How quickly we forget.
The Scott Adams games, granted, were crude both in paucity of description
and in terms of the parser, which was three letters per word, two words
(NOUN VERB, or really NOU VER). Yet we must consider that they were
designed to run on machines with as little as 4K of RAM (if the text could
remain in ROM on a cartridge); the whole game was usually well under 16K, I
think.
So it's not really that the writers have gotten better, just that their
tools--and their audiences' tools--have.
Adam
-- adam@io.com | adam@phoenix.princeton.edu | Viva HEGGA! | Save the choad! "Double integral is also the shape of lovers curled asleep" : Pynchon 64,928 | TEAM OS/2 | "Ich habe einen Bierbauch!" | Linux | Fnord You can have my PGP passphrase when you pry it from my cold, dead brain.