Interactive fiction? Also, splitting (The Wizard's Castle)

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Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/12/2014 6:32 PM · Permalink · Report

Two things:

Is this game really to be considered interactive fiction? I'd say it's just an RPG with a text interface--no more interactive fiction than NetHack.
Should the Windows version, which sports a graphical interface and very little text, be a part of this entry? It's the same game in much the same way that CD-Man is the same game as Pac-Man.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/12/2014 6:42 PM · Permalink · Report

IF is being used to describe both more (text adventures, generally) and less (addventures) than it is outside MG. While Wizard's Castle is about as authentically a text adventure as Wumpus is, they're both closer to that than many other genres. I believe the CRPG Addict has claimed Wizard's Castle as at the head of an early CRPG line that died off, and probably we should strip the IF genre from it.

As a lumper, early on I threw in some disparate versions of what boiled down to the same game together even when facelifts gave them very different appearances. Since then we seem to have come down against doing so, meaning this one (and lots of others: Conway's Game of Life, Eliza, Hunchback, Santa Paravia) is just waiting for someone to make a new blank entry for Wizard's Castle (Windows) and move the information there.

Indra was here (20755) on 4/12/2014 8:14 PM · Permalink · Report

Speaking of IF, I really need you tutor me on interactive fiction, interactive fiction with graphics, and visual novels. I honestly can't tell which is which sometimes. I sometimes wonder if Darklands and King of Dragon Pass qualifies as one variation or another as a sub-genre.

Yes, I'm that confused. What else is new? :p

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/13/2014 3:36 AM · edited · Permalink · Report

In a nutshell:

Does the game primarily rely on player-typed commands for input, as would Crowther & Wood's ADVENTURE or Infocom's Zork? If so, with very few exceptions, the game is a text adventure. These can be on the primitive side, like Scott Adams' games which would only understand VERB NOUN instructions like "SAY YOHO", all the way to Magnetic Scrolls' showboaty "PLANT THE POT PLANT IN THE PLANT POT".

With very few exceptions, these were all just considered "text adventures" and the phrase "interactive fiction" was just marketing jargon. Ultimately a handful of games by the early industry's keenest developers -- canonically Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls, Level 9, and probably Legend, and Synapse sure tried for it -- achieved the IF ideal by aspiring for a more complete world model, more sophisticated stories and more mature themes -- seeking a step beyond the classic genre aspirations of "collect all the TREASURES and put them in the trophy case!" In the more recent, post-crash period, many of the homebrew indie developers have aspired to this ideal and tried to model their games to include the best elements of the best text adventures (cf. completeness, sophistication, maturity) and exclude the vulgar ones that were dictated by market conditions (filler such as hunger daemons, mazes, carry limits, expansive but empty environments), hence the modern authors tend to wave the IF flag. Many of them still make crass "text adventures", but the rising tide has lifted all boats, so to speak.

The text parser isn't enough to make a game a text adventure -- as with the CLI generally, early on it was experimented with as a general input mechanism, and prior to the introduction of the mouse there weren't a huge number of great options (most notably "press a hotkey to choose one of the options presented", as well as interfaces allowing keys for standard options, most of which are unuseful in most situations -- presaging similar "I can't do that" or "That doesn't make sense" with lawnmowing VERB NOUN combos in Maniac Mansion.) Possibly as early as the '60s there was a program (name slips my mind at the moment) simulating manipulations of a few Platonic solids in a closet-sized room with the help of a "robot arm", understanding instructions such as "put the blue sphere on the red cube" -- that was a text parser but not a game. ELIZA took text input, weakly interpreted it, and delivered output inspired by it -- but was also, strictly speaking, not a game... more of a software toy. I have a recollection of a computer wargame -- was it Waterloo? -- that takes text parser input from players and from that, derives instructions to units. Not a text adventure, not interactive fiction in any sense but the most pedantic (eg a directory listing is interactive, responds with text, could be used to tell a fictional story. Yes but no.) Scribblenauts? Related, but there's a lot going on there besides text adventuring. King's Quest and essentially text-parser-era Sierra games? They are adventures, and text input is a gateway (more like a bottleneck), but despite the direct leap from Softporn to Leisure Suit Larry... graphical adventures are a different beast from text adventures. See the next post.

MUDS look and act like text adventures, but the kinds of gameplay offered -- fight orcs, alone or with friends, and upgrade your equipment -- are at variance from the standard genre themes ("solve these puzzles, preferably in some kind of underground fantasy environment") of text adventures. It's a bit like a text parser interface to an often-somewhat-boring RPG hopefully spiced up by your companions.

A necessary digression at the other meanings of "interactive fiction", a genre that has been adopted by related but disparate types of games: not just highfalutin' text adventures, but also "I write a paragraph and offer two options, then you pick one of them and write a paragraph and offer two options" type collaborative (hence interactive) hyperfictions; ALSO, "I have written a paragraph and I am polling the entire internet to submit votes for what should happen next, and will follow that recommendation" games and stories -- which also handily describes Twitch playing Pokemon as well as many MUSHes. Policy here has dictated that we generally exclude "games" whose storytelling is, er, in-progress, but you will find people out there describing such games as IF.

To Be Continued... though for what it's worth, the Wikipedia article on Interactive Fiction does a pretty good job at this breakdown.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/26/2014 11:02 PM · Permalink · Report

Possibly as early as the '60s there was a program (name slips my mind at the moment) simulating manipulations of a few Platonic solids in a closet-sized room with the help of a "robot arm", understanding instructions such as "put the blue sphere on the red cube" -- that was a text parser but not a game.

For future reference: this was SHRDLU -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/27/2014 2:05 AM · Permalink · Report

Oh, I should have recognized that one--I remember reading about it after looking at the Wikipedia article on ETAOIN SHRDLU, some years ago. It's an interesting piece of software.

As far as 'not a game' goes, I'm not sure it's much less of a game than a Tower of Hanoi implementation (especially since not all of those actually implement a winning condition--you're just expected to quit when you're done) but I won't argue the point just now, lest I destroy all of my credibility.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/13/2014 4:02 AM · Permalink · Report

(ha ha: "in a nutshell.. TL;DR")

"Interactive fiction with graphics" is not a genre, and not to be confused with graphical adventures -- it's just a weird invention unique to Mobygames that probably came to Trixter after a night of eating too much anchovies on his pizza. Due to the vagaries of the Apple 2 display, it could harness a mode allowing the display of high-resolution graphics in most of the screen in tandem with 4 lines of text at the bottom of the screen. Ken Williams saw this opportunity and used it to make a bad text adventure with bad graphics! (Memory and storage were at a premium, so something had to make way for the graphics -- not big bitmaps, but actually small vector illustrating-instructions so the screen could "draw" the picture like a plotter would.) Actually he made several, the hi-rez adventure series, and their commercial success inspired many imitators. Some of them were wretched (Adventuresoft's SAGAs, Polarware's Transylvania trilogy), some companies ran with the developments and tried to make the best of things (Level 9 and Magnetic Fields married graphics that weren't too bad with text parsers and game sophistication that wasn't terrible; Legend took this to about the furthest extent possible until the graphics took over entirely and they found themselves developing interactive movies and making Unreal 2.)

Even Sierra could see that this was a hybrid of limited viability, so souped up the graphic element with King's Quest and retained a text parser as a kind of multitool for the on-screen avatar just as long as was purely necessary. Many other developers noticed that the text parser was basically an expensive input device -- it takes a lot of work to make a smart one, and most games will not make good use of the power it offers. If only the need to support a basically infinite combination of verbs and nouns could be streamlined into a list of only the commands needed to win the kind of game they wanted to design, that could represent the next huge quantum leap. Ergo, Icom's Deja Vu basically taking a page from the Mac's interface and inventing the GUI for games. Ergo, Maniac Mansion's "VERB NOUN" shopping list ticker, an inheritor of the failed "word wheel" system they tried earlier in Labyrinth. Streamlining a text parser to a limited graphic parser is a sort of holy grail of localization, because translating a text adventure is very difficult, quite expensive, and requires an enormous amount of programming grammatical understanding, while a pan-cultural iconic interface only needs its text output (and recorded dialogue) translated. But You Did Not Ask About Graphical Adventures. This is just my "IF with graphics" aside.

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/13/2014 4:02 AM · Permalink · Report

I'm enjoying Pseudo_Intellectual's lengthy discourse on the topic, but I'll summarize while he prepares the next chapter.

Approximately, a game is interactive fiction if:

It is a game.
It takes input with a text parser (or, more controversially, a CYOA-style selection system).
Its primary output is prose (or poetry, I guess). Not all text-mode games qualify. No nethack.
It involves a degree of simulation.

An IF game can have graphics, but they should generally be only decorative. Some games have violated this rule by indicating objects in an illustration that aren't described in the text. IF with graphics should be understood as text-parser games with illustrations, rather than CYOA.

A visual novel is CYOA rather than parser-based and includes graphics. There are certain genre conventions which games often flout. A more complete description of these would make this more than a summary, but I think I remember having a discussion on the topic here a few years ago. Maybe we could go over it again, if you want.

