Why First Person Shooters Beat Text Adventure Games

einstein writes "Old Man Murray has this commentary on why the adventure game genre lost out to titles like Doom, Quake, and why players would "rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories..." also provides an interesting look into the eyes of an adventure game writer." Ah, Old Man Murray - some of the funniest reading out there, in my book.

Comments

Puzzles versus Games

[Tony Shepps]

I love games. I hate puzzles.

Text adventures are not games; they are puzzles. Games cannot be solved, only won.

Single-player FPSes are puzzles that are so intricately molded that you can't tell they are puzzles. There is typically one solution ("kill the boss!"), but hundreds of ways to get to that solution ("Let's just use the pea-shooter this time!"). The more interesting single-player FPSes hide the nature of the puzzle by improving the AI to the point where you can't see any obvious patterns.

Other single-player games become too puzzle-like when the AI is crap. In various incarnations of EA Sports' NHL series, for example, the game is fun until you find one type of shot that always works for a goal. At that point, you have "solved" the "game" because the goalie bites on your deke move (or whatever) every time.

Multi-player computer games are GAMES. And in my very extremely humble opinion, gamers graduate to the point where computer AI is no longer interesting and the only solution is to add humans.

This is why the consoles must eventually be netted; not because the net will become utterly ubiquitous, but because AIs will always be harder to make interesting than other humans.
--

the Doom adventure game

[hugg]

>look
You are in a texture-mapped, shadow-mapped, Bezier curved hallway. There are obviously a lot of polygons being pushed here. Through the volumetric fog you see a pink monster.

>i
You are carrying:
a brass lantern
a shotgun
a pile of junk mail

The pink monster attacks!

>kill monster with all
brass lantern: The pink monster howls with pain!
shotgun: The pink monster howls with pain!
pile of junk mail: Your thrust is blocked, and the pile of junk mail breaks in two!

>hi, monster
The pink monster tips his hat to you.
The pink monster emits a hideous scream, and ends your life with one fell swoop of his gigantic claw!

-- END OF SESSION --

Re:Zork, et All - Very difficult to solve puzzles

[Mike Schiraldi]

Imagine that you had never heard of a babel fish, or what it does -- how the hell are you supposed to know that, in order to advance in the game, you have to enter the command 'PUT FISH IN EAR'?

(spoiler ahead)

You never have to enter that command. There's a babel fish dispenser in the room and not much else of interest. You're sitting around with nothing to do, so you try pushing the "Dispense" button.. It shoots out a fish and it goes right into a hole in the wall. So you put your gown on a hook on the wall and try again, and the fish hits the gown, goes down its sleeve, and into a drain. This continues, and eventually, the fish ends up in your ear as the result of a huge Rube Goldberg-style chain reaction. You never have to know it belongs in your ear; it just ends up there.

Plus, your character is carrying a copy of the hitchhikers' guide itself, and you can type
> LOOK UP BABELFISH IN GUIDE
and it will tell you all about them.

You really shouldn't have taken such an authoritative tone with such blatantly incorrect information.
--

Crossover

[dualspeedhub]

You are in a musty cellar. To your north a hole in the floor reveals a secret passage
GO NORTH
You are standing on the edge of a hole which leads down to a secret passage
GO DOWN
You enter the passage. As you proceed along it, a blade suddenly leaps out of the wall at you.
DUCK
Do not understand DUCK
GET DOWN
I Can't do that
CROUCH
You crouch, but your reactions were to slow, and the blade severs your head from your body. In your dying moments you see a large-breasted girl in tight shorts somersault over your headless body and on into the Tomb. She's quite athletic. You begin to feel that progress is catching up with you.
Game Over

Re:Crossover

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, such a game exists. It's called FOOM and available from the Interactive Fiction Archive, which is still alive and kicking, and will be for many more years, what with the IF Competition 2000 coming up.

Action vs Puzzle games

[Masem]

First, the /. title seems to be misleading, as it suggests that only text-adventure games are 'targetted' by the article, but my reading of the piece in question suggests that any non-free-form games, such as Monkey Island, Myst, etc, are a dying breed.

People need to realize that action games and puzzle games (the ones listed above) are two different genres that have yet to compete with each other except in a few isolated titles [*]. For every puzzle game that is put out, there are easily 3 if not more quake-like clones, the action market gets that much more visibility.

Additionally, at this point in time with technology, it's very hard to do a truely complete puzzle game that is completely free-form, as the mustache example tries to emphasize. You'd have to create a small subset of the Grand Unified Theory in order to deal with every sitution that the player may attempt. This, of course, is impractical, so there is a very limited subset of actions that you can do.

But my biggest beef is the choice of example. Gabriel Knight's not very good as a puzzle game. Better examples tend to be anything from LucasArts, including the Monkey Island triology and Grim Fandango. The objects that you collect tend to have very unique properties, that fit in the game at only one place, but generally have good, funny responses if you try to use them elsewhere that are a near match. To that extent, it shows that the game designs tried to anticipate all actions the users might want to do, and add appropriate actions or responses for flavoring. They also drop more than enough hints, but you have to make sure you talk to everyone and look at everything.

Puzzle gaming is far from dead. It's just that there's a vast difference for most players of puzzle genre and fps genre.

[*] Some of the recent FPS/RPG combos (System Shock 2, Deus Ex) come somewhat close, while Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine is more puzzle that FPS, even though it is a FPS.