing on Head," which were purely
> technical endeavours, as the technologies involved in creating a film were
> very, very primitive. After film became somewhat more established and easily
> used, the movie houses opened, and enjoyed a long reign as a news source. The
> fiction work of this period is mostly lacking in quality, (I, for one, refuse
> to admit Citizen Kane as the greatest film of all time) aiming mostly for the
> affections of the mainstream audience, as network television does today. And
> indeed, once television came into its own, film began a long road of decline,
> which ended in bankruptcy for the great majority of the smaller houses and
> came very close to the complete death of the medium. And then, somewhere in
> the late sixties (Kubrick) but mostly in the seventies did the directors begin
> to realize that film had become free of all of the restraints placed on the
> mainstream media. Normal people didn't go to the movies anymore, so there was
> no need to bend over trying to placate their tastes. Similarly, the director
> suddenly found himself able to do things in his films which would have been
> completely unacceptable back when the movie-house was as much of a public
> meeting house as anything else. And so along comes Jaws and Star Wars to
> bring film back to the masses, with an edge of experimentalism which was
> before largely impossible.
Rather than go point-by-point through this largely erroneous (and myopically
US-centric) summary, correcting and refuting it piecemeal, I'd just like to
ask the collective readership to please not lodge any of this in your head
as an accurate history of filmmaking.
--
J. Robinson Wheeler http://thekroneexperiment.com
whe...@jump.net
Bennett Standeven
"Daniel Barkalow" <iabe...@iabervon.org> wrote in message
news:Pine.LNX.4.21.00082...@iabervon.org...
> Oddly, I can picture So Far as a FP game. I think it would be doable with
> a one-button interface, if you could hold up items and interact with their
> parts. I'm not sure if it would even lose anything in the translation,
> although it likely wouldn't gain anything, either.
>
How would you do the dark region?
R. Alan Monroe
>get, say, "Curses" out to more of the people who use these devices, I think
> we'd
>see a lot more people hangin' out with us on these boards (for better or for
>worse).
This reminds me of those social group size surveys (I've
heard about them only anecdotally, I have no quotable source). The
ones that say the break even point for a social group is about 400
members. More people than that and it loses coherency.
Anyone else heard tales like this?
Have fun
Alan
Jonadab the Unsightly One
> I swear, if I read one more time that Myst killed text adventures, I'm
> going to instigate some killing myself.
That's a new one on me, certainly. Last I knew Myst
appealed to an entirely different kind of person than
text adventures, for the most part.
--
Forward all spam to u...@ftc.gov
Jonadab the Unsightly One
> > Actually, I'm more of the opinion that Myst killed graphical adventures.
>
> That's a much more reasonable position
And also a more humorous one, which is a nice bonus.
Jonadab the Unsightly One
> I've got very little knowledge/opinion on this topic, but out of curiosity,
> what did kill text adventures?
There's that weird timeflow again. Somebody's posting from the
future, and a bleak future it is, apparently.
> I suppose it could be argued that they aren't
> dead (Again, I'm not sure about this but it seems like more text adventures
> have been produced over the last few years, since free compilers became
> available, then in their "heyday"), but they are almost certainly
> commercially dead (or at the very least in a coma). So what did them in?
I suppose what you really mean is that Infocom is dead,
and you wonder what killed it? That's been discussed before.
Cornerstone killed Infocom. I'd tell you to search Deja,
but Deja is for all practical purposes dead, so I'll repeat
that Cornerstone was an attempt at a commercial database,
which soaked up huge amounts of resources and basically
bankrupted the company, and nobody would buy it because
it was produced by a *game* company. If Infocom had skipped
the database and kept producing games they might possibly
still be a viable company today, or at least much more
recently. OTOH, the Specifications of the Z-Machine may
never have been written, nor Inform, nor, quite possibly,
a number of other things.
> while the
> AI in other video games continued to advance, continually surprising and
> amazing gamers (okay, maybe thats an exaggeration in most cases, but there
> are some new games that come out with AI (or illusion thereof) and
> playability that amazes me, and I haven't played a text adventure in ages
> that amazed me with its AI (or illusion thereof), and the playability of
> TA's has remained relatively stagnant).
The AI in Descent II catches me by surprise occasionally. The
stock levels that ship with the game don't show it off very
well, but if you start editing your own levels you start to
see things. Those Diamond Claws are *smart*.