All three kinds of games could be viewed as IF. Or you could say that only those games with parser are interactive fiction, and both CYOA and parser-based games are subcategories of hypertext fiction.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/13/2014 4:15 AM · Permalink · Report

Sometimes you have to spell it out for Indra. Usually, you have to spell it out quite explicitly, denoting all ambiguities and defusing all potential ambiguities. If you tell him ABC, XYZ, he will demand: what about D and W?

The text adventure / interactive fiction distinction is often overlooked but I think it's important because it spells out the difference between Hunt the Wumpus and Hunter, In Darkness.

Indra was here (20755) on 4/13/2014 12:19 PM · Permalink · Report

[Q --start Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--]Sometimes you have to spell it out for Indra. Usually, you have to spell it out quite explicitly, denoting all ambiguities and defusing all potential ambiguities. If you tell him ABC, XYZ, he will demand: what about D and W? [/Q --end Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--]Oooh, I like how you know how I like to think. :D

continues reading explanations

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/13/2014 5:27 AM · Permalink · Report

Now, to nitpick your summary:

I don't think that condition 1 is purely necessary. Much hyperfiction is highly deterministic, some of it not even interactive, a condition which we typically require to categorize a program as a game. (This brings to mind a "courtroom" work of IF which asks the "player", in the shoes of a public defender, for input at four or five junctures in the story of a losing case... and consistently presents the same output regardless of what the player's choices are. It's not an open system, it just looks like one. But then, the same can be said of Tic-Tac-Toe, Checkers, and eventually Chess and Go.)

By and large I have avoided documenting ungamely IF here at Mobygames, since I know what we like, but there's lots out there.

(And then, from the other side, there's Lists and Lists. "This was a programming exercise: could I implement a very small Lisp interpreter inside the Z-machine? (Scheme interpreter, actually.) Turns out I could. And I did. But I wanted to enter it in the IFComp as a game, so I added a Scheme manual and a problem set. So it’s a little self-paced lesson in Scheme programming.

I admit it’s still not a game.")

I can of course split hairs with condition number 2. Any input mechanism is hypothetically possible, those are just by far the two most common. Emily Short reviewed a "date simulator" whose input mechanism was making adjustments to a machismo dial while the game played out in real time, responding to her tweaks. More of an interactive movie than a text adventure, but if she considers it under her IF purview, I think she would be qualified to judge its validity!

3 is in practice pretty airtight. There's no reason I can't type "hide behind sofa and wait" into an audiogame's command line while waiting for the wolf panting or robot chainsaw sounds to pan out of my headphones, I just don't think anyone has done it yet. But they will, and it will be interactive fiction!

4 only really applies to the text adventure wing, and doesn't necessarily have any bearing on the hyperfiction gallery. (And even so, I would volunteer that the vast majority of text adventure games merely made clumsy gestures toward simulation rather than simulating anything; all they simulated was displaying the contents of database cell (locationdescription4) when it was queried. In the BASIC era at least, plenty of text adventures wouldn't even list the presence of a dropped item in a room if you had dumped it there and it was surely a rare "if-with-graphics" title that would draw dropped items in the room illustration! If by simulation you mean that when you type "pick up torch" the game moves the torch's location from room 3 - the gatehouse - to room 0 - the player's pockets - I suppose I must concede. But really then all that you're saying is that it is a database.)

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/13/2014 4:41 PM · Permalink · Report

[Q --start Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--]Now, to nitpick your summary: [/Q --end Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--] One good turn deserves another. To nitpick your nitpicking:

I said 'game' because we're on MobyGames and it's games under discussion, but more broadly I might have said 'interactive', in the sense that a CYOA book is interactive. The experience of the work is determined in part by the player's choices--even if the choicemaking is the only difference in experience, as in your courtroom example.

(And, anyway, it sounds like you're placing hypertext fiction as a subset of interactive fiction here. Certainly not all hypertext fiction is IF.)

Regarding input mechanisms, I was again limiting my definition somewhat for the purposes of mobygames, but I'd argue that picking one of several options on a 'machismo dial' at a certain point it just a kind of multiple-selection (i.e. CYOA) interface. It's not the specific interface as much as the kind of interface that matters. I once played a text adventure that was run (IIRC) by inputting commands after 'make' and the 'engine' was just gcc preprocessor directives (I think it was in the IOCCC). Anyway, I can't find the review you're talking about, but I do agree that Emily Short's qualified to judge what IF is, if anyone is.

Regarding prose output: so you posit that the text parser is such an important part of what-it-means-to-be-IF that any audio game that happens to have a text parser must be IF? Not just fiction that is interactive, but actually the-medium-we-call-interactive-fiction? I have to disagree. There is, after all, a version of Doom with some added sounds so it can be played as an audio game, and I don't think that changing the input style to allow "turn 90 degrees left and shoot the chaingun" would qualify as IF.

I agree that simulation is more the domain of 'traditional' text-adventure-descended interactive fiction. I meant the statement very broadly though: in some sense, the thing you're playing with involves at least nominally a simulated world in which you are acting. Eliza doesn't qualify because it doesn't have a simulated world, and sitting at your command prompt doesn't qualify because it doesn't have a simulated world, but a game that says "You see the command prompt on screen. ELIZA.EXE is the only file in this folder." probably does qualify. Of course games even slightly heavier on simulation--including just keeping track of where dropped objects are--qualify for this without question. I don't agree that it is 'just a database', but I would say that a very carefully constructed database with rules for what kinds of data could occupy what columns could well be a game or an example of hypertext fiction, if not precisely IF.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/13/2014 8:44 PM · Permalink · Report

Well picked! I realised that there were additional points following your list for me to also unpack and explode, but sadly there were so many things wrong in Indra's response blurb that renewing my efforts there are taking all my spare time today. Without a doubt I am being needlessly stringent when challenging criteria that describe IF that exist today but might exclude hypothetical future IF that would be fundamentally different.

If you could, however, might you elaborate on "Certainly not all hypertext fiction is IF"? Is it being needlessly literal-minded of me to conflate interaction and the kind of interactivity that characterises IF? Or are you just saying that the Solo Noughts and Crosses gamebook is not IF? (I don't think so, the missing element there is the F, not the I.)

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/13/2014 10:29 PM · Permalink · Report

[Q --start Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--]If you could, however, might you elaborate on "Certainly not all hypertext fiction is IF"? Is it being needlessly literal-minded of me to conflate interaction and the kind of interactivity that characterises IF? Or are you just saying that the Solo Noughts and Crosses gamebook is not IF? (I don't think so, the missing element there is the F, not the I.) [/Q --end Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--] Not all fiction that I'd call hypertext fiction is also what I'd call interactive. There is a short story collection (the name of which escapes me) which is not linearly related, but when the stories are read in any order, a kind of background story emerges. I don't think that kind of interactivity (choosing in which order to read the chapters) is enough for most people to agree that it's 'interactive fiction', even if they're willing to say that not all IF needs to be parser-based or CYOA-based. But it is, in my opinion, a form of hypertext fiction. It's just not in any sense a game.

I no longer have access to a university library, so it's harder for me to find these references now (and Wikipedia's article on hypertext fiction is useless), but I had read some late-eighties/early-nineties articles in academic journals on the subject of hypertext fiction (or something very like it, if not using that term) which, again, didn't assume the kinds of modes of interaction we expect from interactive fiction.

Maybe the best way to say it is this: the MobyGames or Wikipedia of a fictional world would be a work of hypertext fiction, but not a work of interactive fiction, in the sense that it's usually understood.

If you like, I'll see if I can find some concrete examples, but I'm in the middle of cooking, so it'll have to wait.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/17/2014 3:13 AM · Permalink · Report

I just couldn't leave this thread well enough alone! Your bold (and entirely correct) accusations of my imposing my personal views on the topic as authoritative weren't sufficient to send me hiding with my tail between my legs... I just got busy for a few days.

There is a short story collection (the name of which escapes me) which is not linearly related, but when the stories are read in any order, a kind of background story emerges.

That is reminiscent of Cortazar's 1963 Hopscotch.

I don't think that kind of interactivity (choosing in which order to read the chapters) is enough for most people to agree that it's 'interactive fiction', even if they're willing to say that not all IF needs to be parser-based or CYOA-based.

You need to go have a look at the 2013 IF comp's "Trapped In Time" entry, a PDF, for reasons that hopefully my invoking it in this very specific context won't spoil. For a hilarious hyperfiction fail, you can also see the Library of the Future Conversation Kit on my CYOA blog at Turn to Page Four. You read through page 1, it has an illustration on page 2 and ends with "turn to page 3", which has another picture, then text on page 4, ending with "turn to page 5". At the end of the first story, you have the option of continuing to read a second one, also in totally sequential order. Librarian! Your enthusiasm is charming but you are somewhat unclear on the concept!

But it is, in my opinion, a form of hypertext fiction. It's just not in any sense a game.

As with the footnotes in Pale Fire?

(and Wikipedia's article on hypertext fiction is useless)

"There is little consensus on the definition of hypertext literature." Ha. Given what I see there, I'm not even sure that "hypertext fiction" necessarily describes what I'm calling hyperfiction (and what they intermittently call "cyberfiction", ugh!)

