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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: More on What IF is...
Message-ID: <erkyrathDyAoBy.M24@netcom.com>
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Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 15:28:46 GMT
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Jean-Henri Duteau (jeand@myrias.com) wrote:
> Here's a question for you...are there any games out there that allow
> you to take on the roles of different characters AT THE SAME TIME?  I
> know about HGTTG and SUSPENDED, but they aren't what I'm getting at.
> I don't believe that I have a game of the sort I'm asking about in my
> collection.  But I run a UNIX box so some of the DOS only stuff I
> haven't played.

I don't know of any such text games. There are several graphical 
3rd-person games with multiple characters; _The Dig_, for example, or 
_Star Trek: Final Unity_.

It's hard to tell the potential of that attitude, though, because both of
those are so badly written. Bleah. Yes, I know _The Dig_ is credited to
Orson Scott Card. The dialog (in the demo I played) is still agonizingly
bad. 

This is an interesting point. You could do a two-character game with two 
independent text streams, one in the main window and one in the status 
window... (actually that would suck, because many Z-interpreters don't 
scroll text in the status window, and I'm sure no other IF system does. 
But pretend it *is* possible. :-) 

With two windows, putting both in 2nd-person might be uncomfortable. Then 
again, we've gotten used to a lot of weird things. What if one window was 
2nd and one was 3rd, to produce a "protagonist and sidekick" effect? Or 
a "human hero and guardian angel" effect? Lots of options.

--Z

-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
