chipotle | Just what kind of luddite are you?

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Just what kind of luddite are you?

So I’m seeing more and more references to Second Life these days; apparently, SL is the new ~~black~~ MUCK, replacing all that stuffy old text with 3-D graphics.

This “graphic virtual world” idea isn’t new to me; I worked for a while at There, SL’s erstwhile competitor, and the one that for a year or so looked like it was going to kick SL’s virtual ass. However, There aspired to be a virtual Disney World, with the company designers as Imagineers and user-created content as window dressing, and promises of future enhancements to customization and scripting. SL started out with customization and scripting tools available to everyone, and inevitably, that wins in the long run. While There’s execs were talking about being a platform for the metaverse, SL was releasing one. As crappy as SL’s engine and tools are, crappy real products consistently beat fantastic vaporware.

But I don’t like either very much–not for roleplaying, particularly when compared to stuffy old text.

In the early ’80s, when you talked about “computer adventure games,” you usually meant text games. Graphic adventure games existed, but the company doing the most interesting stuff was Infocom, which released brilliant works of interactive fiction. Enchanter is still probably the best-implemented magic system in any computer roleplaying game (and the best single-player “Dungeons and Dragons”-style game made, in my opinion, in that like a good D&D adventure, there was an unfolding story rather than a mere dungeon crawl). Suspended and A Mind Forever Voyaging were two of the best science fiction games ever produced.

Infocom stuck by their text-only guns even after graphic adventure games started filling up the field. In the words of a 1983 ad,

There’s never been a computer built by man that could handle the images we produce. And there never will be. We draw our graphics from the limitless imagery of your imagination–a technology so powerful, it makes any picture that’s ever come out of a screen look like graffiti by comparison.

Any game is bound by its technology: the sophistication of the game’s “world” can, by definition, be no greater than the technology the game engine supports. And text stomps all over graphics.

Boat Landing

A concrete landing sits at the midpoint of a cove that forms much of the eastern shore of this tropical island. A handsome wooden dock juts out into the lagoon, with several boats tied up. The land rises gently to the west, and a gravel walkway, lined with palm trees, follows it up the hill. A plantation-style home can be seen at the hilltop.

The cove can be followed northeast, to a rocky point, and south toward the lagoon’s beach. A carved wooden sign, in typical bright island colors of blue and yellows (and faded by typical bright island sunlight), stands at the side of the gravel path.

The afternoon is mostly cloudy, with extremely high winds blowing across the dock. Choppy waves strike against the beach and the dock.

Obvious exits: northeast, south, southeast, and west

Your idea of what a plantation-style home might be different than mine. You might see a different color for the wooden dock, and you almost certainly see different boats. But that’s okay. You’ve gotten a a clear picture of what’s going on there, and I haven’t had to either expose you to my less-than-stellar graphic talent or recruit someone with talent to try and render it. Your own imagination is “higher resolution” than even the best engine can provide.

Yet, in the end single-player adventure games became exclusively graphic. LucasArts games like The Secret of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango proved you could add pictures and still have wonderful stories, but better technology didn’t make for more sophisticated game play. (1985’s A Mind Forever Voyaging, where the player takes the part of a self-aware AI running simulations to solve an Orwellian future society’s problems, has yet to even be matched.) The $64,000 question is, of course, whether massively multiplayer graphic games will crowd text worlds out of the ecosystem.

MUDs are unusual in that very few of them aren’t completely free; since they’ve always been labors of love rather than labors of profit, they have less pressure from market forces. But creators and maintainers get, in fannish lingo, egoboo–and that requires a certain minimum of players. It’s difficult to set out on a project like the Excursion Society MUCK as it is; the worry that some of the players I’d most like to see involved will be spending their time chasing Warcraft goblins or tweaking personal avatars is not a small one.

An odd coda: the adventure genre is nearly exctinct commercially–and the demand for graphics may well be what did it in. Infocom’s classic games were done by one or two people working together; while LucasArts’ games had one or two primary authors/designers, as time marched on, they required bigger and bigger teams, more and more elaborate graphics and sound, higher and higher investment, and just not enough of a fan base to prevent an ever-dwindling ROI.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Adventure gaming is actually slowly but surely climbing its way out of the stink-pit. We have psuedo adventure games like Beyond Good & Evil and Sam & Max has been acquired from Lucas, to be given a lovely treat.

