If you proceed, you are likely to be eaten by a grue.

[truepenny]

Article on text adventures--for which the swank modern term is apparently "interactive fiction."

(And Mirrorthaw gets a gold star for sending me the link.)

I played almost every game Infocom released. Planetfall was the best, imo, but my greatest lingering fondness is probably for Zork and its sequels.

All hail the Great Underground Empire!

Comments

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The term "interactive fiction" doesn't quite square for me with the experience of playing, as a random example, Zork. I gather from that article that there are a number of IF out there that are stories, but mostly the games that I loved weren't. They were an environment with puzzles.

Now, in the best ones, a story emerged from the environment and puzzles, but it wasn't the story of the player's persona. It was the story of what had happened to produce the environment and puzzles as the player found them.

If that makes any sense at all.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Sure it makes sense. Remember that Zork and Adventure were among the
very earliest of these games. They have almost no story, because that
idea hadn't been invented yet. (Although even the bare minimum --
"There was this adventurer, who faced many trials and found many
treasures" -- has to count as a story, to *some* degree.)

The idea of an *interesting* story, one which was a valuable part of
the game (along with the puzzle solving), came along quickly. Infocom
stayed with that model through most of their run.

You're right that their games (and modern games) put a lot of the
story in as background -- stuff you discover and put together. But I'd
say that there was always a point where the protagonist of the game
was drawn in, or began to take action, and became a part of the
outcome.

_Deadline_, for example, is a formal mystery. You spend time
questioning people and finding evidence. But you also hide, eavesdrop,
follow people, and eventually make an arrest. To whatever degree the
detective is the hero of a mystery novel, you're it.

_Planetfall_ has a long period of discovering what happened to the
planet, followed by a big action scene, at the end of which you save
the world.

Other games, ditto. By the time you get up to the late Infocom games,
like _Trinity_ and _A Mind Forever Voyaging_, you really are the
protagonist the whole way through -- although there are always many
scenes in which your role is to explore and discover.

(Now that I think about it, in both those games you are discovering
your *own* role in the background that you explore.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

This is making me think about the difference between a question and a riddle.

Because the more story-based Infocom games (based on my fifteen-year-old memories of playing them) are rather like the professor who asks what appears to be an open-ended question--but, given the professor and their views on the subject, you know there's actually only one right answer, and class is going to grind to a halt until someone coughs it up.

Whereas the puzzle-based games felt like riddles.

I don't know why there's a difference--and it may be that the difference is something in my head, not an actual attribute. But while both could be insanely frustrating, the quality of frustration was not the same.

Trying to solve a riddle is very different from trying to figure out what someone wants you to say.

Perhaps this is also influenced by the fact that I have a very strong drive for narrative completion--which was even stronger when I was a teenager. So getting stalled in a story-based game drove me crazy because I was holding the story up. A cardinal sin, obviously. And definitely my anxiety rather than anything about the gameplay.

But I think that at least begins to explain why I preferred the games that were about investigating, and recovering fragments of a narrative that was already finished.

But I still haven't managed to articulate the difference between a riddle and a question. Have to ponder that one some more, I guess. There's also some theoretical questions about the nature of a protagonist bumping around in my backbrain, but they're not ready to come out and face the world yet.

[larryhammer]

I note that the extremely popular Myst was the direct descendent of the find-the-story text adventures, with graphics.

My personal favorite IF links are http://www.ifiction.org/games/ and http://www.wurb.com/if/index .

---L.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Post when you come up with the difference; I'm interested.

I should point out that *insane* frustration -- when you really don't
know what to do next, or even what to try next -- means the game isn't
*working* right. And that's true whether you're stuck on a puzzle, or
stuck on a story event. In both cases, the author has something in
mind, and you can't see it, because he hasn't given you enough to go
on.

(Which can happen in a novel too, of course. The big difference is
that in the novel you can keep turning pages, and get to the end, and
say "Huh, that made no sense. I guess it was a bad novel.")

Also worth noting that a story-based game doesn't necessarily mean you
have to constantly *figure out* what to do next in the story. A
different IF model has the puzzle events playing counterpoint with the
story events. They're all happening to *you*, but the bits that move
the story forward aren't the bits that you can get stuck on.

(Commercial RPG videogames usually use an extreme form of this. The
puzzles or fighting or whatever are only barely relevant to the story;
whereas the story scenes aren't even interactive, they're just movies.
Obviously, I don't think that text games should go that far. :)

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes -- and IF authors have had endless fun playing with the
boundary between the protagonist and the player. Your humble
correspondent included. It's one angle I really enjoy about the form.