Just what kind of luddite are you?

[chipotle]

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.

Comments

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

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.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

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. :)

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

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.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

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.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

"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.

[chastmastr.livejournal.com]

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

;)