From: mollems@wkuvx1.bitnet
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: The trend in adventure games
Date: 28 Sep 92 17:37:12 GMT
Organization: Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY

In article <28441@life.ai.mit.edu>, dmb@lf.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett) writes:
> In article <Wcz-7m#@engin.umich.edu> positron@engin.umich.edu (Jonathan Scott Haas) writes:
>>I'm starting this thread to talk about the type of game that seems
>>to be the norm today. You know the type... big on graphics, big on
>>disk space, short on puzzles, short on executable commands.

If you don't know the type, just pick up a copy of King's Quest V or
Leisure Suit Larry V.  When Sierra got rid of their "parser" they got
rid of 95% of the challenging puzzles.  The best game they have done
recently was Conquests of the Longbow, and that gets points for story,
NOT interface or puzzles.

> The conventional wisdom (which I don't have any evidence against) is
> that people now judge text-oriented games as "primitive computer games"
> rather than "sophisticated fiction."

I think that part of what happened was all these incredible Super
Awesome Lookatthisresolutiongeewhizitsincredible VGA adapters came
out, people bought them, and then looked at text adventures and said
"gosh, I have this amazing adapter, I want a game that USES it since I
paid $1000 for it..." and the game companies said, "well, you'll have
to sacrifice plot, puzzles, and interface to have it, but we'll make
it if you'll buy it..." and the public said "Great!  Now my computer
and my televsion can be just the same!  I'll take 20!  The less
actual work my imagination has to do, the happier I am!!!"  :-(

>>What ever happened to the good ol' days, when fantastically
>>complex, intricate adventures ran easily on the Commodore 64, with its
>>feeble 40K (or so) of RAM and its 100K floppy disks? Are the improved
>>graphics worth it?

No, no, no, no, and NO.  Anyone who disagrees, should become a network
television executive.

> You can get shareware text adventures for which the registration fee is
> ten dollars (US).  Yet the vast majority of people who play them won't
> register.  (For those of you who are ready to bitch about shareware
> authors bitching, please take this as a data point and not an attempt
> to make you feel guilty.)  Unfortunately, it seems that there are a lot
> more people who bemoan the fate of their favorite genre than are
> willing to do much to support it.  Again, not a criticism, just an
> informed observation.

One point which seems to have been left out is that one of the best
facets of IF is that you become a character in a computerized novel. 
Today's games want you to be a character in a computerized MOVIE.  The
whole difference between a novel and a movie is that in the novel, the
screen is inside your mind.  It's not a coincidence that movies made
from books are NEVER better than the book, and those who read and
loved the book are always disappointed, because to cram 400 pages of
text into a 2 and 1/2 hour visual display while preserving the
integrity of the book is simply impossible.  The same thing has
happened here.  Would anyone who has played a game like Zork II enjoy
a new version of the game that used today's new amazing graphics?  I
would hate it, because I don't like someone else's vision of what the
characters and scenes should look like.  The same thing has happened
here -- we've sacrificed the novels for the movies in computer games,
and it sucks.

> Infocom established many of the basics of the genre, but they left an
> unimaginable amount of variation totally unexplored (in many cases
> because they were at the limits of 8-bit machines).  Things like
> intelligent actor planning, text generation, etc. haven't ever been
> tried to any great extent, not to mention the whole spectrum of themes
> you find in conventional literature that have no current counterparts
> in the interactive fiction genre.  (For example, there isn't even a
> single work of interactive fiction with a tragic hero in it.)

You might notice that in order to create a game such as you describe,
one would have to be a real author.  Today's games are written by
programming whizzes who may or may not be actually able to write. 
Companies like Origin that have script teams and programming teams
make the games, but I believe that there are less and less real
WRITERS in the world today.
 
> I think tools like TADS make experimentation within the genre much
> easier than it was ten years ago, but surprisingly we still aren't
> seeing many people produce interactive fiction games.  Perhaps such
> tools just take a while to catch on.

I think that tools like that do make it easier, but I think that the
true problem is that making an IF game is a monumental task, and too
much of today's computer gaming population is more inclined to want
whiz-bang graphics than a REAL game.
 
> Dave Baggett
> --
> dmb@ai.mit.edu           MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory                  
> ADVENTIONS: interactive fiction (text adventures) for the 90's!
> dmb@ai.mit.edu *** Compu$erve: 76440,2671 *** GEnie: ADVENTIONS

-- M. Sean Molley