But that's not killing text adventures, because most
people don't even *notice*.
> 3) The major demographic of video game buyers is probably no longer the same
> demographic that would be likely to buy text adventures (which require a
> certain amount of patience, education, and intelligence compared to the
> popular first person shooters of today). Many computer users during TA
> heyday were techies (or wanted to be), or at least geeks/nerds (excuse me
> for the poor choice of words, absolutely no insult intended), whereas now,
> the techies are probably (again, I have no hard stats on this) vastly
> outnumbered and underrepresented in the gamers market.
This is true if you're looking at a percentage of the total market,
but the total number of techies is greatly increased; consequently,
following your reasoning, the market for text adventures is if
anything larger than ever.
> Anyway, I don't know how much any of the above factors are involved, they're
> just some ideas I'm throwing around. But I am interested in some insight as
> to why text adventures have "died".
You mean why they don't make money? There are too many good
ones available free -- nobody has time to play all of those,
so why pay for yet more? But because they're free does not
mean they're dead. Are RMS and Linus Torvalds killing Unix?
Jonadab the Unsightly One
> Also, the LucasArts website indicates that
> the game will be "in 3D". Thus, they seem to be continuing the tradition of
> the story and character part of graphical IF, but are moving in new directions
> as far as graphics and interface.
I'm just waiting for hardware to get to the point where a
game can reasonably raytrace its 3D graphics in realtime
and still get decent FPS on a computer a human being
can afford.
Jonadab the Unsightly One
> Oh yeah, how cool would it have been, though, to see whether or not the
> Infocom crew could have hacked it in another genre. WHat would the
> Infocom Doom have been like?
It would have been like Descent II, but with a real
actual honest-to-goodness plot and less obvious seams
between the "levels".
Jonadab the Unsightly One
> (I swear, if I read one more time that Britney Spears is a more
> significant historical figure than Gandhi...)
AAAARRRGH!
I'm going to have the above stuck in my head for a long
time, I think, and it's not likely to make me happy.
Joe Mason
A blank screen and 3D sound. "Enter" and "leave" would be tricky, but
manageable with some ingenuity.
The part I think would suffer is the NPC's in the silent city.
Joe
Tina
The thing is, there are a lot of people who just really don't want to
take the time to learn how to do something more complex than pushing a
button, and no amount of good feedback from incorrectly phrased commands
is going to help that. That's obviously not the target audience for games
that require any kind of puzzle-solving, though, and honestly I think
that that is a /part/ (not all) of why adventure games do poorly in sales
in the US: we have a society focussed on finding the quickest, easiest
way to do things, in which businesses are dedicated to finding a way to
dumb down stuff to the 'one big button' level.
But it's possible that a well-written, non-condescending, good examples
and parallels to real life guide to IF would help broaden its audience,
and actually now I'm thinking about it and wondering if writing a
Dummies' like guide would be a good hobby for me, since I'm never
actually going to produce a /game/. After all, strategy games /do/ sell
well, and they can be fairly complex -- but they generally have some very
well-written guides.
I shall have to think on this further.
Andrew Plotkin
No, and while there is a limit, I think it varies hugely depending on the
social structure. The geek club I was in in college couldn't have gotten
anywhere near 400, for example.
Newsgroups have their own nature -- one important point is that there are
regulars, occasional posters, and lurkers.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
Kathleen M. Fischer
Paul O'Brian <obr...@ucsu.colorado.edu> wrote:
> Anyway, you may find, even with your theoretical "all-didacticism"
game,
> that players are so conditioned to look for the winning ending, they
will
> construct one with whatever materials you give them, even if the
notions
> of winning and losing are completely absent from your mind when you
design
> the game.
And if you don't supply what the player perceives as a "satisfying win",
they will send you emails asking you how to obtain it, responding
with "Oh." when you tell them what they got is as good as it gets.
Kathleen (well... I thought it was satisfying when I wrote it)
--
-- The Cove - Best of Landscape, Interactive Fiction Art Show 2000
-- ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/Cove.z5
--
-- Excuse me while I dance a little jig of despair
Daniel Barkalow
> "Playing IF for Dummies", anyone?
