From: mollems@wkuvx1.bitnet
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: The trend in adventure games
Date: 1 Oct 92 14:37:08 CDT
Followup-To: rec.games.int-fiction
Organization: Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY

In article <28661@life.ai.mit.edu>, dmb@case.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett) writes:
> In article <1992Sep30.104653.2811@wkuvx1.bitnet> mollems@wkuvx1.bitnet writes:
>>              Mayhap we should go the OTHER way and try and write an
>>interactive "world" of sorts, where you can try anything you want, as
>>long as you're willing to pay the consequences.  That would be a
>>monumental task indeed, almost a virtual reality issue. 

> "Mayhap?"  :-)
 
Hey, now, let's not get personal here... :-)

> The problem with the "virtual reality" idea is that the game would be
> hideously boring because it would have no plot.  If the author has a
> plot (or plots) s/he will by definition end up forcing some
> situations.  The idea that a game in which you could "just do anything
> you wanted" would be fun (or computationally feasible) is totally
> unrealistic.  (For one thing, it's an "AI-complete" problem, in that
> we'd need to "solve AI" to do it.)

That wasn't quite the point... I was merely taking the statement made
by a poster that he wanted to "do whatever he wanted" and taking it to
its logical extension.  I would say that the "world" has a plot --
each of us is faced with a million and one different "puzzles" each
day, and we solve them (or not) in any of a billion ways.  I'm not
recommending that in a computer game, since we get more than enough of
it out of real life... which is why we play the games in the first
place.

> If the game designer plots the game at all, you won't be able to do
> "just anything," and sometimes this means you might get some lame
> excuse from the program, e.g., "Gosh, the forest is just *too* thick to
> allow travel in any direction but north and south."  But this isn't a
> bad thing -- it's just a not-so-subtle hint that you won't be following
> the plot (i.e., making progress through the story) if you do what
> you're trying to do.  (One could argue that you should be able to
> read a novel backwards and get a different story, but the fact that
> the pages are numbered in a particular order is a not-so-subtle hint
> that you wouldn't get much out of reading them in the wrong order.  Yet
> we don't complain about this!)

I agree, but once again the parallel between a novel and an IF game is
close but not exact -- in the novel you are restricted completely to
the next page.  In a good IF game, there is an overriding plot, yes,
but having to bop from point A to point B to point C to... with no
possible variations leads to a kind of linear stagnation.  Flexibility
is the key here; if you recall some of the old Infocom propaganda,
they harped that their games were never the same story for two people,
because each person would approach the story in a different manner. 
Obviously, there has to be a plot, else there is no game; however,
that plot need not be rigidly defined, forcing the player to crawl
down a tunnel until he gets to the end where BINGO!  everything is
resolved in one fiery burst of textual glory.

> To think that this kind of constraint can be done away with is to
> misunderstand the fundamental elements of the genre, IMHO, which are
> the same as they are in traditional fiction: plot, characterization,
> setting, theme, climax, etc..

You are right, but they have to be implemented in a slightly different
way.  The trick is to get the player into the plot and keep him moving
along without him realizing that you're "herding" him from place to
place -- so that after the game is finished, he can sit back with
satisfaction that HE did all the work, NOT the game itself.

>>Then again, games like _Suspended_ force the player to think in a
>>whole new way.
> 
> And *that's* the potential of the genre: exploration of themes that are
> tremendously difficult in traditional fiction.  Consider an IF game
> (work?) written from the standpoint of a retarded person.  I.e., you
> control or "are" someone with a decidedly different view of the world.
> Attempts to explore this within the confines of conventional fiction
> tend to be very difficult to follow (e.g., Faulkner's _The Sound and
> the Fury_), but could perhaps be clearer in an interactive setting.  As
> always, the limitation with IF is that we've barely made a dent in
> solving the central problem: making machines that can *reason* about
> some (potentially artificial) environment.

The machine doesn't necessarily have to reason; the PLAYER does.  The
machine has to respond to the player, and that can be simulated by the
author to a great extent.  If we put too much pressure on the program,
and it comes through, soon the computers will be writing all the IF
and we'll be out of a job :-)
 
> 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, CS Department, Western Kentucky University
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction