Modern text adventures don't limit themselves to one solution, especially if that solution is absurdly complex. Check out Graham Nelson's Curses, and see how many ways there are to open a childproof medicine bottle.
I can play them on just about any platform I want (Inform/TADS games, at least) without sacrificing any gameplay. Try playing Quake on your PalmPilot.
I don't have to spend extra money on hardware, as what I've got now will likely never become obsolete for these games.
With the advent of specialized high-level languages, they're easier to write than other games. This means that good writers and game designers who may not be very good at creating graphics or 3D engines can (and do) write IF.
Most modern text adventure games are freely downloadable. This means that if I start up a game and find out that it's a badly written treasure hunt (doesn't take long to tell), all I'm out is the download time (which is often less than some pages on Slashdot)
Text adventure games have authorship. If I play a game from Andy Phillips (Time: All Things Come to an End, Heist, Enemies), I know it's probably going to be epic in scope but boil down to a hunt for keys. If I play something from Andrew Plotkin (A Change in the Weather, The Space Under the Window, So Far, Spider and Web), it's going to be very twisty. If it's from Adam Cadre (I-0, Photopia, Varicella, 9:05, Shrapnel), the story will be great. If it's from Rybread Celsius (Candy, Limp, Lack of Vision), I know it's going to be insane.
They're not demanding of attention; I can play them during class and still manage to take notes.
The interface is more obvious than graphical games ("guess-the-verb" is dead, and has been for a while. These days it's considered a bug if you have to use "ignite" instead of "light"). This means that you're spending your time playing the game instead of learning the controls. (Of course, after a long session, I do have a tendency to type "look" instead of "ls".)
They're more varied than any other genre. There aren't rules, only conventions. Sure, there are quite a few Zork clones, and most (not all) games use compass directions and "look"/"examine", but there are "games" that are like nothing you've ever seen before.
Subtitled foreign films have more text than your typical action flick. That doesn't make 'em novels.
Metaphors aside, LucasArts and Sierra games use a graphic interface rather than a text parser. This necessarily reduces the number of things that the player can do, and leads to cartoon-logic puzzles.
Notice how the title on Slashdot is "Why First Person Shooters Beat Text Adventure Games" (emphasis mine) but the OMM article talks about Gabriel Knight 3 and other games by Sierra?
There's a big difference between text adventures and "Sierra game" graphic adventures. There's a lot less story in most of the latter, which is due to and made up for by static artwork. People didn't buy King's Quest V for the story; they bought it for the state-of-the-art graphics and sound. Same for most of the puzzle-adventures like Seventh Guest and Myst.
Text adventures, on the other hand, haven't had to worry about their game engine very much, especially once specialized languages like Graham Nelson's Inform came into being. So all there is to work on is plot and puzzles. Sure, you get the occasional find-the-keys structure from people who don't know anything else (and even this can be excellent; play Curses or Mulldoon and see what I mean), but there's a lot more out there.
Half right. AOL can win this without hurting the Napster case. They just shouldn't focus on the "we're just a messenger" defense, but instead on the "we never sanctioned Gnutella" defense. If they have to use the former defense, they should base it on the fact that Gnutella isn't MP3-specific, as Napster can't make that claim.
What the company is sued for in those cases isn't the direct act so much as fostering it with the workplace environment. Or do you have a case where a company was successfully sued because of a one-time (as opposed to ongoing) action that was in violation of company policy?
I know this was meant as a joke, but you can't sue somebody for distributing child pornography unless (1) you're an attorney authorized to bring a criminal suit on behalf of the government; or (2) you suffered personal harm from the distribution--e.g., pictures of you or someone for whom you have power of attorney were distributed (evidence for a tort), or it was forged in your name (defamation), or it was sent to disturb you (intentional infliction of emotional distress).
Case 2 is a civil suit, and would involve damages but not jail time.
Copyright law may be bad, but that doesn't make it unconstitutional. The most you could argue is that its current incarnation isn't the best way to achieve the intent of copyright stated in Article I, Section 8.