Truth be told, though, I was always too young for adventure games until recently. The problem I see with them is simply that it gets incredibly frustrating at times. Some of them are well-done and only require you to stop and think logically or explore for a little bit (Grim Fandangom, Beneath A Steel Sky), but most of the ones I've tried have been pretty much crappy "think like the developers did" games, or even worse, they become enormous pixel-hunts, clicking everything on everything. One of the old ones I've been enjoying lately is I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, which is based off a short story or something similar. Rather interesting, dealing with the redemption of five people who have been kept alive and tortured by a supercomputer who managed to annihilate pretty much the whole world.

And going on your subject of Second Life, I'm honestly a tad drawn. On one hand, I love making crap in it, and some things that have been made in it are awesome (go look at the giant Metroid-themed goon land plot, for example), but I pretty much hate most of the furries on it, for mixed reasons. Beyond the fact that they pretty much have the collective intelligence of an ostrich who's been guzzling drain cleaner, it just sort of irks me that, given the nearly infinite possibilities of Second Life, that with all the available talent, manpower, and money, that there isn't something huge and grand within SL, and it pisses me off to see them, instead of spending their time trying to do something totally awesome like, say, make an online graphical adventure game that's reguarly updated, they spend their time modeling realistic badger cocks and mashing the "Report" button whenever anything goes wrong in their fifth cyber-yiffing session in the past eight hours.

But then again, I'm unnaturally bitter.

I had a similar feeling about Second Life, in that with all the possibilities that quasi-omnipotence had to offer, the best most of SL's residents can come up with is virtual bling and virtual Escalades and virtual mansions. Oh, and huge pectoral muscles.

Mmmm...huge pectoral muscles.

We need more creative endeavors like Minerva, Dark Life (though with less lag), Tringo, and...dare I say it? Slingo.

Second Life can be so much more than virtual bling, just as long as we keep the huge pecs.

Well, my (female) character there has huge tanks, but she also has chalk-white skin, a blue jumpsuit and platform boots. Not exactly the American Dream... more like its nightmare, if I have anything to say about it.

What are these places (?) you mention?

Minerva is something that reminds me of Ultima Online, while Dark Life is very Diablo-ish. Tringo and Slingo are games.

And you just described a lot of people, mind you.

I guess if I'd been there more than the one or two evenings, and I saw these ~~other people~~ impostors, I'd change my appearance.

But then I wouldn't recognize you!

(of course, I could just read your name, but where's the fun in that?)

I absolutely agree. Terrible place for an RP/story.

But, there is a strong sense of community, a wide tolerance for people with different tastes (save the people way off, like the non-furs), and well, just nice people. Which is part of why I can no longer be found on FM, but can often be found haunting SL, even if I still don't have much to say.

What good is all that imagination if you can't even get people engaged with you enough to peek into it?

When it comes to tolerance for different tastes, I've hardly found FurryMUCK and Tapestries to be particularly closed-minded and judgmental. After being there for 15 years (God help me), I can say with a pretty high degree of certainty that the key to making friends and feeling like one "fits in" there is not just to be friendly, but to be a good conversationalist. Being open to being approached isn't enough. And, contrary to apparent belief on the part of many, species and "exoticness" have very little to do with popularity beyond superficial interest. (One's species has to be something that a fair number of people are, on average, going to be able to find attractive, granted, so anthropomorphic mold spores are usually right out. I've found that the "more exotic than thou" race among characters over the last years tends to put off at least as many people as it attracts, though.)

While I admit I haven't been around Second Life as much as I was around There, my impression is that the social group is very much an equivalent of what you'd get on a MUCK or an IRC channel. The technology itself doesn't directly affect the sense of community. Over the long run, I'd bet that the social dynamics are going to be subject to pretty much the same forces that are in play on text-only social systems.

there is not just to be friendly, but to be a good conversationalist

But, that I am not, and I know I am not alone in this. Call me boring, perhaps I am, but well, at least the visual aspect gives me something.

It all depends on what you want for an RP/Story. Yes, there willl be some things you just can't get out of Second Life, but there will be some things you can do quite splendidly.

I do, however, absolutely agree with you on the wide tolerance and strong sense of community, even among those who aren't into the furry fandom.

Doesn't the viability of text adventure assume that the users are literate? Because so few American users are, as surprising as that seems when much of the interaction on the net is through text. Well, unless you count Harry Potter and translated manga.

And please never use the word 'egoboo' again. I've never heard it before and I could have gone my whole life in just exactly that same way.

Well, obviously there's a level of literacy required, and some of Infocom's games--not to mention some of the post-Infocom interactive fiction--would go over the heads of a fair number of players. (And probably did.) But the basics of playing a text adventure barely require high school reading levels. I really think the wane of text adventures just had more to do with our ongoing fascination with the cool and new, and of course, the desire to keep pushing computer hardware: once you have Myst, where does that leave Zork?