I had read some late-eighties/early-nineties articles in academic journals on the subject of hypertext fiction

Was it being academically analysed at any other time?

In the early days of Everything2 a few of its admins used it as a forum in which to collaboratively mprovise a shared post-apocalyptic near-future SF setting named "Underground Tokyo" (oh hey, here it is), whose infoblurbs were scattered haphazardly intermingled amongst all the facts and fictions the other users were populating the database with. That was totally hypertext fiction. (I encouraged a few attempts to implement CYOAs there also, but with only 512 characters to work with per write-up, that didn't leave much left after including two pipe-linked choices.)

If you like, I'll see if I can find some concrete examples

Oh, I'm always interested in examples, but this is hardly pressing.

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/17/2014 1:19 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

Re-edit: quotes replaced with italics because that makes so much more sense than just letting us quote more than six times....

I admit that I was concerned that my 'utterly blunt' statement might have been a bit... sharp. And then I posted a couple of IF reviews on my blog and Planet IF, which usually receives several posts a day, has been silent ever since. An omen? Or perhaps I've simply said The Last Word on interactive fiction.

...or perhaps you're secretly the entirety of the rest of the IF community. A smaller community than I thought!

That is reminiscent of Cortazar's 1963 Hopscotch.

Not the one I was thinking of, though it is on my reading list. It came to my attention a month or two ago, because it's on the Daphne award shortlist for fiction.

You need to go have a look at the 2013 IF comp's "Trapped In Time" entry, a PDF, for reasons that hopefully my invoking it in this very specific context won't spoil.

I was planning to work my way up from 1995, playing all the old ifcomp games I missed, but a few detours in what's sure to be a multi-year endeavour are doubtless warranted.

For a hilarious hyperfiction fail, you can also see the Library of the Future Conversation Kit...

That's stupendous! I'm sure I've made jokes about 'CYOA' like that in the past, but I didn't think I'd actually see such a thing.

As with the footnotes in Pale Fire?

Another book that is on my reading list for the summer (along with Lolita). I'll let you know when I finish it, I guess.

But the 'cyber' is hip and rad and future-cool. Like cyberpunk! Am I doing it right?

Don't worry too much--I'm not sure that hyperfiction means what they think it means, either, so we make just as good experts as Anonymous Q. Wikipedia.

Was it being academically analysed at any other time?

Point. Indeed, I remember commenting (or complaining), some months ago (on the occasion of realizing that Twine was becoming a force in the world, I think), that twenty-odd years ago academics seemed wide-eyed and interested in hypertext fiction, but by the time interactive fiction matured in an interesting and bold literary direction, everyone seemed to have forgotten it existed.

In the early days of Everything2

...

That was totally hypertext fiction.

Indeed! These kinds of things occupy an interesting place in the literary spectrum. They're like the Voynich manuscript--not necessarily stories, but still fiction. And in the case of these collaborative efforts (and we may expand this to include addventures and such), they're not exactly games, in the usual sense, but they're interactive entertainment with rules (your contribution must make sense) and goals (write something interesting). They're like the SimCity of literature--interactive toys that are, at least superficially, like stories (as SimCity is, at least superficially, like more traditional games).

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/17/2014 8:18 PM · Permalink · Report

I admit that I was concerned that my 'utterly blunt' statement might have been a bit... sharp

I was concerned that you might have knocked Indra's opinion of my expertise down a few notches, now that he's just referring to me as just another "fanboi" (but of what, I'm not quite clear). Maybe next time it will be your brain he tries to pick!

Or perhaps I've simply said The Last Word on interactive fiction.

Time to close the book, so to speak.

...or perhaps you're secretly the entirety of the rest of the IF community. A smaller community than I thought!

As sockpuppet trolls have demonstrated, it only takes a few people with dissociative identity disorder to populate a bustling forum!

Not the one I was thinking of, though it is on my reading list.

I have no idea if I will ever read it; I've come to terms with being satisfied having a vague familiarity with many important works without ever actually experiencing them directly. I have all sorts of opinions about films I haven't seen, derived entirely from the reviews 8)

I was planning to work my way up from 1995, playing all the old ifcomp games I missed, but a few detours in what's sure to be a multi-year endeavour are doubtless warranted.

That sounds to me like a ruinously thorough all-or-nothing strategy that will be largely unrewarding. I could see playing all IFComp winners and all XYZZY award winners for a highlights reel of sorts. I can take a big dose of them once a year, but a non-stop diet of comp mediocrity might I fear be enough to put someone off IF altogether!

But the 'cyber' is hip and rad and future-cool. Like cyberpunk! Am I doing it right?

And now it can be retrofuturistic! Cyberpunk: the next steampunk, which was itself the next cyberpunk!

twenty-odd years ago academics seemed wide-eyed and interested in hypertext fiction, but by the time interactive fiction matured in an interesting and bold literary direction, everyone seemed to have forgotten it existed.

Reading old academic works about gaming, I found a bias toward writing about MUDs. Reading more recent academic works about gaming, I find a bias toward Second Life. I think it's really a matter of dressing up something that you already have an interest in in significance drag until someone else is convinced that its study is worth paying you to continue. In the meantime Anna Anthropy comes out of left field and overturns an industry. It's hard to foment a revolution when you're worried about getting on the tenure track.

I'm sure there are hip young academics like Zoya Street who would probably do good work bridging the past and present of hyperfiction if only most of it wasn't hidden behind the academic paywall. It's so expensive and simultaneously so unrewarding. Never pirated because it wasn't worth the bother?

not exactly games, in the usual sense, but they're interactive entertainment with rules (your contribution must make sense) and goals (write something interesting). They're like the SimCity of literature--interactive toys that are, at least superficially, like stories (as SimCity is, at least superficially, like more traditional games).

You don't need to toot the "software toy" horn, I'm the genre's biggest booster here. Once I documented Conway's Game of Life and Eliza, I had to just say.... y'know, they're close enough to games.

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/18/2014 1:45 AM · Permalink · Report

Well, that's the only way, as Bacon tells us: "Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things."

My, but you can turn a lovely phrase. "Ruinously thorough" sounds like something I'd like to have printed on either my business card or my tombstone.

Fortunately, I can handle a lot of drek, and it will be spaced out. There is one saving grace: the very worst games are likely to be among the very shortest, I think.

You don't need to toot the "software toy" horn, I'm the genre's biggest booster here. Once I documented Conway's Game of Life and Eliza, I had to just say.... y'know, they're close enough to games.

Shh... don't tell anyone, but I too added some entries that are a bit dubiously gamelike.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/18/2014 8:40 PM · Permalink · Report

My, but you can turn a lovely phrase. "Ruinously thorough" sounds like something I'd like to have printed on either my business card or my tombstone.

Just get miniature versions of the tombstone printed as business cards. Your acquaintance comes with free paperweight!

There is one saving grace: the very worst games are likely to be among the very shortest, I think.

I believe that some of the larger pieces by Paul Panks rival Time Zone for enormous expanses of undifferentiated filler rooms, and Panks games traditionally rated dead last year after year. Of course, even a hundred empty rooms don't take long to skip through with no puzzles to slow you down.

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/18/2014 10:23 PM · Permalink · Report

Happily I'm planning to play these under (more or less) ifcomp rules. Not more than two hours per game unless I feel like it, and I'll feel free to stop playing early under the same circumstances I would when judging for the comp. There are only about 30 games per comp, on average, so it should be doable, eventually.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/19/2014 2:11 AM · Permalink · Report

Heh, I often call it a day once I get a strong feeling of "oh, it's one of those...."

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/21/2014 4:35 AM · Permalink · Report

My, but you can turn a lovely phrase. "Ruinously thorough" sounds like something I'd like to have printed on either my business card or my tombstone.

Wait no, what this really called for was a rigor mortis joke.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/17/2014 7:26 PM · Permalink · Report

(And, anyway, it sounds like you're placing hypertext fiction as a subset of interactive fiction here. Certainly not all hypertext fiction is IF.)

One is a blackberry bush planted over here and the other an ivy vine planted over there, but now in 2014, substantial quantities of both plants have grown tangled and intertwined. They are not necessarily conjoined, but at this date I don't know if it's possible for them to continue being considered unrelated.

I'd argue that picking one of several options on a 'machismo dial' at a certain point it just a kind of multiple-selection (i.e. CYOA) interface.

My reading of the review is that it wasn't a "make a choice at certain intervals" interface so much as a continuous matter of small tweaks, somewhat akin to steering a car along a winding road.

Anyway, I can't find the review you're talking about

Here we go, it was The Act.

I feel that text input (whether keyboard-typewritten or PUT/HAMSTER/MICROWAVE as in Maniac Manion) is indeed more central to what I have in mind than text output is, because up until the mainstreaming of the GUI, virtually all computing was text output and most of it was not IF 8)

There is, after all, a version of Doom with some added sounds so it can be played as an audio game, and I don't think that changing the input style to allow "turn 90 degrees left and shoot the chaingun" would qualify as IF.

You need to have a look at FooM and IF Quake 8)

a game that says "You see the command prompt on screen. ELIZA.EXE is the only file in this folder." probably does qualify.

I suppose framing is important, but I wouldn't want to hang a substantial judgment on such a delicate distinction.

Of course games even slightly heavier on simulation--including just keeping track of where dropped objects are--qualify for this without question.

Yes, yes! Simulation is important for satisfying text adventures; the early ones don't have it much because it is hard to do, and specifically it is hard to do right (have a look at the Digital Antiquarian's writing about the emergent gameplay in Melbourne House's simulationist Inglish games). But then for more story-concerned titles such as Photopia and Mercy -- the emergence of the IF aesthetic -- simulationism doesn't necessarily need to even be present at all, because the stories these games play aren't stories about keys in locks, but about people's rich internal lives and the interactions between them. (But then in the hands of a programmer-artist like Emily Short you get titles like Galatea and Alabaster (or, say, The Warbler's Nest) which incorporate the simulation of emotional states of NPCs (or what the player knows or believes in that latter case) into a much more interesting and focused kind of emergent storytelling -- shades of Chris Crawford's decades of fruitless work with the Erasmatron. This simulation-IF direction brings us closest, I think, to the holy grail of a computerized D&D DM, though where the tabletop D&D ideal would fit on an Adventure-RPG videogame spectrum for Indra's purposes remains deeply unclear 8)

I don't agree that it is 'just a database'

C'mon -- Scott Adams text adventures are just databases. But conspicuously, only by a generous stretch could they be characterised as IF 8)

I would say that a very carefully constructed database with rules for what kinds of data could occupy what columns could well be a game or an example of hypertext fiction, if not precisely IF.

Congratulations, we've found one square foot of common ground 8)

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/17/2014 7:37 PM · Permalink · Report

text input (whether keyboard-typewritten or PUT/HAMSTER/MICROWAVE as in Maniac Manion)

This part is important, I think (not to the text adventure / IF division, but to a more general division between adventure game generations): once Maniac Mansion's list of verbs is streamlined down to a hand icon, an eye icon and a walk icon, you no longer know what specifically to expect and hope for by clicking the hand on an on-screen object: you might feel its texture, you might try to pick it up, you might try to move it, you might lasciviously fondle it or conversely you might slap it. I suppose there's an intermediary step, when we still have the verbs but most of the physical-manipulation ones are streamlined down to "use". My point is that by the time the adventure mantle is passed from Sierra to Cyan, the player really has lost most of their specific agency over how they intend to interact with the simulated game world. The mouse pointer gets reduced to a magic stick whose tap either sets hidden mechanisms into motion or fails to. In Sierra (Space Quest 4 at least 8) the player has eyes, ears, hands, a nose and a mouth to use to interact with the world, and in the next generation, all they have is a magic stick. (DooM is also a game in which the player's only interaction with the world is via a magic stick, though its at least is two-function: it can both push buttons and make explodey.)

(This doesn't mean that I demand a PUT KEY IN LOCK / TURN KEY / GET KEY / TURN KNOB / OPEN DOOR / GO THROUGH DOOR / CLOSE DOOR level of detail in my text playing, but when we turn the verbs from words into icons it seems like a Nemean Lion-style loss of fine-grained control over what kinds of directions you're actually giving the player.)

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/18/2014 1:21 AM · Permalink · Report

They are not necessarily conjoined, but at this date I don't know if it's possible for them to continue being considered unrelated.

Unrelated, certainly not. I am pretty sure that everything I'd call interactive fiction is also something that I'd call hypertext fiction. Pretty sure the converse is not true.

My reading of the review is that it wasn't a "make a choice at certain intervals" interface so much as a continuous matter of small tweaks, somewhat akin to steering a car along a winding road.

Oh, now that I read it, you're right. That's an interesting game! Maybe not a good one, but it's a neat idea. Reminds me that I meant to play Dragon's Lair a while back...

You're right that there are plenty of e.g. strategy games (International Bridge Contractors, which I was looking at lately, being one) that have text or even prose output that aren't IF. But then CYOA doesn't seem to fit. And one can certainly imagine CYOA with ideographs rather than words...

You need to have a look at FooM and IF Quake 8)

Heh, of course there are such things, but I did mean actual-Doom with an alternate input mechanism.

C'mon -- Scott Adams text adventures are just databases. But conspicuously, only by a generous stretch could they be characterised as IF 8)

Keeping in mind that I've only played Adventureland, and that briefly, said game does at least the minimum level of simulation necessary for me to say that there's a world being simulated, if poorly.

Congratulations, we've found one square foot of common ground 8)

Rather more than that; why, Common Ground is a fine example of interactive fiction!

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/19/2014 2:09 AM · Permalink · Report

Unrelated, certainly not. I am pretty sure that everything I'd call interactive fiction is also something that I'd call hypertext fiction. Pretty sure the converse is not true.

So in the Venn diagram, IF is a bubble entirely contained within a larger bubble called hypertext fiction?

That's an interesting game! Maybe not a good one, but it's a neat idea.

One of my cultural strategies is to seek out interesting failures over boring successes.

Reminds me that I meant to play Dragon's Lair a while back...

5 minutes of DL will suffice to get the general gist. (One of my numerous started-but-not-completed projects was a joke CYOA conversion of DL. A lot of work for an unfunny joke.)

You're right that there are plenty of e.g. strategy games (International Bridge Contractors, which I was looking at lately, being one) that have text or even prose output that aren't IF.

You should have a look at A Dark Room which I just won and documented here, a text-only managerial / roguelike hybrid with casual game cool-off periods... which describes itself as "a minimalist text adventure", with only text output but only button and cursor-movement input. I suspect its author did not dwell on the matter on at great length as we are here doing.

But then CYOA doesn't seem to fit.

Then my vague hand-waving must have been toward text-adventury! Or at least a precise selection of an anticipated outcome, which CYOA also offer (except when R.A. Montgomery kills the reader suddenly and for no apparent reason.)

And one can certainly imagine CYOA with ideographs rather than words...

No need to imagine, we have Meanwhile with many wordless panels!

Heh, of course there are such things, but I did mean actual-Doom with an alternate input mechanism.

Quake does have its console... with a bit of source code tweaking, that could probably be arranged as an alternate input mode for the game.

Keeping in mind that I've only played Adventureland, and that briefly, said game does at least the minimum level of simulation necessary for me to say that there's a world being simulated, if poorly.

Feh. Scott Adams games are a lifeless stroll through array elements. I'll have to meet you halfway on the closing word of your quote there.

Common Ground is a fine example of interactive fiction!

Tiddy-boom!

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/20/2014 1:14 AM · Permalink · Report

So in the Venn diagram, IF is a bubble entirely contained within a larger bubble called hypertext fiction?

Yes, in my opinion. Though, I fully expect you to come back with an example that shatters my ontology. Don't disappoint me!

One of my cultural strategies is to seek out interesting failures over boring successes.

Absolutely a worthwhile strategy--and one reason I don't mind playing even the bad old ifcomp games, looking for any gleaming bits of beautiful intention among the garbage.

5 minutes of DL will suffice to get the general gist.

I've seen it, of course, so I'm sure you're right. But it looms rather large, doesn't it? My only direct experience is a few minutes with the Amiga port (lesson: loading FMV from a floppy is a terrible idea), and the NES version, which isn't the same at all.

except when R.A. Montgomery kills the reader suddenly and for no apparent reason

It's obviously a commentary on the illusory nature of agency in a print medium! Or else a clever bit of sabotaging influence for future MUD builders. Why, yes, the Harem in the Abandoned Palace is a deathtrap. Naturally the ghost of the King will kill you to defend his wives. Isn't it obvious?

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/21/2014 2:58 PM · Permalink · Report

Yes, in my opinion. Though, I fully expect you to come back with an example that shatters my ontology. Don't disappoint me!

I just think it's basically hilarious that we're debating whether something whose scope is vague and poorly understood is a partial or complete subset of something else whose scope is vague and poorly understood.

Absolutely a worthwhile strategy--and one reason I don't mind playing even the bad old ifcomp games, looking for any gleaming bits of beautiful intention among the garbage.

Ahh, but I think that Panks aside (whose unique aesthetic was sufficient motivation for a game to be made in his style as a portmortem tribute), you will find that what most of the losing ifcomp games are is uninteresting failures.

I've seen it, of course, so I'm sure you're right. But it looms rather large, doesn't it? My only direct experience is a few minutes with the Amiga port (lesson: loading FMV from a floppy is a terrible idea), and the NES version, which isn't the same at all.

There are a lot of different kinds of DL games, but it boils down to: the original, and the rest. (FMV from the floppy? That is actually several terrible ideas at once!)

It's obviously a commentary on the illusory nature of agency in a print medium! Or else a clever bit of sabotaging influence for future MUD builders. Why, yes, the Harem in the Abandoned Palace is a deathtrap. Naturally the ghost of the King will kill you to defend his wives. Isn't it obvious?

I hope you're keeping these notes for future projects!

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/22/2014 7:38 PM · Permalink · Report

Sure, but if the question had an obvious answer, it wouldn't be worth asking, would it?

Ahh, but I think that Panks aside . . . you will find that what most of the losing ifcomp games are is uninteresting failures.

I'm not too worried. I've usually found at least one worthy thing in any given game, if only evidence of sincere effort, and I'm not too polite to vent my frustration with a negative review, in the case of really awful games.

I hope you're keeping these notes for future projects!

In fact, my example did give me an interesting idea, which I've filed away with all the others. Sadly, what I need is not more projects, but more hours in a day. You can guess which of those two is likely to grow more quickly, though.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/13/2014 4:48 AM · Permalink · Report

So: what's the deal with Visual Novels? First, see here. Languages with pictographic alphabets were poorly suited for the home microcomputers of the '80s because a language with only 100 symbols requires a keyboard the size of your whole desk, and you need several hundred of them to write an adventure game that isn't insanely repetitive and tedious. It's a bad input mechanism. (For output it works OK, though. Programmers have to figure out how to get the characters in, but all players need to appreciate their labours is literacy.)

So as that link indicates, the first Japanese text adventure was actually written... in English! The English grammar of text adventure conventions can be approximated easily in BASIC programming, while Japanese is just... much of a muchness. (We saw smaller but substantial text adventure industries in German, Spanish, and French, with some outliers in Portuguese, Swedish, probably Polish and more niche languages, but it's a lot of work for virtually no pay. Even in English it was a lot of work for only decent pay and only for a couple of boom years.) There were a few cracks at text adventures using simplified subsets of the full character scope -- see Square's first game, The Death Trap, and the initial release of Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, then note that the latter game is much better known due to a later repackaging using the streamlined, ICOM-style graphical interface.

Hence the development of the visual novel "system": reusable character portraits and backdrops allowing a kind of interactive drama, where the players strut and fret upon their stage and periodically pause to see if the player wants to gently nudge in one direction or another with highly simplified, streamlined input mechanisms. We don't need a full Japanese keyboard for you to appreciate watching this subtitled soap opera, or for you to choose options A or B at the appropriate moment. Sometimes the game will demand more of you -- being at the right place at the right time, or having acquired item X from location Y prior to triggering scene Z, or just suspending all game progression until the player systematically visits all locations to arrive at location Q from where the developers made the poorly-clued decision to resume the story and nominal gameplay. Because Japan's popular culture is very different from the west's, the visual novel, like manga, was found to be a vessel that was suitable for exploration of numerous themes (like dating and romance, as well as what sometimes follows) that the Text Adventure, with its primary focus on warmed-over Tolkien, largely hasn't. (Infocom explored with mysteries, sci-fi, historical fiction, romance, wordplay, and espionage... but mostly text adventure devs stuck to the classic themes. This is not a problem particular to the text adventure genre.)

Visual Novels were Japan's response to the Text Adventure, and I think that a lot of what we've seen with Bioware's games as well as, eg., Christine Love's indie games, is the West's response to Visual Novels. They're all different amounts of degrees abstracted from what came before, but though they're descended from ADVENTURE -- much as is Everquest, via MUD1 -- now they really are their own thing, sharing only a general concern for storytelling vs. puzzle and simulation games which can optionally care, or not, about whether their game has any kind of story or not.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/13/2014 5:06 AM · edited · Permalink · Report

The final development, in a genuine nutshell, is that hyperfiction, after decades out in left field for enjoyment only by academics with tenure-supported access to the Eastgate Systems catalogue and children with eight fingers jammed into a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure paperback, was eventually (only in the last three years or so) folded back into the amateur "interactive fiction" text adventure community after years of text parser purists insisting that they were fundamentally different kinds of works. This was undoubtedly the case in the '90s when indie text adventures were consumed with a concern for mimesis -- believable world-modelling, a task better left for simulations than adventures -- and less with storytelling. As every user of the WWW has noticed, hypertext is a pretty ideal streamlined user input mechanism, and digital storytellers have recently been trying to harness its power to tell their stories in a streamlined fashion: not necessarily stories for which there is a good ending and a bad ending, or puzzles that need to be unraveled -- not necessarily stories that contain any significant interaction at all (an inheritance from the visual novel tradition -- or is it from Half-Life's introductory train ride?) but sometimes stories whose telling is tweaked to reflect the player's previous choices. In the '90s hyperfiction produced a lot of works whose interactive elements seemed abstruse and arbitrary, while lately companies like Choice of Games have been making games that by and large run all players through the same Acts 1, 2 and 3, and don't necessarily deceive the players about the outcomes of their choices (CYOA traditionally has dissatisfying surprise game-ending "wrong choices"), but treat all the different ways to play the game as basically equally valid.

Hyperfiction was never text adventures, but in time, they have both come together under the interactive fiction umbrella, where they use different techniques in an attempt to achieve similar storytelling effects. It just took hyperfiction a bit longer to get there. I think that the 2013 IF Comp entries are an excellent illustration of how they have "arrived" in this sense.

I'm sure this survey will only lead Indra to a thousand and one further disambiguating questions (or a hand-throwing-up expression of genre-defining hopelessness, the way they usually end) but I've attempted to pre-emptively provide enough information to pave some of these lines of prospective inquiry.

vedder (70793) on 4/13/2014 9:19 AM · Permalink · Report

Haha, this thread is why the featured article section needs to return! :-D

Cavalary (11445) on 4/13/2014 8:26 PM · Permalink · Report

What vedder said. Pseudo, with a bit of editing you should submit this as one... if there's any way to do that still...

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/13/2014 9:26 PM · Permalink · Report

It's problematic just because I'm trying to provide a reasonable answer to an unreasonable question -- basically, "lay out the first half of the history of the adventure game genre for me". I would continue on and finish the history, but I jumped ship when Myst came around (CD-ROM games: too big to pirate on 14.4 modems!) and am not qualified to paint the "and that's how we got here" situation.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/17/2014 3:18 AM · Permalink · Report

"The adventure genre returns to its textual roots and grows strange, sideways." I always aspired to do an IF featured article, but as the 4th most recent was also one of these, by Terrence Bosky, I figured that I'd need to let the field lay fallow to get some distance between mine and it. I suppose I just hadn't realised that so few other featured articles would mark the increasing number of years between that article and now 8)

Indra was here (20755) on 4/13/2014 12:45 PM · Permalink · Report

I think I got the gist of it. So, by definition interactive fiction should be thrown out the window. The animal that we're actually talking about is text adventures. Text adventures and visual novels have nothing to do with each other, as the former for the most part requires text input and gameplay centralized in a vocabulary algorithm.

IF with graphics is the missing link between text adventures and graphical adventures. Graphical adventures is next generation adventure games leaving the ocean, totally abandoning the use of text input, using other forms input to replace its fins.

Classic rogue variants and MUDs can be viewed as a limited text adventures that evolved a different path up rivers, instead of going on land. No longer focusing on a vocabulary algorithm, but on squatting letters by pressing letters.

Now I need to figure out how to translate this in normal English and put it into writing. :p

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/13/2014 8:55 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

I think I got the gist of it.

I'm not so sure...

So, by definition interactive fiction should be thrown out the window.

No, it's a real thing, more now than ever before. It started as a kind of aspiration: we had text adventures that wanted to be interactive fiction, but kept interfering by throwing in gamified filler (oh boy, another maze!) to interfere with progress through the story, in order to prolong gameplay and justify a higher price tag for more hours of "play". When the enthusiasts took up the mantle and really studied what were their most favourite and least favourite elements of Infocom's games, new design standards emerged which largely eschew the filler and allow the works to be freed of the "text adventure" drag factor and realise their "interactive fiction" aspirations. Some audacious early works almost made it despite the state of the industry and being bogged down with nominally commercial concerns, such as Trinity and A Mind Forever Voyaging, and maybe Mindwheel, but this development -- a final blooming into interactive fiction -- really required devs who had no aspirations of a paycheque, and were making these works as a labour of love, unwilling to dilute their creations with compromises. And having tools sufficiently sophisticated to realize what you want to make happen really helps, which is why we had homemade text adventures for years using The Quill and the AGT, but only began seeing IF happen at home with TADS and Inform (especially following the lead of Inform dev Graham Nelson, whose debut release Curses was a big, juicy challenge to raise the bar.)

What is true is that it is difficult to draw a clear line saying "these were text adventures on this side and from then on these were works of interactive fiction" -- there are obvious superficial commonalities that have resulted in them being lumped together by laymen. You might argue that IF tends to have a more literary, postmodern sensibility than the text adventure, which often looks like an 8-year-old's bucket list of the best tropes they remember after watching TV for two consecutive Saturday mornings -- naive and haphazard. (A low standard by which most video game stories are measured, across all genres.) Zork 1 probably is merely a text adventure, but by the time you see the ending of Zork 3, everything is cast in a more sophisticated light, and it probably qualifies as IF. The Infidel design document was for a text adventure, but the resentful author's sabotage elevates it to a species of IF. (Whether that also applies to a young Zarf's juvenile parody of it is a conundrum I'm not going to try to unravel.) Hitchhiker's Guide was a piece of IF that couldn't be constrained in the text adventure genre -- it couldn't help but bust out all over, and was a unique bestseller because of its irrepressibility. Knight Orc wants to detourne the conventions and turn them on its head with the Braid revelation: most protagonists are actually antisocial jerkwads. I don't know if the gameplay catches up with the aspirations, though Lost Pig revisits similar territory years later to great success. The modern Endless, Nameless is revelatory: it opens pretending to be a text adventure, then gradually reveals itself to be interactive fiction -- a similar trick played earlier to awesome effect by 9:05. A good benchmark might be (akin to the "is it a film or a movie" question) to ask yourself: is this game trying to do anything new and interesting within its genres, or is it just going through the motions, visiting the talking points it feels are expected of it? Ironically, this makes Crowther & Woods' ADVENTURE interactive fiction, because they were blazing a new trail and establishing, not following, the genre conventions. Hey: I'm a spelunker, that's why I'm setting my game in caves. What's your excuse?

And of course hyperfiction was always IF; it's just that up until recently, nobody was making any works of digital hyperfiction that anyone enjoyed, cared about or recommended to friends. It's like quinoa and chipotle -- these food crops were always out there, but up until recently most people didn't care about eating them. But now we have Digital: A Love Story and Depression Quest and Horse Trainer and people seem to be making a bigger deal out of them. Another touchpoint I might visit is computer games which revealed the full text of game events through game journals, like the Star Saga games or the Gold Box series. I believe Wasteland did it (designed as it was by writers of Tunnels & Trolls solitaire adventures -- paper gamebooks, and ditto for the Tunnels & Trolls computer game!) and it was happening as early as the Temple of Apshai, where the game's story output is through these huge text dumps and the rest of the game is just hoops you have to jump through in order to reach the next text dump. A game can demand of a player: you must grind to level 8 before we unlock the next text dump (Pool of Radiance), you must build up your colony to 1 million inhabitants before we unlock the next text dump, you must kill seven of the eight competing computer players before we unlock the next text dump, you must ... make sense of the log files you encounter strewn through the database in no particular chronological order (Activision's Portal) or you must experiment with the various components of the broken machine until accidentally repairing it, unlocking the next text dump. These are all just different mechanisms to achieve interactive fiction, the latter of which is most typical of a text adventure (with its simulationist model just about sophisticated enough for "dry goods puzzles" of flipping switches and stacking boxes.) (And don't delude yourself that System Shock 2's audio logs are any different.) What I'm getting at here seems to be that while not all text adventures are works of interactive fiction, the interface conventions of the text adventure are the most common I/O arrangement to enable a work of interactive fiction to happen -- so not all work of IF necessarily bear any ressemblance to a text adventure. But for reasons of convenience and tradition, most do. This last paragraph will probably prove fairly contentious, my claim that all interesting games with strong storytelling elements are works of interactive fiction 8)

The animal that we're actually talking about is text adventures. Text adventures and visual novels have nothing to do with each other, as the former for the most part requires text input and gameplay centralized in a vocabulary algorithm.

Having just demonstrated how the latter emerged directly from the former, I don't know that it would be fair to say that they have nothing to do with each other; they do however tend to have different concerns: text adventures are games of locations, door-opening puzzles and inventory items, while visual novels tend to be more games of locations and balancing interactions with large casts of characters (interactions often requiring inventory items to prevent the characters from acting as a locked door. But they do tend to be more games of gatekeepers than gates.) These are general guidelines -- inventoryless text adventures and visual novels composed entirely of introspection are entirely possible. But they buck the trend.)

PS, I don't think that text adventures "for the most part require text input" -- I can't think of any exceptions to that particular rule. I think it is that and that alone which makes a text adventure a text adventure. Even something like the BBC educational game Podd is borderline -- type in the verb, then watch it happen, animated, on the screen. But if it worked the other way around, it wouldn't even be on the table: waggle the joystick, and different gestures result in different kinds of text display. Uhh... (No, wait, I stand corrected, there is a modern 2600 ROM that delivers text output from joystick input. (No, two of them! Dark Mage and Fellowship of the Ring!) So you see, none of these guidelines are hard and fast; however, we can describe what is typical of the genre at least.)

Yes and no: text adventures undoutedly led to graphical adventures -- Crowther's ADVENTURE even led directly to Robinette's Adventure for the 2600! Whether illustrated text adventures led to graphical adventures is dubious -- it was an obvious embellishment, but it was similarly obviously inadequate. The thing you need to understand about text adventures-with-graphics is that most of them can be completely played all the way through without even displaying the pictures: they're optional ornaments, but in most cases add nothing necessary to the game. It's like: hey, want to play a crappy text adventure? OK, now -- want to play it with ugly artwork? Some of them even support disabling the pictures (or in the case of BBC versions of Speccy textgames-with-graphics, the pictures are simply not included.) They didn't add any dynamics to the gameplay, only to its presentation -- often to its overall detriment, as you'd see in Infocom's ads making fun of crappy computer graphics; adding illustrations to text adventures was considered akin to putting garish makeup on a beautiful woman. I'm not convinced that they influenced anything or led or linked to anything. The uneasy King's Quest 1-era hybrid genre of text adveturing with on-screen avatar movement wasn't explicitly the result of an attempt to engineer a new genre or push Mystery House into a new dimension, but rather to throw together an impressive tech demo for the formidable multimedia capabilities of the doomed PCjr. They weren't committed to it -- in the Black Cauldron, you see a glimpse of the future using the interface they wanted to use -- and it was such an ungainly hybrid that it didn't even yield many imitators despite enormous commercial success: you see maybe the Hugo's House of Horrors trilogy, Earthrise (the earlier of the two), and the two Avalot D'Argent games, none of which are well-remembered. Don't get me wrong -- some of my favorite games, the first two Quest for Glory games, used this weird system, but it's no coincidence that the industry never adopted it and that once it was left behind, it was kept in the past. Hurr hurr hurr... but I digress. The history of the western adventure game genre is a question of how to get from ADVENTURE to Myst, then growing decadent and backsliding from Myst into hidden object games. (It's weird and ironic that it's through FPSes of all things that we're getting adventuring back in fashion, with Dear Esther and Gone Home.)

Classic rogue variants and MUDs can be viewed as a limited text adventures that evolved a different path up rivers, instead of going on land. No longer focusing on a vocabulary algorithm, but on squatting letters by pressing letters.

MUDs, yes. (Well, first sentence yes - I believe they still use the text parser rather than the hotkey menus of eg. LORD, it's just that additional commands have been introduced to further the social element.) Rogue variants, categorically no, with the sole exception of Kerkerkruip in 2011. Basically the only things roguelikes have in common with text adventure games are textmode and Gary Gygax.

Now I need to figure out how to translate this in normal English and put it into writing. :p

For goodness sakes don't do that until we're on the same page!

Indra was here (20755) on 4/13/2014 9:51 PM · Permalink · Report

[Q --start Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--]So, by definition interactive fiction should be thrown out the window.

[1] No, it's a real thing, more now than ever before. It started as a kind of aspiration: we had text adventures that wanted to be interactive fiction...

[2] What is true is that it is difficult to draw a clear line saying "these were text adventures on this side and from then on these were works of interactive fiction" -- there are obvious superficial commonalities that have resulted in them being lumped together by laymen. You might argue that IF tends to have a more literary, postmodern sensibility than the text adventure...

Hitchhiker's Guide was a piece of IF that couldn't be constrained in the text adventure genre -- it couldn't help but bust out all over, and was a unique bestseller because of its irrepressibility.

[3] Classic rogue variants and MUDs can be viewed as a limited text adventures that evolved a different path up rivers, instead of going on land. No longer focusing on a vocabulary algorithm, but on squatting letters by pressing letters.

Ah, so interactive fiction is basically the Shakespeare of the formerly text adventure Aesop's Fable. Dude, I just summarized your fanboism into one sentence. :p
Okay, the Hitchhiker's guide example is where you lost me. I still can't see how it can no longer be considered a text adventure. Both still being interactive literature of sorts (why didn't they call it interactive literature? :p), where IF from your description is a tad more artsy. Is there anything gameplay-wise that warrants it to be noticeable different? Though I'm still trying to determine which definition is more accurate. I'm still sticking to text adventure, quality aside, being more general. Hence based on our genre system, wouldn't it be more accurate to call these games text adventures instead of interactive fiction?
Well, I'm making an educated guess with large liberties in assuming the evolution tree would be text adventure --> MUDs --> Rogue variants. At least gameplay-wise. Simply because pressing in the direction of the orc is faster than typing in "cleave orc".

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/13/2014 10:11 PM · Permalink · Report

We're getting closer to the truth here, but we're missing the hyperfiction side of the modern IF coin that needn't rely on a text parser at all. It's not just a matter of IF = text adventures that don't suck, but rather IF = text adventures that shoot for (and hit) a target of greater concern for compelling storytelling than for treasure-collecting and orc-slaying (plus hyperfiction of all sorts except for some varieties that Tracy Poff will soon delineate.)

If you like I could annotate an HHG transcript and point out the flashes of genius that elevate it beyond its text adventure brethren. There are probably at least a dozen such moments that cement its greatness. The footnotes are a part, the unreliable narrator another... parser scolding during the bulldozer death sequence, its handling of responses to rhetorical questions, both the opening darkness puzzle and the subsequent darkness puzzles. ... sorry, there are more, but it's dinner time. Still, pretty good for off the top of my head for a decades-old game.

Also, the progression isn't text adventure -> MUDs -> Roguelikes but rather text adventure -> MUDs -> MMORPGs. Again: Roguelikes have no place in this conversation!

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/17/2014 3:23 AM · Permalink · Report

I was troubled by my failure to note the most important transgression I felt the HHG game elevated to its core, central conundrum: the conspicuous absence in the player's inventory telegraphed by the inclusion of <tt>no tea</tt>, tickling the same funnybone as does that joke about how Sartre takes his coffee. If that was the only change the game made to the text adventure formula, it would have still been a bold step forward (albeit one so bold that no one has as yet managed to follow through and develop that particular detournement of the genre convention.)

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/13/2014 10:14 PM · Permalink · Report

[Q --start Indra was here wrote--] 2. Okay, the Hitchhiker's guide example is where you lost me. I still can't see how it can no longer be considered a text adventure. Both still being interactive literature of sorts (why didn't they call it interactive literature? :p), where IF from your description is a tad more artsy. Is there anything gameplay-wise that warrants it to be noticeable different? Though I'm still trying to determine which definition is more accurate. I'm still sticking to text adventure, quality aside, being more general. Hence based on our genre system, wouldn't it be more accurate to call these games text adventures instead of interactive fiction? [/Q --end Indra was here wrote--] We don't usually call modern interactive fiction 'text adventures' because most of them aren't adventures. They're interactive stories, usually not even interactive adventure stories.

But to be utterly blunt: there's no consensus, and Pseudo_Intellectual's arguments are his personal biases, not his disinterested reporting of well-known facts. It is the case that a game that feels more like a classic dungeon-crawling text adventure than the more 'artistic' modern IF is likely to be recognized as a 'text adventure' by the modern IF community, and similarly no one is likely to call something like Galatea a 'text adventure', but that's just a matter of the current habit of the disorganized community of enthusiasts.

Indra was here (20755) on 4/13/2014 10:46 PM · Permalink · Report

[Q --start Tracy Poff wrote--]We don't usually call modern interactive fiction 'text adventures' because most of them aren't adventures. They're interactive stories, usually not even interactive adventure stories. [/Q --end Tracy Poff wrote--] One of these days, the term "adventure" will be permanently erased due to confusing practically everyone. :p

A more specific definition then, I would use would be: an interactive text game. Though using interactive with game seems to be an oxymoron (looks at the term interactive fiction). A predominately text game basically. In that regard, I see little difference between what you may refer to as a text adventure, interactive fiction, interactive fiction with graphics, and visual novels.

Fred VT (25953) on 4/13/2014 10:50 PM · Permalink · Report

In the end, pretty much all video games are interactive role-playing fiction :P

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/13/2014 11:40 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

In the same way that there's little difference between Civilization, Warcraft, and Minecraft. They're predominantly graphical games that involve some degree of 'securing your position'. Basically the same.

Part of the problem here is perhaps that Pseudo_Intellectual is casting a very wide net with his definition of interactive fiction. And perhaps he's right to do so. But if we are going to be splitting games up by genre (or, to call it what it really is, medium), then there's a substantial difference between at least visual novels and the other three. They are all doing the same kind of thing (telling a story), but they're doing it in rather different ways.

Some visual novels may include little or even no interaction beyond advancing the text, and no other graphics than a background image that illustrates the scene. Some offer hundreds of choices and are much closer to what we'd rather call a Japanese adventure game. Which isn't the same thing as a Western adventure game at all. Then there are sound novels--Real Sound had only a blank screen except for occasionally putting up a still picture, and was explicitly designed to give the same experience to blind and sighted players. But it's in the same family as visual novels, despite the lack of visuals. And it's something I'd call hypertext fiction and Pseudo_Intellectual might well call interactive fiction (sorry, Pseudo_Intellectual, if I'm misrepresenting you).

You're not going to get a pat answer because the art is evolving, as art tends to do. It's too facile to say that all of these things are just interactive fiction and we shouldn't bother examining the differences between them, but it's too dogmatic to say that only clones of ADVENT count as interactive fiction, too.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/17/2014 5:57 AM · edited · Permalink · Report

One of these days, the term "adventure" will be permanently erased due to confusing practically everyone. :p

ADVENTURE gives text adventures a better reason than most genres for retaining the word. It's the trunk and they're the first branch, and granted, most of the early text adventures bear a marked resemblance to their inspiration.

an interactive text game. Though using interactive with game seems to be an oxymoron

I'm not sure if "oxymoron" is the word you're thinking of. Idle games like Progress Quest aside, all games must be interactive: the player is the prime mover even in pachinko, while they have little input into the action of a waterfall, hence the former is a game and the latter a force of nature 8)

What would a non-interactive text game look like? A short story?

A predominately text game basically.

Now we can get down to brass tacks and seek to more specifically define "text" 8)

In that regard, I see little difference between what you may refer to as a text adventure, interactive fiction, interactive fiction with graphics, and visual novels.

Yes, they all look similar in terms of where the meat of the output -- the content needed to understand what's going on and advance the story -- is located. But from a certain perspective, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong don't look that different either. Let's call them "graphics adventures" 8)

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/17/2014 5:34 AM · Permalink · Report

We don't usually call modern interactive fiction 'text adventures' because most of them aren't adventures.

Oh wow, what is an adventure? Which raises the question of what you get when you take the adventure out of a text adventure? (To which I suppose the answer is 2012's entry "Murphy's Law", a game about signing a paper and taking it to the bank . If only everything that could go wrong hadn't gone wrong! I suppose the answer to my question might also be "banal undrama", the headline of one of the reviews of that game.) Of course, are text adventures called adventures because they are expected to contain adventures, or is "adventure" itself just shorthand for "a game played in the style of ADVENT or Adventureland"? (Of course, it did take some time for the early text adventures to break free of just being clumsy apeings of the very first ones, so there wasn't that much room in "in the style of" for the apple to fall far from the tree. As has been noted earlier, Pyramid 2000 didn't even bother making a new map, they just reskinned ADVENT!)

But to be utterly blunt: there's no consensus, and Pseudo_Intellectual's arguments are his personal biases, not his disinterested reporting of well-known facts.

Oh, this is very true. Indra asked for my take and by gum, I'm committed to giving it. I suppose I could have been more clear about not representing consensus opinion: my tutelage contains bias. I don't think that the existence of a line is so very controversial, more a matter of where it is drawn.

It is the case that a game that feels more like a classic dungeon-crawling text adventure than the more 'artistic' modern IF is likely to be recognized as a 'text adventure' by the modern IF community

You find games like Castle Adventure! from the 2012 IFcomp, or R or Leadlight from the 2010 comp or anything by the late, great Paul Panks... and to some extent they read as artefacts fallen through a wormhole from a simpler age. Back in the day people just wrote text adventures because that's what there was, and the mental leap forward to live up to the potential of the medium just hadn't happened yet. To write and release one today requires a kind of conscious ignoring of all the developments of the past 15 years. It's kind of the "8-bit" aesthetic of adventure design: the technology and the market both moved beyond it, but for nostalgic purposes some still cling to it. (I appreciate that this is an ironic distinction to make considering that every non-IF-enthusiast would consider all text-parser games a self-indulgently conspicuous exercise in nostalgia -- to the extent that Indra insists on lumping them in with Roguelikes, which only share a character set with them.)

Periodically I see the author of 1990 Speccy text adventure The Axe of Kolt washing up at the IF forums looking for testers for his conversion to a contemporary language, and he's consistently frustrated because he's looking for text adventure enthusiasts and all he's finding are interactive fiction enthusiasts for whom his game epitomizes what they're grateful to have left behind.

Indra was here (20755) on 4/17/2014 2:19 PM · Permalink · Report

Tracy, I'm leaving it you to thump a mallet through that thick fanboi adventure head of his. I don't speak native text adventure lingo. :p

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/17/2014 6:37 PM · Permalink · Report

As I've demonstrated, I'll be only too happy to elaborate on any unclear jargon I'm using.

Indra was here (20755) on 4/17/2014 9:56 PM · Permalink · Report

I'll get back to that in a minute. I'm still having trouble identifying how ignorant my ignorance is. Hell, I have trouble identifying why all these game examples are even remotely relevant.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/17/2014 10:06 PM · Permalink · Report

Well, you may need to actually play the games to determine why they are relevant.

Fred VT (25953) on 4/17/2014 2:26 PM · Permalink · Report

Since you seem to be the expert on the Adventure genre, can you tell me if this game: http://www.mobygames.com/game/psp/conception-ore-no-kodomo-o-undekure

should have the Adventure genre? It is a RPG, but a big deal of the game plays mostly like a Visual Novel dating sim.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/17/2014 2:54 PM · Permalink · Report

It sounds like both, and "Conception: Ore no Kodomo o Undekure! is a RPG with Visual Novel elements" seems to corroborate.

