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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.'"
I have been eaten by a grue :(
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
You wake up.
> get up
You can't get up, it's dark.
> turn on light
You turn on the lamp.
> get up
You can't get up. You've got a headache from that hangover.
> look in pockets
While you look in pockets, your house is demolished by a bulldozer.
Try Again?[y/n]
#$@@#$! That's the third time in a row! !@#%!#@ text games!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...all alike.
Was the main exercise that tought me English pretty early. You just cannot go on without understanding, and you cannot go on without writing yourself. That forces you to learn the language in contrast to just cross-reading books or (blasphemy for actually learning English) chatting.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
QUAKE II
/ 043214&tid=112)
Copyright (c) 1991-2001. All rights reserved.
West of steaming pit of hell
You are standing in an open room west of a steaming pit of hell leading down.
There is a gun here.
>
(recycled: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/31
--
RageTech
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.
clicky clicky
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
They'll produce wonderful text-based games, and people from the cities of MMORPG and FPS will travel out to them to buy blankets and marvel at their monochrome screens.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
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.
With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more.
same goes with all turn based games. like adom, chess, nethack and others. There is one problem about turns however - they are not MMORPG-able by definition. Some tweaks to the turn system must be made, so that other players wouldn't have to wait for other players. I'm dreaming about MMORPG version of adom, just like I'm dreaming about Diablo-like graphical version of adom. Sad is - that they will probably never happen...
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
.. play those games linked, have a look at http://nickm.com/if/faq.html
In fact, I dare say that most console games have a pause feature, specifically to allow players to go make sandwiches.
Ahh... this brings me back to my days in Elanthia as Lord Sharvan Darvenshire, half elven ranger. In 9th grade I must have spent 50% of my time outside of school playing online with my friends. Computer dork, I know... but hey, you're reading /., so you're probably not one to talk! ;-)
The great thing about text MUDs was how easily (and quickly) GMs could add content. There was no 3d modeling, no conceptual drawings, downloadable patches, etc, so a festival or merchant could be whipped up in a matter of hours to days (depending on the extent)
Another nice thing about the "special events"? It was a REAL PERSON you interacted with. The merchant would alter your items, enchant them, etc.
Sharvan has since moved onto World of Warcraft... but I still have a soft spot for GS III (now Gemstone IV), as it introduced me to the world of online gaming. There are a lot of things that were in GS that I wish WoW had as well, but it's an entirely different environment so it's pretty much impossible. Totally different experiences.
I actually attribute my ability to type >120wpm to Gemstone. When you spend so much time in the game, and typing is the only way to interact, you learn to get around the keyboard quite well. Who ever said gaming was pointless?!
And, for the more graphically inclined, check out these:
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
I have been a MUDer for over nine years now, I have tried MMORPGs like Shadowbane, Ultima, and WoW to name a few, but I always keep coming back to the MUD that I have been with for all this time. There are many reasons, one is the community, on a MUD like the one I play there are only about 40 of us and we know each other well. Another reason is that the MUD that I play at least is about Role Playing, which is not something that can be truely done on a MMORPG. A good balance of PK and RP is what is needed, and MUDs can provide that. Also on a MUD you have to actually use your mind, your imagination. Another great thing I have found after my years of MUDing is an improvement in certain skills, I read faster, type faster, and can make things up on the spot that sound more reasonable. Overall I think that MUDs are great things, but they arn't for everyone but those of you who take to them they are much much better than a graphical game ever could be. By the way, the MUD I play is called Dark Mists http://darkmists.org/ [darkmists.org] and my character is Nij so if any of you want to stop by I'd be happy to show you around.
Utinam me logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant.
That's part of the beauty of Everquest. You don't have to play it at all and it's still just as interesting.
http://publicvoidlife.blogspot.com
Computer is on /.
> Surf to
Page Loads - no recent stories
> Reload 7,512 times
A new story pops up
> Click on the story
Nothing to see here - move along
> Reload 389 times
You see the new story
> Write pithy First Post comment - hit Submit
Comment accepted - 8/8
> Reload page
Your comment is gibberish because you didn't preview it
> Reload page again
Comment moderated to -1 as Troll
> Change race to Elf
Change not accepted - you are now permanently cursed as a Troll.
