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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.
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.
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"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