>
> The thing is, there are a lot of people who just really don't want to
> take the time to learn how to do something more complex than pushing a
> button, and no amount of good feedback from incorrectly phrased commands
> is going to help that. That's obviously not the target audience for games
> that require any kind of puzzle-solving, though, and honestly I think
> that that is a /part/ (not all) of why adventure games do poorly in sales
> in the US: we have a society focussed on finding the quickest, easiest
> way to do things, in which businesses are dedicated to finding a way to
> dumb down stuff to the 'one big button' level.
There are situations in which the player is interested in solving puzzles,
but not in figuring out how to explain their solution. They might feel
that just picking the right tool, which has an obvious use on an obvious
part of the problem, should be sufficient. Or that the game is insisting
on fiddly details (yes I know the door is locked; when I say north, I mean
to unlock the door with the key I know works, open the door, and then go
north). Or even that the character ought to know how to navigate his
neighborhood without making the player write out a map.
There are lots of ways in which text adventures don't generally reduce all
the non-puzzle aspects to a command to do the obvious thing and a bunch of
story to read. This can lead to the player wishing there was one big
button to get to the next interesting part.
> But it's possible that a well-written, non-condescending, good examples
> and parallels to real life guide to IF would help broaden its audience,
> and actually now I'm thinking about it and wondering if writing a
> Dummies' like guide would be a good hobby for me, since I'm never
> actually going to produce a /game/. After all, strategy games /do/ sell
> well, and they can be fairly complex -- but they generally have some very
> well-written guides.
Partially, I think a guide would be helpful (remove the unintentional
guess-the-verb puzzles, where the right verb is conventional, if you know
text adventures). Partially, I think libraries should support more
higher-level stuff, where the player types what they're trying to do, and
the game treats it as a series of commands to actually carry that out,
stopping where the author intends a part to require thought.
} GO TO SUBWAY
You open the north door, walk through, and close it behind you. You walk
down the stairs and north into your room. You put on your socks and shoes
and take your backpack, first putting in a long-sleeved shirt in case it
gets colder. You walk out into the hall, where you are startled to notice
a tentacle stretching from the living room.
Hall
You are in the second floor hall. The stairs go up to the third floor and
down to the front door. To the north is your room, to the south is the
living room.
There is a thick green tentacle coming from the living room.
}
That is to say, the player types one command for each thing they think of
to do, and may skip detailed instructions if the author and player both
think them to be unnecessary.
Also, the shortcuts have to be documented and simple. If Zarf insists on
pushing one button for "examine", we can hardly expect newbies to be happy
typing it out each time, and there's no way they're going to guess that
they don't have to.
-Iabervon
*This .sig unintentionally changed*
Michael Kinyon
[snip]
> Newsgroups have their own nature -- one important point is that there are
> regulars, occasional posters, and lurkers.
Hmph. This is clearly a troll designed to bring us
r.*.i-f lurkers out in the open. Well, it won't work.
>KILL TROLL WITH ELVEN SWORD
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade goes snicker-snack!
The delurk troll vanishes in a puff of smoke.
*** You have won. ***
You scored 100 points out of 100. Would you like to
FOLLOW-UP, START NEW THREAD, or LURK?
>LURK
Lurking mode on. Thanks for playing Usenet!
MK
*****
Michael Kinyon
Dept. of Mathematics & Computer Science
Indiana University South Bend
South Bend, IN 46634 USA
email: mki...@iusb.edu
www: http://www.iusb.edu/~mkinyon
Paul O'Brian
> Last I knew Myst
> appealed to an entirely different kind of person than
> text adventures, for the most part.
This statement seems to assert that "for the most part," there's no such
thing as a person who likes both text adventures and Myst. This seems to
me, "for the most part", a highly specious assertion.
--
Paul O'Brian obr...@colorado.edu http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~obrian
SPAG is starving! Show your compassion by feeding it your interactive
fiction reviews -- deadline for issue #22 is September 10, 2000.
Billy Harris
> regulars, occasional posters, and lurkers.
HEY! I resemble that remark!
Greg Ewing
>
> This statement seems to assert that "for the most part," there's no such
> thing as a person who likes both text adventures and Myst. This seems to
> me, "for the most part", a highly specious assertion.
For what it's worth, I'm one person who likes both
sorts of adventures. Generally I like anything that
activates my Sense Of Wonder, however it achieves
that.
