From: dmb@xbar.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: So you want to write a text adventure?
Date: 17 Nov 1992 07:15:38 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
NNTP-Posting-Host: xbar.ai.mit.edu

In article <41084@sdcc12.ucsd.edu> djohnson@cs.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson) writes:
>[I would give TADS away for free.]

This *is* an emotional argument, but that doesn't make it entirely
off-limits herem does it?  Anyway, you can talk all you want about what
you *might* do, but I've personally come to see people who decide to
charge money for their products to be in many ways more generous than
those who don't.  When you charge enough money for something to justify
spending time on it, more time will get spent on it.  And the
documentation will be better, end user support will be better, new
features will be added faster, etc. 

I think that TADS will change the text adventure genre, just as the
emergence of sentence parsing changed the genre from Adventure-like
games to Zork-like games.  TADS 2.0 lets you make games that are
essentially as large as you want, and this opens the genre up to almost
anything.  Anyone who thinks that IF has been done to its limit better
read the story about the famous 19th century Patent Office employee.

The point is that I doubt that this event would have happened had Mike
not been able to justify putting in the time required to design,
implement, document, and support a system that consists of over 2
megabytes of source code.  To those who would reply that "if the system
were free, everyone could have chipped in and it would have gotten
done," I invite you to read rec.games.programmer for a few weeks and
watch for the "Ultimate Game Library that Everyone Will Work on and
Will Blow Away all the Commercial Companies Through Mass Cooperation"
thread, which, needless to say, always leads the same place: nowhere.

Lastly (on this topic), users don't respect freeware and shareware.  If
you took some of the top-notch shareware games out there (and I mean
graphics games here too, like Keen IV on the PC) and instead released
them as shareware, the reaction to the products would change
overnight.  These games would no longer be "great, for shareware, but
I'm not paying the $25" but would instead be "Man, you gotta play XYZ,
it's the hottest thing around!"

I can't quantify this in any way, but it's a strong feeling I get from
reading comp.sys.ibm.pc.games, etc. where mediocre to bad commercial
games get TONS of traffic while excellent shareware (especially some of
the recent PC games that have been uploaded) get a "does anyone
play this?" message once a week.  (Note that I'm talking about graphics
games for the most part; pure IF doesn't get traffic because it just
doesn't get much traffic in those groups.)

There have been notable exceptions, like Solarian II and Wolfenstein 3-D,
but such cases are rare.

Many will argue that most shareware is crap.  But tell me what you
think would happen if I wrote an IF game that was blatantly far
superior to any Infocom game (assuming this were even possible given
current technology) and released it as freeware.  I have a strong
suspicion that people would still cite the Infocoms as the best IF ever
written (as is the case now) and would largely write off or ignore
my freeware game.

(Note: This is not bitching about my personal experiences with
shareware, just my observations.)

>Yep.  Better than spending years on a similar system in order to get
>something people could use.  Right now, TADS and any adventures
>people have written in TADS (even adventures people want to give
>away for free) are *useless* to me and many other people.

This will become a moot point in the near future.  The system *will*
get ported to Unix and to the Amiga once 2.0 is released.  My
impression is that Mike didn't want people to port 1.X since 2.0 was
just around the corner.  So don't give up hope.  There are certain
factions that *very much* want to see their games run under Unix,
AmigaOS, and any other OS that can display text.  (We won't mention any
names, but they would even consider a port to Acme BogOs.)

>(However, it *always* seems to be that case that whenever people
>ask about good adventure writing systems, TADS is always touted,
>even though it won't run on most machines)

In terms of numbers of installed machines in the world, that's a
misguided comment.  You can fantasize all you want about a Unix-ruled
world, but there are an estimated 80-100 million DOS machines out
there, and another 12-20 million macs.  Common sense may side with you,
but the numbers don't.  When you're in a university setting it seems
like Unix is all there is.  But Joe Average Computer User is very
likely to have a PC.

Dave Baggett
--
dmb@ai.mit.edu           MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory                  
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