From: dmb@lf.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: The trend in adventure games
Date: 28 Sep 92 05:29:14 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

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.

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."  Glitz sells very well, and game
designers have to eat.  The problem with interactive fiction these days
is a matter of marketing -- there isn't any.  There's a small but very
fanatical user base out there; it's just that no mainstream company
wants to be associated with anything but the "cutting edge" of
graphics, sound, virtual reality object oriented artificially
intelligent graphical user interface technology, etc.  1/2 :-)

>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?

You can still get interactive fiction; it's just harder to find because
it's no longer mainstream.  Not only that but text games have the
potential to be much more complex since we have a lot more memory
available.  IF games can now really be novel-sized.

>What's happening? Do we, the adventure gaming public, actually prefer
>these dinosaurs of graphical adventures to the enjoyable text-based
>adventures of our younger days? How much longer will we continue to
>shell out our hard-earned money for a $50.00 adventure game, only
>to discover that it is trash?

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.

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.)

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.

Dave Baggett
--
dmb@ai.mit.edu           MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory                  
ADVENTIONS: interactive fiction (text adventures) for the 90's!
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