--
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, University of Canterbury,
Christchurch, New Zealand
To get my email address, please visit my web page:
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg
Stephen Rogers
Greg Ewing wrote:
>
> Paul O'Brian wrote:
> >
> > This statement seems to assert that "for the most part," there's no such
> > thing as a person who likes both text adventures and Myst. This seems to
> > me, "for the most part", a highly specious assertion.
>
> For what it's worth, I'm one person who likes both
> sorts of adventures. Generally I like anything that
> activates my Sense Of Wonder, however it achieves
> that.
>
Ditto.
Jonadab the Unsightly One
> > I envision games where the various outcomes are not specifically designed
> > to make the player feel like he has "won" or "lost", but rather to convey a
> > meaning or message from the author. For example (albeit a strange and
> > arbitrary example), a given ending might be designed to plant in the player's
> > brain the notion that Communism is evil.
>
> This seems to me to be a much worse idea than the win/loss dichotomy. I'd
> rather feel that I have two choices (winning or losing) than feel I have
> one choice (to be preached at by the author by any given ending.) To put
> it another way, I'd rather play a game than read a purely didactic tract.
What if you had several choices, each of which is didactic but
with a different message than the others? So, for example, an
ending which carries the message that Communism is evil, and
a different ending, reachable by different in-game decisions,
which carries the message that Capitalism is evil, and yet
another ending, reachable by yet other actions, which carries
yet another message, and so on? Just a thought.
Or, a sequel to Photopia that carries the message that
simple people just trying to have a good time get too
much flack from evil teetotaling doo-gooders like the
family in Photopia... it could be a difficult thing
to get a lot of readers to feel sympathy toward that
viewpoint, but hey, nobody ever said persuasive writing
was supposed to be easy, right?
Jonadab the Unsightly One
> It's true. But if they have a good story, I often play them again just to
> experience that story. Of course, this philosophy is not as valid for people
> who like tough puzzles (unless they also have poor memories :-).
The Alzheimer's Adventure Association, anyone?
"How did that happen? Huh. I've got this saved game where
my inventory includes a sooty stick. Where did that come from?
and how did I ever solve that stupid problem with the torch?
This is a hard game. I should have written a walkthrough."
Paul O'Brian
> [I wrote:]
> >My own feeling about the various endings in LASH is that while some of
> >them are clearly superior to others, each has its own pros and cons.
> This is pretty much what I was trying to say, but you said it better.
> Replace "LASH" with "a game" and you'll have a pretty good idea of what I was
> attempting to say.
Oh. Well, in that case, I agree with you completely. :)
I think the part that confused me was the thing about "delivering a
message" -- made it sound like the author had some kind of moral to hammer
home. Even if it was a different moral in each ending, that would still
bug me. The idea of different endings that fit various ways of playing the
character, on the other hand, is one I like a lot.
Say, Brendan, this is entirely off the topic, but would you consider
possibly changing your messages to a more standard Usenet format? By this,
I mean (mainly) add attributions for the people you're quoting, and use
line breaks rather than indentations for new paragraphs? Indented
paragraphs are fine on the page, but to my eye they all run together on
the screen, and that makes your messages harder to read carefully.
Jason Peter Brown
"Jonadab the Unsightly One" <jon...@bright.net> wrote in message
news:39a322ec...@news.bright.net...
> "Jason Peter Brown" <x@x.x> wrote:
>
> > I've got very little knowledge/opinion on this topic, but out of
curiosity,
> > what did kill text adventures?
>
> There's that weird timeflow again. Somebody's posting from the
> future, and a bleak future it is, apparently.
I'll assume that we're posting from a relatively similar timeframe, and say
that I wasn't proposing that text adventures are dead or have been killed.
However, I was reacting to the sentence "if I read one more time that Myst
killed text adventures", which can be interpreted to mean "Myst didn't kill
text adventures, but something else did" (which is how I read it), or "Myst
didn't kill text adventures, because they are still alive" (which is not how
i read it). I was simply asking why he thought that text adventures were
dead. Perhaps a misunderstanding on my part.
> > I suppose it could be argued that they aren't
> > dead (Again, I'm not sure about this but it seems like more text
adventures
> > have been produced over the last few years, since free compilers became
> > available, then in their "heyday"), but they are almost certainly
> > commercially dead (or at the very least in a coma). So what did them in?
>
> I suppose what you really mean is that Infocom is dead,
> and you wonder what killed it? That's been discussed before.