'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back
Must have been written in Java then.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
I used to write text adventure games on the BBC micro. Only 32Kb memory as I remember, and you had to get the whole game and all data into that. Even with those limitations, the engines were getting pretty interesting. A lot of time was spent thinking how to compress the info down.
I remember thinking back then, I wonder how amazing the games will be when we have much more memory, like 128Kb or even 256Kb! Couldn't even conceive of 1Mb of memory.
I returned to it a few years ago because I'd heard there were still people developing them, but the engines really haven't advanced at all. It's a shame, with the capacities that computers have these days we really should be able to develop truely interactive fiction, but I don't think it's ever going to happen. A pity.
There is no light.
:(
> Improvise a light using the minerals from the cave walls, putting it in a piece of my shirt so the combustion can be controlled. I'll use some flints to light it up. The sweat in the shirt can provide enough moisture
Sorry, Macgyverisms not supported in this game.
> WTF?
>_
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm somewhat surprised that nobody has mentioned the 11th annual Interactive Fiction Competition going on right now. However, today is the last day to be a judge.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Other than eBay, there is ONE other source of Infocom games... You can buy from here..
http://www.lacegem.com/
One CD with every Infocom game that Activision could legaly put on one disc. Activision lost the rights for games like HHGTG and Shogun. Yes, they are in the UK, and yes, they ship to the USA. I ordered this from them a few years ago. I have no affiliation with the company other than being a satisfied customer.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
You know what's going to happen? The authors are going to start with an emoticon for a smiling face, and the ASCII Art will go downhill from there and before you know it there will be screens full of . / \ . and everything but the ASCII Goatse guy will make appearances in the game.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
If you missed this one, it's truely a great BOFH episode...
i ng_the_savegame_panic/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/23/bofh_hitt
---
RageTech
As someone who played Zork I/II/III back on his Apple //e - let's not forget the other great text-only games Infocome produced. Deadline was a Clue like game, but my fav was always Hitchhiker's guide. You can play it online now here:
n .shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_nola
Yes, they do put some basic graphics up, but the whole text game is still there!
fak3r.com
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
There are a few contests out there dedicated to Interactive Fiction, and these contests tend to view it more as a literary form than a style of computer game.
The biggest is of course IF Comp, but there are other smaller ones dedicated to particular themes (like the annual Saugus.net Ghost Story Contest that invite both prose and interactive fiction entries).
Viewing interactive fiction as just a type of computer game is a little like viewing an audio book as just a type of CD. While it's in some sense true, a typical I-F title has just as much in common with a typical computer game as a typical audio book has with a typical pop CD...
This text-based game wasted so much of my time at the SUNY-Buffalo in the late 80's, I cringe to think about it.
Therefore, I would be remiss not to unleash it on the rest of you now once again.
Galactic Trader Online
Galtrader Telnet client
Enjoy...
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
I don't know... Every time I ask my son to stop playing, the answer is "You can't pause here" or "You can't save here". That must be the Parental Annoyance Mode.
On the plus side, he does seem a little interested in the text adventures on Games Knoppix.
Oh man, I have to know how to read to play these games!? That doesn't sound like much fun at all.
the thing with text games is that it'd be easier to get new adventures put into them, and also pretty much anyone could code one (or at least make a world for one if there are editors to make them, which I guess there would be). I only discovered MUDding last year and it was great til I stopped playing for work or exams or something.. cant remember =_= didnt help that I played on an american server and had to stay up till 6am to get anyone else playing =p
which is totally what she said
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!
While I enjoy the FPS and the attmpts at RPGs like Galaxies and WoW, I still play gemstone IV because... well... You get more out of it. You use your imagination, and you can ::gasps:: really roleplay. Unlike the D&D games I used to play here in Albany, where roleplay consisted of the DM giving all the awesome stuff to his wife, and people acting like morons around the table.
:)
Gemstone is BY FAR the best MUD out there but I love them all anyway. I am glad the genre is staying alive. Even if I do pay $50 a month for text
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
I visited Lacegem, unfortunately they list the Infocom collections as being out of stock. There are resellers on Amazon that list the Infocom titles, however at collector's prices.
I suppose now that the evil eyes lurking in the cave labyrinth and eating you whenever your fireberries go out, are grues?
You find yourself transported to a site containing a worthless slashdot story about text adventure games. You make a witty comment that you hear FORTRAN is making a comeback. Your post is moderated Troll.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
FTA: 'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more.'
And that's the kind of excitement I'm looking for.
