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

Ye Cannot Get Ye Flask!

[normanrafferty.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: Ye Cannot Get Ye Flask!

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

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.