> Cornerstone killed Infocom. I'd tell you to search Deja,
> but Deja is for all practical purposes dead, so I'll repeat
> that Cornerstone was an attempt at a commercial database,
> which soaked up huge amounts of resources and basically
> bankrupted the company, and nobody would buy it because
> it was produced by a *game* company. If Infocom had skipped
> the database and kept producing games they might possibly
> still be a viable company today, or at least much more
> recently. OTOH, the Specifications of the Z-Machine may
> never have been written, nor Inform, nor, quite possibly,
> a number of other things.
Well, that's not exactly what I meant. All sorts of text adventures
companies have folded, and many around the same time period. I was wondering
what destroyed their collective commercial viability. For this reason, I am
skeptical that Infocom would have survived much longer, as no one else
seemed to (albeit, none of the other companies were as big as Infocom, so
perhaps Infocom had a better chance of survival if they hadn't dumped
enormous resources into Cornerstone). But there does seem to be some
evidence of a shift in what a majority of gamers demanded from games from
the early nineties onward, and that regardless of what Infocom did with
Cornerstone, text adventures would not keep a company afloat any more.
> The AI in Descent II catches me by surprise occasionally. The
> stock levels that ship with the game don't show it off very
> well, but if you start editing your own levels you start to
> see things. Those Diamond Claws are *smart*.
>
> But that's not killing text adventures, because most
> people don't even *notice*.
I'm not sure that I agree with you that most people don't even notice the AI
in games. Maybe a lot of people don't, but many people do, and more of them
notice the lack of (or poorly implemented) AI. People will notice in a text
adventure when they type:
>ASK JOE ABOUT KEY (that he just gave them)
"I don't know anything about that." says Joe.
that something has gone seriously wrong. They will also notice (if only
subconsciously) that they are thrilled at how well the soldiers in Halflife
seem to organize themselves and hunt them down, and how much they have to do
in order to get themselves from point A to point B safely. Now, in the text
adventure example its not so much AI as poorly programmed SELECT CASE
statements, but to the programming illiterate gamer, the more inputs the
text adventure responds uniquely to, the more it seems to exhibit
intelligence, or at the very least, the more enjoyable the game becomes. If
you have a program that can respond to natural language, then you have
something that would really impress gamers. This however, is much more
difficult than programming an AI to chase a player down in a 3D action game.
>
> > 3) The major demographic of video game buyers is probably no longer the
same
> > demographic that would be likely to buy text adventures (which require a
> > certain amount of patience, education, and intelligence compared to the
> > popular first person shooters of today). Many computer users during TA
> > heyday were techies (or wanted to be), or at least geeks/nerds (excuse
me
> > for the poor choice of words, absolutely no insult intended), whereas
now,
> > the techies are probably (again, I have no hard stats on this) vastly
> > outnumbered and underrepresented in the gamers market.
>
> This is true if you're looking at a percentage of the total market,
> but the total number of techies is greatly increased; consequently,
> following your reasoning, the market for text adventures is if
> anything larger than ever.
Well, you are quite probably correct. This is not so much *my* reasoning, as
just a quick idea I threw out. However, do you think techies have increased
proportionally to non-techie gamers? I am also wondering if techie gamers
themselves would be as interested (on average) in text adventures today as
they were years ago. After all, the technical wizardry behind text
adventures is no longer as impressive as it was in 1985. Right there, you
lose many of the techies who are solely interested in the latest
gizmos/technology for their gaming pleasure.
I also wonder what percentage of us frequent this newsgroup, in a large
part due to nostalgia. If the numbers are sufficiently high, then the threat
to text adventures could be quite great, as they could die with us (or if
our interest as a collective ever wanes). Is there much "new blood" involved
in text adventures today?
> > Anyway, I don't know how much any of the above factors are involved,
they're
> > just some ideas I'm throwing around. But I am interested in some insight
as
> > to why text adventures have "died".
>
> You mean why they don't make money? There are too many good
> ones available free -- nobody has time to play all of those,
> so why pay for yet more? But because they're free does not
> mean they're dead. Are RMS and Linus Torvalds killing Unix?
Sure, I was talking strictly commercially. I'm quite (personally) convinced
that there is more text adventure production going on right now then there
has ever been during their commercial "heyday" (and more exciting production
at that). And you're reasoning sounds bang on to me. There are too many good
ones freely available to play :)
And I'm quite thankful for it.