AOL could try a defense that isn't based on the software itself; for example, they could claim that they don't own the work, and that they shouldn't be party to the suit. (Not saying this would work in this case, but if it did it wouldn't help Napster.)
Gnutella is a bit different, in that it's not inherently MP3 the way Napster is. "Trading recipes" is a better cover story than "trading public-domain MP3s" is.
case in point.. time yourself, and count the number of images in the following list:
ball.gif bar.gif box.gif calendar cap.gif cgi1.shtml cgi2.html cgi3.shtml clients.html count count1 demo imap.html imap.map includes.shtml interactive.html last_min.old line.gif logo.gif me.jpg nntp1.html old.tar.gz phone.html pipe.shtml price.html smlogo.gif speil.html storage.html tchotchkes.html threads now translate the list into a set of icons on your computer, associating a specific color and shape with each file type, and do it again. . compare the results. . if you're working with a standard-issue nervous system, the latter will be at least twice as fast.
This is disingenuous, for the following reasons:
The text output is (likely) in a proportional font selected for reading English. Most dir/ls output is in a monospaced font.
The output is delimited by spaces, and in a single (wrapped) line. Most dir/ls output is formatted so that files are aligned.
You allow for associating color and shape with icons, but not for associating file types with color in a directory output. Try figuring it out when all the icons look like the "Unknown file type" icon.
You don't allow for the obvious CLI answer of searching only for the.gif and.jpg files. This would give you your answer much faster than counting words or icons.
So let me get this straight. Junior gets upset at school. So the best way to get him to deal with this is to sit him in front of a game of Soldier of Fortune? I'm sure it may help a bit, in the same way that any engaging activity does, but having him imagine the face of a teacher or peer on every casualty doesn't strike me as a particularly healthy catharsis.
The Mother Jones article dealt with the healthy effects of "heroic, combative storytelling," focusing mainly on the author's own experiences with comic books. I don't think that most players of ultraviolent games pay much attention to the "heroic" (how can one be heroic if one's only interaction with others is through a gun?) or "storytelling" aspects of this.
How crazed. Children can go see Basic Instinct with their parents, but this article doesn't mention kids being able to view such games with parental permission or accompanyment.
Yes, it does:
The law bars people under age 18 from such games unless accompanied by a parent or guardian.
A bad law is not necessarily unconstitutional. This is a bad law. This is not an unconstitutional law. It should not be changed by the courts, it should be changed by the legislature.
O.K., work with me on this...
You and 3 competitors are vyying for the same market. with 86% ofthe market using IE, if you all go with IE-only web sites, you miss out on the other 14% that aren't using IE. Now, if you make your web site with correct standards, so everyone can use it, no matter what browser they're using, you not only get a share of the IE market, but you'd proabably wind up with 14% more than your competitors, since they'll only use your site, since it's the only one that they CAN use.... Now, 14% + 1/3 of 86% (about 28%) = 42% of market share. And if you were investing in a company, which would you pick, one with 28% of the market, or 42%? So would I.
Thing is, presumably the site using the IE-only "standards" will get more of the IE users. (I'm assuming that they're using the tags because they add something, not because they're designing their site with FrontPage.)
So let's say there's 3 competitors: One designs an IE-compatible site. One designs a site for IE and Netscape. One designs a site in completely valid HTML 4.01, usable by every browser.
The IE users like the additions that the first two sites offer. Half use the IE-only site, a third use the IE/NS site, and a sixth use the HTML site.
Netscape users can't use the IE-only site, but like the little popups and stuff on the IE/NS site. Two thirds use the IE/NS site, and one third use the HTML site.
Users of browsers like Opera and Lynx are inconvenienced by the extensions on the IE and IE/NS sites, and all use the HTML-only site.
Under this model, assuming 86% IE, 12% NS, and 2% other, the IE site gets 43% of the audience, the IE/NS site gets 37% of the audience, and the HTML site gets 20% of the audience.