'Egoboo' is old fannish slang. I don't use that sort of thing too often, but sometimes it just fits--MUCKs are pretty fannish endeavors, after all. But I'll make note of your aversion. :)

YOU SAID IT AGAIN

I often wonder if people even get that much out of high school. Either that or the standards have slipped. But we've had this conversation before, I think...

There's also the sociopolitical-commerical angle, that unchecked imagination is not particularly useful to the existing power structure, and that you've got to make people think in the right direction even if it's in their leisure time, so it's games that are more and more directed and leave less to the imagination. I've noticed this about games; I've noticed this about skills and occupations generally. It's less and less necessary to actually be able to do anything.

You know what I saw in someone's journal yesterday? I quote: "Video games are like anything else in life, you get out of them what you put into them." This was in an entry in which the author discussed spending up to 200 hours playing time to perfect the art of completing a 2D shooter on one life.

Oh, I also skimmed the comments on someone's fiction on DA, and saw replies like, "It was good, with some people's writing I've got to pull out a dictionary to read it," and that rubbed me wrong; another time I was reading a library book where somebody had underlined an uncommon word here and there, like they meant to look it up later, and at first I felt contempt for them because they didn't know these words, but then I decided I ought to admire them for taking the trouble to look them up and acknowledging their ignorance.

"Life is like a sewer. You get out of it what you put into it."

To be fair (or cynical with a different slant), games that require you to think--let alone make you think--have always been in the minority in the computer era, and I'm not sure the proportion of them has trended downward as much as it sometimes seems. Interactive Fiction at its best drew you into its world, like a novel or a film, but--just like other storytelling media--they're pretty directed most of the time. If you broaden the discussion to just talk about "thinking games," that adds in everything from Archon to Civilization, and such games are still pretty popular. And, on the flip side, it's not like mindless shoot-em-up games are new. You can more or less draw a straight line from Doom III back to Wizard of Wor.

As for the commercial angle, that's sort of a chicken-and-egg issue: are companies just giving the audience what they want, or are the companies determining what the audience wants by constraining their available choices? Publishers and studios tend to avoid putting resources into things that they don't think are going to sell, so challenging fare is hard to get into the marketplace. But I don't think I can see a conspiracy to keep America stupid here, on the simple grounds that it's awfully difficult to prove the studios wrong. Audiences have consistently shown that given a choice between a Snow Falling on Cedars and a Big Daddy, they'll flock to Adam Sandler every time.

Incidentally, I blame this in part on the original 1977 Star Wars, but that's a different rant.

Egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo egoboo!!

;)

I think that's a huge part of the beauty of text, for me. It's likely also a large part of why I still vastly prefer ASCII as my roleplaying medium of choice.

If I see a picture, I will judge it not simply for its subject matter, but based on a million unconscious, subjective opinions of its rendering. An artist may fail to include some element my mind placed value upon, or may interpret a detail point very differently than I do. If this happens, there is dissonance between my mind and the image, and though I like to think I'm a somewhat intelligent and rational person, the negative record of that dissonance becomes a part of my opinion of the depicted subject.

If I read text, however, it's my own mind doing the rendering, and by definition, it is the most perfect, most complete and accurate-by-my-standards rendering possible. I may, without realizing it, add data that wasn't in the original text to embellish the mental image, building upon it. The amount of detail in my imagined version is directly proportionate to my interest in it, and my mind is capable of microcosmically exploring the subtlest nuances of the things I find most fascinating. (Yes, I can clearly imagine the tactile sensation of the trusty old brass lantern from Zork in my hand, its weight, its grip, its texture, its balance. And the sword, which is lighter to wield than it ought to be, but I suspect that's the magic talking.) I can never let myself down, because I will never do a dissatisfactory job of rendering to my own standards.

It's why graphics games disappointed me so. I *know* what a dragon looks like -- those paltry pixels on my old PC RPG don't deserve the name. :P Left to my own devices, I painted far more vivid and wondrous pictures than any computer of that day could paint, and today, even as advanced as technology is, I still feel my mind's eye is clearer than most artists' hands.

In short, interactive fiction worked with my imagination, and graphical adventures often worked against it. They haven't created the computer yet that can dream the way my mind can, and I'm certain they never will.