JPB
BrenBarn
>message" -- made it sound like the author had some kind of moral to hammer
>home. Even if it was a different moral in each ending, that would still
>bug me. The idea of different endings that fit various ways of playing the
>character, on the other hand, is one I like a lot.
Well, I think either one could be useful. The idea is that each ending
tells the player something. Whether that something is a moral message, a piece
of the story, or something totally different is up to the author. Although I
don't think I'd particularly "like" playing a game that preached at me every
time I died :-).
>Say, Brendan, this is entirely off the topic, but would you consider
>possibly changing your messages to a more standard Usenet format? By this,
>I mean (mainly) add attributions for the people you're quoting, and use
>line breaks rather than indentations for new paragraphs? Indented
>paragraphs are fine on the page, but to my eye they all run together on
>the screen, and that makes your messages harder to read carefully.
Well, this is really more of an additional black mark against me than an
excuse, but I'm still using AOL to read my newsgroups (it won't let me use any
other newsreader). The AOL quoting facility, for some diabolical reason, does
not insert attributions, so I have to cut-and-paste them myself, which
apparently I got away with for a while. But I'll do my best, now that you've
pointed it out, to remember to add those.
As for paragraph breaks. . . One way to put it would be, "I like an
indent." :-) For me, line breaks do what indents apparently do for you: they
make the paragraphs seem insufficiently distinct. However, your point is
valid, and as a compromise, I'll try to use both styles in tandem (as you
should see in this message, if AOL has no more tricks up its sleeve). This way
we can all be happy (although it's going to make my rants even longer than they
already are :-). Anyway, the last thing I want is to have my message obscured
by typography, so thanks for giving me a heads-up on that.
Ironically, my response to the off-topic part of your message was longer
than that to the on-topic part. Ah, well :-).
foobler
where they added to, rather than subtracted from, a game. Clearly, Wizard
and the Princess did nothing to make us think that graphics was the way to
go. But we did (mostly Marc and I) see that graphics were in our future and
started having discussions about where that might take us.
As a result of these discussions and heavy lobbying by Marc to the powers
that be, I headed up a small but expensive research project designed to
develop a machine independent graphics language (GIL) with Marc Blank's
enthusiastic blessing. The small group I put together spent a lot of time
analyzing and researching games, puzzles and activities, designed Fooblitzky
on paper, then started on the implementation. Fooblitzky was partially meant
as a proof of concept and a test of GIL.
GIL/GIP was implemented by Poh C. Lim, an interesting story for a later
time. I think Moriarty coded the Amiga GIP interpreter, but that's a little
hazy.
When Fooblitzky was finished, we immediately noticed the game was truly a
game and not a puzzle, that people in the company were playing it during
their lunch hours and having tournaments... in essence, we had succeeded on
2 levels: The design had been successful; and the implementation was
compelling enough to suck time out of key personnel.
Our problem was with marketing: marketing something different; and marketing
something different with a sales rate that was not increasing as quickly as
it had. At the time, with sales of text games no longer on the huge upswing,
the fear from some in marketing was that launching a graphics game could
further erode sales of text games. Then there was the issue of branding:
people would be buying Fooblitzky thinking they were buying a new text
adventure. This I found absurd as well as offensive. The marketing
department's excuses and my whining and anger at their lack of seeing things
my way, rationally, or any way except the CYOA-way, ended in contributing
toward my leaving. Nonetheless, my statement that "our customers are smart
enough to read the word 'graphics' on the box" went unnoticed/uncomment on
by the marketeers.
The market for text games eroded due to the ever increasing quality of
graphics presentations on machines. As they got faster, bigger, etc...
graphics became more appealing/hotter. It had nothing to do with any one
product like Myst.
I would like to also point out that as computers and media have sped up our
culture, the activity of reading has become a less appealing method of
getting information than through visual means. Processing of visual
information is significantly faster and required for surviving in today's
world. This is part of the mutually-supportive feedback loop which will end
with reading books being a very niche activity.
-- Mike
mailto:mbe...@adelphia.net
"Jason Peter Brown" <x@x.x> wrote in message
news:BElp5.16944$Si1.2...@news20.bellglobal.com...
Jonadab the Unsightly One
> Not to pick on you, but this is exactly the attitude I was talking
> about. Frankly, it's elitist. Just because the opposite tack can be done
> badly doesn't mean that it's not worth doing. Plug and play interfaces
> are an absolute godsend to millions of people, when they work. And they
> work a lot of the time.