Yeah, I know that adding the proprietary tags doesn't usually make a site more popular. But if designers think it might, you'll see it.
If we had live-video-quality images generated in real time, we could start seeing what kind of horror white phosphorus, napalm, and Claymore mines perpetrate on flesh. Maybe if, in a first-person shoot-'em-up, it were possible to get wounded by shrapnel that turns out the be the bone fragments of the guy next to you -- as happens sometimes in real-world combat -- it might make a few would-be Sgt. Rock types stop and think a little.
I'd like to think that, as computer-game violence gets more realistic-looking and intense, many gamers would get turned off by it. I fear this isn't the case. Those Sgt. Rock types aren't going to stop and think about the atrocities going on in the game if they get wounded by bone fragments or burned by napalm. They're going to laud the attention to detail, and they're going to make sure they frag the guy next to them before his potential bone fragments get too close.
The problem is the nature of the beast: the player is invulnerable. Sure, if he's not careful he can lose hit points or functionality, but a player can't feel pain. This is why watching other people suffer and die can be sold as entertainment.
(No, there is no legislative conclusion to be drawn from this. Keep your slippery-slope rhetoric to yourself.)
Age restrictions are just a form of legal stereotyping.
Yeah, but age correlates to maturity. Not perfectly, but significantly. If we could reliably measure maturity (whom would you trust to produce such a test?), then this might be an issue, but we don't have that.
Huh? You haven't defined "win" and "lose." While it's true that it's hard not to play the employment game (people have to eat, and that means they have to either buy or produce food--something to remember next time you discuss economic theory), there's nothing that says you have to work beyond the point of diminishing utility. It's not like you get an extra life at a million dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry. Open-source creative endeavors are just another name for authoring by committee. They don't work. What you want is a MUD, not IF.
Modern text adventures don't limit themselves to one solution, especially if that solution is absurdly complex. Check out Graham Nelson's Curses, and see how many ways there are to open a childproof medicine bottle.
Subtitled foreign films have more text than your typical action flick. That doesn't make 'em novels.
Metaphors aside, LucasArts and Sierra games use a graphic interface rather than a text parser. This necessarily reduces the number of things that the player can do, and leads to cartoon-logic puzzles.
Notice how the title on Slashdot is "Why First Person Shooters Beat Text Adventure Games" (emphasis mine) but the OMM article talks about Gabriel Knight 3 and other games by Sierra?
There's a big difference between text adventures and "Sierra game" graphic adventures. There's a lot less story in most of the latter, which is due to and made up for by static artwork. People didn't buy King's Quest V for the story; they bought it for the state-of-the-art graphics and sound. Same for most of the puzzle-adventures like Seventh Guest and Myst.
Text adventures, on the other hand, haven't had to worry about their game engine very much, especially once specialized languages like Graham Nelson's Inform came into being. So all there is to work on is plot and puzzles. Sure, you get the occasional find-the-keys structure from people who don't know anything else (and even this can be excellent; play Curses or Mulldoon and see what I mean), but there's a lot more out there.
Have none of these people ever heard of TADS, or Inform, or the Interactive Fiction Archive?
Not being sold in a big shiny box at Best Buy does not equal dead.
Half right. AOL can win this without hurting the Napster case. They just shouldn't focus on the "we're just a messenger" defense, but instead on the "we never sanctioned Gnutella" defense. If they have to use the former defense, they should base it on the fact that Gnutella isn't MP3-specific, as Napster can't make that claim.
What the company is sued for in those cases isn't the direct act so much as fostering it with the workplace environment. Or do you have a case where a company was successfully sued because of a one-time (as opposed to ongoing) action that was in violation of company policy?
I know this was meant as a joke, but you can't sue somebody for distributing child pornography unless (1) you're an attorney authorized to bring a criminal suit on behalf of the government; or (2) you suffered personal harm from the distribution--e.g., pictures of you or someone for whom you have power of attorney were distributed (evidence for a tort), or it was forged in your name (defamation), or it was sent to disturb you (intentional infliction of emotional distress).
