From: librik@cory.Berkeley.EDU (David Librik)
Subject: Re: The trend in adventure games
Organization: University of California, at Berkeley
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 00:50:22 GMT

mollems@wkuvx1.bitnet writes:

>In article <28441@life.ai.mit.edu>, dmb@lf.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett) writes:
>> 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 this is unfair; there's more to it than that.  Creating real
characterization, themes, sub-plots, and suggestions of greater profundity
(both "game depth" and "philosophical depth") is much, much harder in
Adventure games than in stories.  Even the best Adventure creation systems
(like TADS) don't make it less than an utter pain in the butt.

If I write a story and want to give a character some psychological depth,
I can choose what she says as the story progresses.  But Adventures are
driven by an input-and-response scheme that makes specifying character
behavior difficult.  Robert Abernathy the Adventure Wizard (in UU2) is
hardly a figure from Dostoievsky, but I imagine he took a good deal of
code just to circulate around and make random witty comments.

In my TADS game, I wanted Leya (a woman you rescue near the end of the game)
to have some simple behavior patterns: she was bothered by violence -- the
game is full of necessary but unpleasant activities -- though she eventually
becomes somewhat resigned to it.  Her responses, and general attitude towards
you (used to determine certain reactions to commands), would be based on a
simple model of "current mindset."  Unfortunately, this sort of thing is
near impossible to do in any straightforward way.  The techniques of a
writer's craft don't help you any, because Real Writers don't spend their
time trying to come up with algorithms and canned responses for a hundred
unanticipated commands.  In the end, I had to fall back on the Old I.F.
Standard, the well-placed comment: a few remarks at appropriate times (i.e.
in response to appropriate actions) sketch out a metal picture for the reader.
(It's a bit like Chinese art: a few perfectly-placed brush strokes have to
take the place of naturalism in representation.  You see a few squiggles, but
your mind thinks "distant, inaccessible line of mountains.")

But I don't think a more "pre-fabricated" Adventure development system is
the answer.  The good thing about TADS is that it lets you get down and
specify _exactly_ what you want the game to do: that is, you program it.
An Acme "BILD-A-PERZONALITY" kit would only work if it were so constructed
as to let the programmer override any defaults, and still have the expressive
power to describe character behavior.  In TADS, at least, it would be nice
to have some way to encapsulate _within the Actors_ their reactions to
"external" events.  But what is an "external" event is hard to say ...

- David Librik
librik@cory.Berkeley.EDU