[HN Gopher] 50 Years of Text Games - A 2021 Journey from Oregon ...
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50 Years of Text Games - A 2021 Journey from Oregon Trail to A.I.
Dungeon
Author : homarp
Score : 82 points
Date : 2021-01-02 16:53 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (if50.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (if50.substack.com)
| ddingus wrote:
| Subscribed. I love these kinds of games and it looks like you
| will cover games I have not seen before.
|
| Great.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Back when my at home "Internet " was AOL, I wrote a free text
| adventure game for the Apple II called Land of the Dwarf.
|
| Started with a huge piece of paper and drew a well labeled
| transition diagram and then writing the game was easy.
|
| A huge number of people downloaded the game. I hope they enjoyed
| it.
| hawktheslayer wrote:
| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text game was my favorite of
| the genre, and was my first introduction to PC games. I remember
| it being quite challenging especially in the pre-walkthrough
| days.
| rchase wrote:
| Quite challenging.
|
| That game is impossible to solve without spoilers, so far as
| I'm concerned. And lord knows I tried. As far as Infocom goes,
| the only ones I managed to solve unassisted were Zork I and II
| and Planetfall, all of which are considered on the easy end of
| the spectrum. The later games were much more complex. Along
| with HHG2TG, Lurking Horror was really difficult too.
|
| Tons of fun all of them, though.
|
| Gosh I miss my C64.
| spc476 wrote:
| Interesting. I found Planetfall moderately difficult, but the
| Lurking Horror was easy (I almost finished it first time I
| played it---I think it took me two sessions). A friend of
| mine played HHG2TG (I never did) and almost gave up on it.
| ghaff wrote:
| I really liked Planetfall and it's one I made it through to
| the end without _too_ much help (also pre-walkthroughs /pre-
| Web). Steve Meretzky was the author of both that and
| Hitchhikers--the latter with Adams of course. I also really
| liked his A Mind Forever Voyaging but that's probably closest
| to an interactive novel that Infocom ever did; the puzzle
| content is fairly light.
| SoSoRoCoCo wrote:
| H2G2 was medium difficulty compared to Starcross and
| Deadline, it just required patience. And MAN was it
| satisfying to win as a 13 year old. Long before
| accomplishments were measured in twitch response rather than
| deductive logic.
|
| Spellbreaker, OTOH, was potentially impossible. It had two
| puzzles early in the game that were solvable by irreversible
| methods that made the game unwinnable. (One was casting
| Girgol to stop time allowed you to solve the Ogre puzzle, but
| you needed that spell at the very end, can't recall the
| other).
| nickt wrote:
| Happy to see "You are in a comfortable tunnel like hall" is in
| there! Looks like a great series.
| macintux wrote:
| I've been trying for years to remember details about a game I
| very briefly played online in 1989; with luck, perhaps this
| series will cover it.
|
| Looking forward to reading this.
| the_af wrote:
| I took a serious interest in IF once it reached its "modern"
| stage (which ironically happened more than a decade ago). It
| started subverting the tired tropes of "you're in this dungeon
| and have to find the treasure" and playing with the conventions
| of the genre and even the UI itself.
|
| In the spy game Spider and Web, instead of "losing", for most of
| the game you get a "that's not what happened, please don't lie to
| me".
|
| There was this scifi game, whose name now escapes me, where
| you're communicating by radio with the survivor of a spaceship,
| and every parser error gets reported appropriately: "I'm sorry,
| you're breaking up, can you repeat please?".
|
| In Rematch you have only one move, and then you either die or win
| (but what you can do in this move can be _very_ complex).
|
| In Adam Cadre's Photopia the gameplay possibilities aren't that
| many, but the story is heartwrenching. His 9:05 is hilarious in
| how it plays with common player expectations.
|
| I love IF.
| SoSoRoCoCo wrote:
| Too bad so few people turned up to play the Interactive Fiction
| Competition this year. Only about ~50 votes per game were
| recorded on average. I think people like to reminisce rather than
| play I.F., or maybe we've all been broken by 3D.
|
| The winning game in 2020 was truly whimsical, and the Magpie
| scored a place in the top-5 again!