Case 2 is a civil suit, and would involve damages but not jail time.
Copyright law may be bad, but that doesn't make it unconstitutional. The most you could argue is that its current incarnation isn't the best way to achieve the intent of copyright stated in Article I, Section 8.
Two things:
Right. It's too close to the description of "the mark of the Beast" in Revelations for middle America to accept it.
Well, I'm surprised that nobody's tried to create a SOMAD/Slashbot yet. It wouldn't be too hard to do one that could do the following:
et cetera.
Oh. Never mind, then.
This is disingenuous, for the following reasons:
They haven't lost yet. This is just a preliminary injunction; the judge is in effect saying "stop until we get this mess sorted out."
So let me get this straight. Junior gets upset at school. So the best way to get him to deal with this is to sit him in front of a game of Soldier of Fortune? I'm sure it may help a bit, in the same way that any engaging activity does, but having him imagine the face of a teacher or peer on every casualty doesn't strike me as a particularly healthy catharsis.
The Mother Jones article dealt with the healthy effects of "heroic, combative storytelling," focusing mainly on the author's own experiences with comic books. I don't think that most players of ultraviolent games pay much attention to the "heroic" (how can one be heroic if one's only interaction with others is through a gun?) or "storytelling" aspects of this.
Who are you going to get to judge an individual's maturity level?
Stick with age. While it's not perfect, it's relatively free of bias.
Yes, it does:
This depends on where you live. Some jurisdictions have backed the MPAA ratings with law.
A bad law is not necessarily unconstitutional. This is a bad law. This is not an unconstitutional law. It should not be changed by the courts, it should be changed by the legislature.
Thing is, presumably the site using the IE-only "standards" will get more of the IE users. (I'm assuming that they're using the tags because they add something, not because they're designing their site with FrontPage.)
So let's say there's 3 competitors: One designs an IE-compatible site. One designs a site for IE and Netscape. One designs a site in completely valid HTML 4.01, usable by every browser.
The IE users like the additions that the first two sites offer. Half use the IE-only site, a third use the IE/NS site, and a sixth use the HTML site.
Netscape users can't use the IE-only site, but like the little popups and stuff on the IE/NS site. Two thirds use the IE/NS site, and one third use the HTML site.
Users of browsers like Opera and Lynx are inconvenienced by the extensions on the IE and IE/NS sites, and all use the HTML-only site.
Under this model, assuming 86% IE, 12% NS, and 2% other, the IE site gets 43% of the audience, the IE/NS site gets 37% of the audience, and the HTML site gets 20% of the audience.
Yeah, I know that adding the proprietary tags doesn't usually make a site more popular. But if designers think it might, you'll see it.
I'd like to think that, as computer-game violence gets more realistic-looking and intense, many gamers would get turned off by it. I fear this isn't the case. Those Sgt. Rock types aren't going to stop and think about the atrocities going on in the game if they get wounded by bone fragments or burned by napalm. They're going to laud the attention to detail, and they're going to make sure they frag the guy next to them before his potential bone fragments get too close.
The problem is the nature of the beast: the player is invulnerable. Sure, if he's not careful he can lose hit points or functionality, but a player can't feel pain. This is why watching other people suffer and die can be sold as entertainment.
(No, there is no legislative conclusion to be drawn from this. Keep your slippery-slope rhetoric to yourself.)
Yeah, but age correlates to maturity. Not perfectly, but significantly. If we could reliably measure maturity (whom would you trust to produce such a test?), then this might be an issue, but we don't have that.
Huh? You haven't defined "win" and "lose." While it's true that it's hard not to play the employment game (people have to eat, and that means they have to either buy or produce food--something to remember next time you discuss economic theory), there's nothing that says you have to work beyond the point of diminishing utility. It's not like you get an extra life at a million dollars.