As for the extinction of the adventure game...yeah, it's true. It's gone underground and become another quaint spectacle of "those wacky days before new technology," the same way HAM radio has. On the other hand, I rather think that was the best thing *for* the genre. When IF was commercial, tons of shoddy, inadequate imitation games plagued the market, because sale of a product was more important than its quality. (Infocom had a pretty uniformly good stable, but I cringe at some of the $50 two-word-parser digital smegma I bought for its Frazetta or Hildebrandt knockoff cover picture.) Today, with all the best tools freely available and only the diehard enthusiasts writing Z-code, the amount of truly stunning, top-quality IF games has, I feel, increased a bit since Infocom's heyday. Sure, only the hardcore fans know it even exists, but that's okay -- for those happier with bumpmapped demonspawn beating the bejeezus out of each other with glowing weapons in glorious 3D and atmospheric surround sound, such antiques would only be noise on the pipeline of polygonal death.

So, um, yeah. I hear you. And I'm one more bearded journeyman casting Frotz on his Zippo when this song you're singing gets played again.

Hello, sailor.

Yet, in the end single-player adventure games became exclusively graphic. ... [B]etter technology didn’t make for more sophisticated game play.

We're past the 10th anniversary of Myst, a seminal computer adventure game that has been repeatedly cited as an inspirational work, with the "worlds inside books". I'm disappointed that Uru collapsed -- the idea of puzzles that required people working together to solve them would've been excellent opportunity for role-play.

For every Voyaging, there were a dozen more blah text adventures that required a high suspension of disbelief. I wouldn't say solving the puzzles in Hitchhiker's Guide required a higher level of literacy.

Speaking as a Skotos developer (http://www.skotos.net), there isn't really anything about text that magically makes it open for more imagination. I've had to explain to my crew that we don't need to hem folks into small venues or tiny cities or forbidding travel to different places, we can handle it all abstractly and organically.

What's impressed me about SL is that you're right, it's not There -- it started with the user development tools and let people do what they wanted early and lets them do it as well as they can.

As far as role-playing ... it's interesting to see people take a greater interest in their appearance for a change. No, I don't miss "you think she has a C cup, maybe a D" text. Because SL is so visual, folks spend more time dressing up their paper-doll avatars and outfitting them, and talking about one another's appearance. If you include appearance with role, then it's a very rich environment. It will be interesting to see where SL goes. It's still pretty young, and things like Dark Life show that it has promise ... if you're willing to do some coding.

The $64,000 question is, of course, whether massively multiplayer graphic games will crowd text worlds out of the ecosystem.

They never will, because text worlds use up so much less resources. And you can't Everquest from work.

For every Voyaging, there were a dozen more blah text adventures that required a high suspension of disbelief.

Sure. In the 1980s, I owned a TRS-80, and if you remember what passed for graphics on those, you know why there were an awful lot of text adventures on it. :) Trust me, I've seen some remarkably lousy ones, and seen some ones which were a lot of fun but not terribly "literate." Scott Adams' old Adventure series comes to mind--a very klunky engine even by text game standards, compounded by the fact that the guy couldn't spell to save his life, but really fun as games. (Also notable for being one of the first virtual machines.)

While I think text really does offer a certain advantage in "imagery" over graphics, the reverse is also true in different areas, much like the difference between a novel and a film. My musing really wasn't on the intrinsic superiority of text as much as on the lower bar of text. Building a room on my current MUCK project may take me hours, when one accounts for look details and environment properties and taking advantage of all the "infrastructure" in place for lighting and weather effects. For a MUCK, this is fairly ambitious stuff.

Now think about the time it would take to design that all, in credible detail, on Second Life. It's not that it couldn't be done, but that it's an order of magnitude more work. And then, take into consideration things like stylistic choices and art direction--things which World of Warcraft and, for that matter, There take very seriously. If you were building a Caribbean island on SL for an area somewhat inspired by Disney's Adventurers' Club and "Tale Spin," do you want it to look subtly toonlike? What color palette should be used? How much work do you put into weathering elements? How much research are you going to put into modeling proper geography and vegetation?

The way to "short-circuit" this process on Second Life, from what I've seen, has been to cobble together a lot of pre-existing elements with some tweaking and customization. There's nothing wrong with that--but it looks like a lot of pre-existing elements cobbled together with some tweaking and customization. Many areas across SL feel like earnest fannish productions, and that's not entirely complimentary. That was precisely the feeling that There didn't want in their world, and that caused a lot of uncertainty about just what to open up for customization and what to keep "locked down"; as a ~~crackpot~~ amateur VR theorist, I think SL's approach got it "right," but my world-building side is awfully sympathetic to There.

And, my $64,000 question was somewhat loaded--I don't think graphic games will completely crowd text worlds out, either, just as films haven't meant the death of the novel. Resources are certainly part of that, but I suspect there will always be a subset of players who continue to enjoy such games for their own sake.

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Just what kind of luddite are you?

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