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

[malkith0.livejournal.com]

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.

[bfdragon.livejournal.com]

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?

[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.

[rancourt.livejournal.com]

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.

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.