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My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
"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
'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more.'"
I do this in WoW all the time. Hit 'Stealth'. Go make a sandwich, etc. Come back, and I'm still stealthed. In the unlikely event (mostly depending on where I am when I go afk) that I die, I can just resurrect. Sure I'm out a few silver for repairs, but at least I have a sandwich!
And they said zombies weren't real!
Back? Some of us never left.
If this sig is witty, it was probably borrowed from someone else's sig.
http://www.retromud.org/ - regularly 90+ players on at a time, fantaistic guild/class system, active wizzes, very complete, massive worlds (11,000+ rooms I think). I wasted a significant amount of time there in college, it was great.
http://lensmoor.org/ - different flavor, but same characteristics as above. Very active.
checking for libvirus... no
ERROR, libvirus.so not found, terminating
The games that I really hated involved you having to perform some off-the-wall action to get a result that made no sense what so ever.
Modern text adventures no longer do that. There were a couple of playability problems that have been largely addressed by modern games. Remember that this is a genre that has seen a huge amount of input from many people fixing irritations (much like the OSS community) and has had two decades to polish out imperfections:
* Parsing -- Well, this will never be perfect as long as we lack human-class AI. However, modern parsing is *much* more reasonable than the original games, where you could play "hunt the verb". There are still a few bad games, however, any decent modern TADS-based game is going to be pretty playable -- might take you a little bit to get used to things, but you aren't going to throw your keyboard across the wall because you couldn't figure out what particular command the game wanted you to use. ADRIFT games are another story, and mostly suck badly at this.
* Missed an action somewhere in the game, now cannot win. Game designers have realized that this is frusterating. Modern text-based adventures don't do this. Basically, if you screwed up and you're going to lose, you lose right away.
* Illogical puzzles. Game designers have realized that most people don't want to spend time trying to SMELL OCTOPUS to have a bucket magically fall out of the air. These are pretty much gone. There are some things, though, that it helps to be familiar with the genre to play. For example, people new to RPGs probably don't immediately come up with the idea of talking to everyone in a town to solve a problem (after all, it's not what one would do in real life). People new to FPSes probably don't immediately think that smashing open every crate in the game (especially in random alleyways and houses) is a good way to get medical kits and ammunition. People new to text-based adventures may not think of trying to LOOK UNDER BED or realize that TADS-based games generally consider EXAMINE CLOSET and SEARCH CLOSET to be two different commands (EXAMINE being equivalent to LOOK AT and SEARCH meaning to try to find anything unusual). Most TADS games come with basic starter help like this that comes up if you type HELP.
If you're looking for a good (IMHO) game, I'd suggest downloading a TADS runtime (frob seems to be the latest-and-greatest implementation for Linux, though regrettably it doesn't use emacs keystrokes) and try Babel. That was the first text adventure game that I ever beat without help or hints.
I'd also like to point out the (even smaller than the standard IF community) AIF community, which produces adult games.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
After being burned to a crisp by the dragon in King's Quest, you were told something about how by venturing too close to the dragon's flame, you made an ash out of yourself.
Telltale Games: Bone, Sam and Max
As I said before, the rest of my 30-minute interview wasn't included. It's not so much that what I said was taken out of context, as it is that what *else* I said would have helped it make more sense. I play a lot of console games. I know about pause. Sheesh. But the action is usually pretty fast-paced. That's the difference. Things don't *happen* in Interactive Fiction until to make a move. You don't *have* to pause. You don't *have* to reach a save point. You just get up and walk away. Simple.
I think the people here get a bigger kick out of making asinine comments than in actually discussing the topic. And most of it is just misinformed. MUDs? Browser-based games? This was an article about Interactive Fiction. It wasn't an article about Kansas and Sandwiches. Most people just read the blurb, and replied to get in a quick jab. A shame. The article was about a lot more than that.
:::: Mike Snyder
Either a really bad subset of AIF (Adult Interactive Fiction), or a blatant lie. Most likely, a troll response.
:::: Mike Snyder
If it's Interactive Fiction, they're not going to be nearly as good as those written in Hugo, Tads, or Inform. C# is a general-purpose language. Step one would be to create an IF *engine*, and those that exist now have had *years* to refine and get it right.
I know Hugo. and I somewhat know C#. It's all about going for the right tool for the job. C# ain't it.
:::: Mike Snyder