[HN Gopher] 50 Years of Text Games - A 2021 Journey from Oregon ... ___________________________________________________________________ 50 Years of Text Games - A 2021 Journey from Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon Author : homarp Score : 82 points Date : 2021-01-02 16:53 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (if50.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (if50.substack.com) | ddingus wrote: | Subscribed. I love these kinds of games and it looks like you | will cover games I have not seen before. | | Great. | mark_l_watson wrote: | Back when my at home "Internet " was AOL, I wrote a free text | adventure game for the Apple II called Land of the Dwarf. | | Started with a huge piece of paper and drew a well labeled | transition diagram and then writing the game was easy. | | A huge number of people downloaded the game. I hope they enjoyed | it. | hawktheslayer wrote: | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text game was my favorite of | the genre, and was my first introduction to PC games. I remember | it being quite challenging especially in the pre-walkthrough | days. | rchase wrote: | Quite challenging. | | That game is impossible to solve without spoilers, so far as | I'm concerned. And lord knows I tried. As far as Infocom goes, | the only ones I managed to solve unassisted were Zork I and II | and Planetfall, all of which are considered on the easy end of | the spectrum. The later games were much more complex. Along | with HHG2TG, Lurking Horror was really difficult too. | | Tons of fun all of them, though. | | Gosh I miss my C64. | spc476 wrote: | Interesting. I found Planetfall moderately difficult, but the | Lurking Horror was easy (I almost finished it first time I | played it---I think it took me two sessions). A friend of | mine played HHG2TG (I never did) and almost gave up on it. | ghaff wrote: | I really liked Planetfall and it's one I made it through to | the end without _too_ much help (also pre-walkthroughs /pre- | Web). Steve Meretzky was the author of both that and | Hitchhikers--the latter with Adams of course. I also really | liked his A Mind Forever Voyaging but that's probably closest | to an interactive novel that Infocom ever did; the puzzle | content is fairly light. | SoSoRoCoCo wrote: | H2G2 was medium difficulty compared to Starcross and | Deadline, it just required patience. And MAN was it | satisfying to win as a 13 year old. Long before | accomplishments were measured in twitch response rather than | deductive logic. | | Spellbreaker, OTOH, was potentially impossible. It had two | puzzles early in the game that were solvable by irreversible | methods that made the game unwinnable. (One was casting | Girgol to stop time allowed you to solve the Ogre puzzle, but | you needed that spell at the very end, can't recall the | other). | nickt wrote: | Happy to see "You are in a comfortable tunnel like hall" is in | there! Looks like a great series. | macintux wrote: | I've been trying for years to remember details about a game I | very briefly played online in 1989; with luck, perhaps this | series will cover it. | | Looking forward to reading this. | the_af wrote: | I took a serious interest in IF once it reached its "modern" | stage (which ironically happened more than a decade ago). It | started subverting the tired tropes of "you're in this dungeon | and have to find the treasure" and playing with the conventions | of the genre and even the UI itself. | | In the spy game Spider and Web, instead of "losing", for most of | the game you get a "that's not what happened, please don't lie to | me". | | There was this scifi game, whose name now escapes me, where | you're communicating by radio with the survivor of a spaceship, | and every parser error gets reported appropriately: "I'm sorry, | you're breaking up, can you repeat please?". | | In Rematch you have only one move, and then you either die or win | (but what you can do in this move can be _very_ complex). | | In Adam Cadre's Photopia the gameplay possibilities aren't that | many, but the story is heartwrenching. His 9:05 is hilarious in | how it plays with common player expectations. | | I love IF. | SoSoRoCoCo wrote: | Too bad so few people turned up to play the Interactive Fiction | Competition this year. Only about ~50 votes per game were | recorded on average. I think people like to reminisce rather than | play I.F., or maybe we've all been broken by 3D. | | The winning game in 2020 was truly whimsical, and the Magpie | scored a place