|
| https://ifcomp.org/
| zorked wrote:
| I play some IF here and there and the comp is my go-to place
| for what to play. I'm frequently years late though. It's not a
| thing I think I should track in real time.
|
| Infocom games were nice and all but modern IF is where it's at.
| The genre moved forward, there's better design, better stories,
| more interesting mechanics. Gigantic labyrinth worlds that you
| can't win because you missed a one-time chance to pick up
| bubblegum in the first area of the game isn't something that is
| done anymore.
| SoSoRoCoCo wrote:
| > one-time chance to pick up bubblegum in the first area of
| the game isn't something that is done anymore.
|
| This is what I said in peer post a few hours ago. That's
| because the genre has been critically analyzed over the past
| 50 years.
|
| Although the "click the keyword" modern I.F. really doesn't
| do it for me. I prefer the open-ended interpreters.
|
| There is a doctoral thesis on this called "Twisty Little
| Passages". It discusses several "fundamental laws" of I.F.
| that were derived from the Infocom games of the 70's and
| 80's, such as your "bubblegum" complaint.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Twisty-Little-Passages-Approach-
| Inter...
| hubblesticks wrote:
| I grew up playing Return to Zork and just missed the original
| Zorks. I couldn't get into them but really wanted to. I love
| the execution of IF and the stories they weave. What would be
| a good modern IF to jump into that isn't as punishing as the
| original Zorks, and not too hard for an IF newbie? Thank you!
| anthk wrote:
| Anchorhead.
| brox wrote:
| For those familiar with the original 1998 version, note
| that a remastered and illustrated edition was released in
| 2018--worth a replay and a good way of supporting the
| author!
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/726870/Anchorhead/
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I find these games super boring alone but so much fun in small
| groups.
|
| I think they need to be designed as a facilitator of a story,
| ultimately played and told by you and your friends.
|
| Kind of like if the story part of D&D was a standalone product
| where the software is the DM.
| SoSoRoCoCo wrote:
| > but so much fun in small groups.
|
| In my 40+ years playing IF, I never considered this. What an
| interesting idea. I did play an email correspondence campaign
| in the early 90's but that was a ton of work for the DM since
| he was writing pages and pages of story. But it was a fun in-
| between.
| cproctor wrote:
| In my academic studies using IF to teach CS [1], I've found
| it can be very powerful to "play" or "tell" stories in
| person. (These are middle- and high-school students.)
| Usually, at the end of a class authors will volunteer to
| share their stories, and then they will ask for a volunteer
| to be the protagonist while the author reads as the narrator.
| (This becomes important when the stories are serious and
| touch on real-life situations where it could be painful to
| have someone else misread, misinterpret, or make fun of your
| story.)
|
| [1] Proctor, C., & Garcia, A. (2020). Hogg, L., Stockbridge,
| K., Achieng-Evenson, C., & SooHoo, S. (Eds.). Student voices
| in the digital hubbub. Pedagogies of With-ness: Students,
| Teachers, Voice, and Agency. Myers Educational Press. https:/
| /chrisproctor.net/media/publications/proctor_2020_ped...
| mbunch wrote:
| It's frustrating how hard of a sell the text medium can be,
| especially with how creative authors have grown to explore what
| visual media isn't well-suited for. So many of my avid gamer
| friends just won't give anything with such a minimal UI an
| honest shot, even if they loved playing similar games in the
| past when it was more of a necessity.
|
| Incidentally, I was actually thinking of submitting something
| that I'd been working on for the competition, but I didn't
| think it would qualify since it was already publicly
| distributed. It's up at
| https://writtenrealms.com/worlds/7996/brimstone-prologue, so if
| anybody is into this kind of thing and has some time to kill,
| I'd actually love to hear any feedback!
| nugget wrote:
| I liked this article about Gemstone 3
|
| https://gizmodo.com/i-had-my-first-kiss-in-gemstone-iii-1845...
|
| which shows the powerful and lasting impact that some of these
| multi-player text games had on the people (particularly kids) who
| played them. It was previously posted to HN but I can't find the
| thread off hand.
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