Slashdot Mirror
Loyalists Preserve Past Through Text-Only Games
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "'You are at the edge of a clearing with an impressive view of the mountains. A trail splits off toward some standing stones to the southwest, while the main road emerges from the forest to the east and continues westward down the hill, via a series of switchbacks.' So begins 'A New Life' (downloadable from here), part of a group of game hobbyists going back to text-only basics. They try to keep the genre alive by posting their titles online for free and meeting in chat rooms dedicated to the craft, the Wall Street Journal Online reports. 'Console games are demanding,' says Mike Snyder, a 33-year-old computer programmer in Wichita, Kan. 'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more.'"
Does Nethack qualify? Not quite text-only, but it will run on a terminal. IMNSHO, the greatest game of all time...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
The biggest part of these games, and the highest value of attraction:
No games graphics will ever beat text only's games:
WHY - Becuase its not limited by your PC, by its programming, and by Your Graphics Card, only your MIND.
You get a general mental version of the world your in, and you can assume its more detailed then wandering the plains in EQ2, unless your imaginaionally inept.
In fact, I dare say that most console games have a pause feature, specifically to allow players to go make sandwiches.
Interesting that this made it to the Wall Street Journal. (nostalgia) My first video game was Zork I running on an Osborne I, and I still remember figuring out to give Marvin "tea" and "no tea" in Hitchhiker's.... (/nostalgia)
I do think this is an unfair statement (FTA): "The plots of the games are often as minimalist as the graphics: To win, players must solve a series of puzzles, like finding the key to a castle door."
How is that less complex than any of today's graphics-intensive games? If anything, text adventures are more complex, because you have to read and use your imagination instead of simply killing villians and "walking" over their corpses to collect power-ups or keys or whatever. It's still "find the key to the door," just more literary than visual.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Text adventures are great. To dismiss them as obsolete because we have graphics now is as foolish as dismissing novels because we have movies. I'm a big fan of graphic adventures (and just about any other type of game), but I still appreciate text adventures. There is a level of interactivity in modern text adventures that graphic games haven't yet achieved. The extremely low development costs mean that lots of interesting and quirky stuff gets made.
The WSJ article oversimplifies a few important things. The IF competition is supposed to be limited to games that take two hours. The idea is to get more people writing games under the idea that a two hour game is much easier to make than a twenty hour game. But people still regularly release longer games. Anchorhead, mentioned above, too me about 30 hours.
It's also not fair to say that "just" 174 people voted. Judging is time consuming; you're expected to play to the conclusion (or for two hours, whichever comes first) at least 5 games. And while there is lots of good stuff, there is a lot of junk. So being a proper judge takes a healthy chunk of time and a willingness to suffer some bad games. It's far easier to just wait until the competition ends, then download the top rated ones. While text adventures are a niche market, I expect we're talking thousands of people who play the competition games. It's just that only a small subset vote.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Yeah, but they're still a lot of work for developers. You have to draw stuff.
Pure text adventures are a lot closer to actually writing stuff. You can make nice long ones that say what you want to say without the trouble of graphics.
You can even do it all completely alone.
Its why they can still hold an interactive fiction competition every year and have enough entries to make "top ten" a meaningful ranking.
This is all assuming you're talking about some kind of actual complexity in the interface. Obviously "find the spot on the screen that you can click on to make something happen" isn't a big deal, but making something like Myth is.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
"You stand before a mountain."
The mountain you see in your mind's eye will be unique and different from every other mountain experienced by anybody else who reads those words. Where is the limitation there? Compare that to a photograph, or a painting which boxes the person into a narrow, pre-defined experience.
Words are simple tools, yes, but they are designed to spark the deep wells of the imagination.
Only a writer frustrated by the fact that the particular mountain in his head cannot ever be perfectly transcribed to another person would complain. Better to be open to the reality that there are endless perspectives and then use those perspectives to cooperatively cobble together a universe in which to tell one's stories.
"You stand before a mountain."
-FL