in the top-5 again! | | https://ifcomp.org/ | zorked wrote: | I play some IF here and there and the comp is my go-to place | for what to play. I'm frequently years late though. It's not a | thing I think I should track in real time. | | Infocom games were nice and all but modern IF is where it's at. | The genre moved forward, there's better design, better stories, | more interesting mechanics. Gigantic labyrinth worlds that you | can't win because you missed a one-time chance to pick up | bubblegum in the first area of the game isn't something that is | done anymore. | SoSoRoCoCo wrote: | > one-time chance to pick up bubblegum in the first area of | the game isn't something that is done anymore. | | This is what I said in peer post a few hours ago. That's | because the genre has been critically analyzed over the past | 50 years. | | Although the "click the keyword" modern I.F. really doesn't | do it for me. I prefer the open-ended interpreters. | | There is a doctoral thesis on this called "Twisty Little | Passages". It discusses several "fundamental laws" of I.F. | that were derived from the Infocom games of the 70's and | 80's, such as your "bubblegum" complaint. | | [1] https://www.amazon.com/Twisty-Little-Passages-Approach- | Inter... | hubblesticks wrote: | I grew up playing Return to Zork and just missed the original | Zorks. I couldn't get into them but really wanted to. I love | the execution of IF and the stories they weave. What would be | a good modern IF to jump into that isn't as punishing as the | original Zorks, and not too hard for an IF newbie? Thank you! | anthk wrote: | Anchorhead. | brox wrote: | For those familiar with the original 1998 version, note | that a remastered and illustrated edition was released in | 2018--worth a replay and a good way of supporting the | author! | https://store.steampowered.com/app/726870/Anchorhead/ | Waterluvian wrote: | I find these games super boring alone but so much fun in small | groups. | | I think they need to be designed as a facilitator of a story, | ultimately played and told by you and your friends. | | Kind of like if the story part of D&D was a standalone product | where the software is the DM. | SoSoRoCoCo wrote: | > but so much fun in small groups. | | In my 40+ years playing IF, I never considered this. What an | interesting idea. I did play an email correspondence campaign | in the early 90's but that was a ton of work for the DM since | he was writing pages and pages of story. But it was a fun in- | between. | cproctor wrote: | In my academic studies using IF to teach CS [1], I've found | it can be very powerful to "play" or "tell" stories in | person. (These are middle- and high-school students.) | Usually, at the end of a class authors will volunteer to | share their stories, and then they will ask for a volunteer | to be the protagonist while the author reads as the narrator. | (This becomes important when the stories are serious and | touch on real-life situations where it could be painful to | have someone else misread, misinterpret, or make fun of your | story.) | | [1] Proctor, C., & Garcia, A. (2020). Hogg, L., Stockbridge, | K., Achieng-Evenson, C., & SooHoo, S. (Eds.). Student voices | in the digital hubbub. Pedagogies of With-ness: Students, | Teachers, Voice, and Agency. Myers Educational Press. https:/ | /chrisproctor.net/media/publications/proctor_2020_ped... | mbunch wrote: | It's frustrating how hard of a sell the text medium can be, | especially with how creative authors have grown to explore what | visual media isn't well-suited for. So many of my avid gamer | friends just won't give anything with such a minimal UI an | honest shot, even if they loved playing similar games in the | past when it was more of a necessity. | | Incidentally, I was actually thinking of submitting something | that I'd been working on for the competition, but I didn't | think it would qualify since it was already publicly | distributed. It's up at | https://writtenrealms.com/worlds/7996/brimstone-prologue, so if | anybody is into this kind of thing and has some time to kill, | I'd actually love to hear any feedback! | nugget wrote: | I liked this article about Gemstone 3 | | https://gizmodo.com/i-had-my-first-kiss-in-gemstone-iii-1845... | | which shows the powerful and lasting impact that some of these | multi-player text games had on the people (particularly kids) who | played them. It was previously posted to HN but I can't find the | thread off hand. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-02 23:00 UTC)