In my experience, PNP works maybe 70% of the time *if* you're willing
to uninstall and reinstall a few times. If you require it to work
right the first time the percentage drops to something like 50%,
which, when I was in gradeschool, was outright failure. PNP is like
DWIM. Exactly like DWIM. When it works, it's impressive. When it
fails, it is also impressive, albeit in a slightly different way.
Don't get me wrong, the *idea* of Plug and Play is a good one.
The problem is that hardware manufactures think, "Oh, it's plug
and play, so my instructions can read 'Windows will automatically
detect and install your hardware'" -- with no indication what to
do in the inevitable cases where that doesn't happen. And the
OS doesn't help this any by failing in many cases to provide
a mechanism to manaully alter the settings of the device. (It
is not necessary to enumerate OSes which differ in this respect;
most of you who care know of one.)
Getting back to topic...
The idea of providing a player with a simple interface to a
game is a good one, if it is done correctly. But there is a
difference between providing a simple interface and limiting
the user to a simple interface.
Now, you're going to balk. "If the game can be played through
with just the simple click-click-click interface, who would
type in commands?" I only have a partial and unsatisfactory
answer, I'm afraid, but here's my reasoning: there's a
compromise to be had. click-click-click is probably simpler
than necessary, and at the other end "Quickly stack the
bricks, red on yellow on green, on the counter next to the
medicine bottle, using only the left hand" is needlessly
complex. I think there's a lot of room for a game to
provide both a simple interface (e.g., "skin cat") and some
more complex functionality (e.g., "soak the sponge in the
fish oil, then toss it into the potato peeler")
> But I'm not convinced the only solution to translating user input into IF
> commands is the modern parser. We just haven't really attacked the
> problem, because of the attitude we posess. It's a shame, because we're
> the ones with the technical expertise to actually do something about it.
Helmet-and-gloves VR could probably offer some interesting
possibilities, but as yet it's FAR too expensive for most
games to even think about. Voice recognition may be closer,
and I think as good as our parsers are they could be much
much better.
> For example--here's an idea I came up with when writing my above
> post. What would happen if you took the Inform library, and re-wrote the
> debugging messages in plain English? And what if you set up a new window
> (say, in glk or some such) with a friendly interface that would contain
> all this information, explaining to the user what their commands were
> doing and how they were being interpreted by the computer? Essentially,
> I'm saying: Drastically increase the *feedback* the user gets when
> playing the game. Teach them how to play by showing them what all their
> commands were doing.
Interesting notion...
> If a company like Infocom were working on this stuff, an idea like that
> would have been siezed upon, and experimented with. This isn't
> necessarily better or worse than the current state of IF--a company
> perhaps wouldn't feel as free to experiment as we have--just different, is
> all.
I bet if Microsoft hired seven people from this group to write
IF, they could probably make it turn a substantial profit.
Assuming they advertised it well. Whether that would be good
for the hobby is another question.
Actually, though, a company like Outrage might do better things
wih IF... really, if you took a 3D first-person shooter engine
and replaced the weapons with a dozen "actions", added an
inventory screen, and reworked the NPCs so they could do things
besides attack... there are all sorts of interesting
possibilities. Okay, it wouldn't be the same as textual IF,
but it might make for some good games anyway, if the story
and puzzles and characters were given as much weight as the
graphics and engine.
iands...@my-deja.com
"Giles Boutel" <gbo...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> I wonder how much of the (alleged) death of adventure games in general
is
> due to the fact that once you finish them they're not exactly
replayable.
> In fact, each game's longevity is almost entirely dependant upon it's
> ability to frustrate your efforts. RPGs, which could be considered to
have
> the same innate drawback, at least extend the time it takes to
complete them
> through numerous combat and travel elements, and FPS games always have
the
> challenge of shooting stuff (not much variety, but at least it's still
a bit
> of a challenge). Adventure games, even the prettiest, are almost
always
> CONA (complete once - never again, or a least not for a couple of
years).
>
I beg to differ - though I am blessed with a remarkable memory - ideal
for playing IF
My memory is so poor that I am playing Zork I again for the third time
in 3 years
> Just a (not terribly considered) thought - and obviously not one
applicable
> to everyone, or this group wouldn't exist.
>
> -Giles