"The story is then told through conversations reminiscent of Visual Novels, and animations. During the conversations, the player sometimes have to choose what Itsuki says from multiple-choice answers."

Anywhere outside of a BioWare game, this would be setting off "adventure game" alarms and sirens. But it is true that the general conventions of an overall VN umbrella structure can be used to to tell stories that incorporate gameplay elements of other genres: Radical Dreamers is a VN with some light RPG content; Tokimeki Memorial is a VN with heavy managerial content. I suppose the question is: can a VN be so synthesized with another genre as to lose its adventure game status? (I suppose an equivalent question for Western adventure games would be: is Kerkerkruip, a tactical combat roguelike, still IF due to its text parser interface? I think probably.

Fred VT (25953) on 4/17/2014 3:19 PM · Permalink · Report

Since this is my description, I can tell a bit more. This game (and its sequel) is distinctively both genre IMO, since half of the game plays as a Visual Novel. Even the town is just a list of areas where events happen. The core concept of the game is to create units that will be stronger depending on the relation of the protagonist with the girls.

The other half is the randomized dungeon exploring with turn-based combat, shopping and looting for better equipment and items, etc. I guess that would be the perfect hybrid of both genres.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/17/2014 3:21 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

Here's another one in the "hybrid" column: the 1991 Spore, which is half Arkanoid clone and half text adventure. It's obviously both and clearly not neither.

Fred VT (25953) on 4/17/2014 3:24 PM · Permalink · Report

Should the Visual Novel theme also be selected for Conception, or only the Adventure genre?

Indra was here (20755) on 4/17/2014 3:30 PM · Permalink · Report

I'd be happier if the visual novels were an independent genre split from the adventure genre permanently.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/17/2014 6:36 PM · Permalink · Report

I don't believe that it is necessary to select "Adventure" to also select "Visual Novel"... or do you mean that you'd like VNs to be a top-level genre, one of which must be chosen?

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/17/2014 6:46 PM · Permalink · Report

Wikipedia's VN entry seems pretty clear that, depending on tone, hybridity and subject, there are several genres contained in what we here have lumped together as Visual Novels -- NVLs and ADVs being the main two. Also we see a lot of eroge and not so many nakige. And, yes, sound novels.

Fred VT (25953) on 4/17/2014 6:50 PM · Permalink · Report

According to this article, that game is definitely a turn-based, visual novel Adventure RPG :P It even has the fast-forward option for the text...

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/17/2014 3:31 PM · Permalink · Report

I think that if VN is selected, Adventure is implied to some extent, though the reverse is in no way the case. Especially if the game originates from Japan, it's the preferred genre for our filing system here.

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/18/2014 1:36 AM · Permalink · Report

Ah, I did actually play that one, in 2012. Thought it was terrible. Surprised it ranked in the middle of the pack, like that.

In fact, I'd say that Murphy's Law qualifies as an adventure. You go on a rather epic trip to the bank, overcoming deadly obstacles, with the hope of obtaining a very enticing reward--your very own home. It's a tedious and boring adventure, but I don't think that means it isn't an adventure. Now, Aisle or Rematch, those aren't adventures.

Of course. I just wanted it to be clear to the laity that you're not speaking ex cathedra. Or should that be ex bazaar?

every non-IF-enthusiast would consider all text-parser games a self-indulgently conspicuous exercise in nostalgia

I suppose that's true, but it's a shame. Interactive fiction is one medium in which a person can reasonable make a game following a singular creative vision. Sometimes we're Ed Wood and sometimes we're Daisuke Amaya, but it's something that even the 'common person' ought to appreciate.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/18/2014 8:29 PM · Permalink · Report

Ah, I did actually play that one, in 2012. Thought it was terrible. Surprised it ranked in the middle of the pack, like that.

I liked the idea, just not the execution. The middle of the pack is a good home for the mediocre and uninspired -- the real losers at the end tend to be basically broken, evolutionary dead-end throwbacks, intros disguised as games, games that aren't really remotely IF, and games made for unpopular proprietary environments (what? Windows-only executables? Protest vote!)

It's a tedious and boring adventure, but I don't think that means it isn't an adventure.

That is both very fair to the game in question and I think more open-mindedness toward the essence of adventure than many players would accept 8)

Now, Aisle or Rematch, those aren't adventures.

Hey, the journey of a thousand miles etc. etc. (Haven't played Rematch, will have to give it a go. As for Aisle, I'm currently remaking it for the ShuffleComp!)

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/18/2014 10:17 PM · Permalink · Report

I liked the idea, just not the execution.

Well, I didn't think there was anything really wrong with the idea (though it didn't seem particularly inspired); rather, I disliked it because it was boring and it seemed to be intentional. Which, if correct, isn't exactly a problem with execution.

The middle of the pack is a good home for the mediocre and uninspired -- the real losers at the end tend to be basically broken, evolutionary dead-end throwbacks, intros disguised as games, games that aren't really remotely IF, and games made for unpopular proprietary environments (what? Windows-only executables? Protest vote!)

Heh, I hate Windows-only executables even though I'm running Windows myself. Not as much as I hate online-only browser games, though. That's a plague that needs to be stopped.

That is both very fair to the game in question and I think more open-mindedness toward the essence of adventure than many players would accept 8)

Have we switched scripts? I could swear it was me telling you that your definitions were too broad...

As for Aisle, I'm currently remaking it for the ShuffleComp!

Oh, sounds interesting! I liked the idea of ShuffleComp, but I didn't learn of it until a bit too late to enter. Best of luck! Or is it more of 'break a leg' situation? Whichever.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/19/2014 2:31 AM · Permalink · Report

Fair enough. I like the basic premise of a simple, mundane task being undone by everything going wrong that can go wrong; admittedly I didn't care for the specific puzzles here or the protagonist. (Ideally the thing I like most about that premise is being able to harness the chaos to produce covertly-desired outcomes, as how in Bastard Tetris the AI, coded to give you the "least-useful" piece given the current game state, can be tricked into giving up a particular piece. But that very quickly would become something other than IF.)

Heh, I hate Windows-only executables even though I'm running Windows myself. Not as much as I hate online-only browser games, though. That's a plague that needs to be stopped.

Homebrew parser systems can be things of beauty, like with T-Zero, but typically it's just more work for the author to produce a game with less of the expected modern functionality. Online-onliness is a plague for players and especially historians, but it does give game authors distribution control and the ability to walk away from works they stop being proud of. I don't agree with reasons for doing so, but I do understand them.

Have we switched scripts? I could swear it was me telling you that your definitions were too broad...

I am happy to stretch and contort to include and accommodate outliers and exceptions, but I appreciate that this opinion is not unanimous. Something like Papers, Please could have been implemented as a text adventure (a role reversal of Bureaucracy, perhaps) as we can see from a handful of text-parser managerial sims such as Olivia's Orphanarium (and your own entry to the corpus... speaking of which, were you inspired by Journey to Alpha Centauri?) but I don't think it would have been as widely accepted by players, and I figure that would-be authors understand and recognize this, as falling a bit too far beyond the scope of adventurism.

Thanks for the Comp well-wishes; I have my list of commands and have taken notes on the kinds of responses that should follow. I just need to square some time aside (not spent on this thread!) writing and implementing them.

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/20/2014 1:01 AM · Permalink · Report

Ideally the thing I like most about that premise is being able to harness the chaos to produce covertly-desired outcomes

In that case, you'll probably want to take a look at Rematch.

Bastard Tetris

Coincidentally, Bastet is a game I added to MobyGames. If you could trick the AI, I didn't find out how--didn't get a single line--but I didn't play it for very long. I applaud the dedication of anyone who plays long enough to work out how to beat the system.

Online-onliness is a plague for players and especially historians, but it does give game authors distribution control and the ability to walk away from works they stop being proud of.

You can't change the past, and you shouldn't try. Besides my general disagreement with that, though, having a copy of the game to potentially play in the future (hosted on the ifarchive) has traditionally been part of our 'payment' for judging games in the ifcomp. The authors get exposure and potentially some fairly desirable prizes, and we get the games. I wholeheartedly approve of efforts to open the community up to new people, but this ephemeral online-only nonsense should not be allowed to continue.

But that's a rant for another place, and I guess I don't have to convince you.

and your own entry to the corpus... speaking of which, were you inspired by Journey to Alpha Centauri?

Ah, my Perelandra Penetrator? Nah, just imagining why a spaceship would need a click-o-matic. Though, now that I look at it, I'm sure I've encountered that game before.

I just need to square some time aside (not spent on this thread!) writing and implementing them.

The time and effort spent on the game is always the thing, isn't it? And I think this may be the longest thread on MobyGames not dedicated to either janitorial work or complaints. Well, there are the Game Jorunals, too, but... anyway, we have been spending a lot of words here. For a worthy cause!

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/21/2014 4:03 PM · Permalink · Report

In that case, you'll probably want to take a look at Rematch.

No worries, I grabbed it the first time you endorsed it!

Coincidentally, Bastet is a game I added to MobyGames.

Excellent work!

. If you could trick the AI, I didn't find out how--didn't get a single line--but I didn't play it for very long. I applaud the dedication of anyone who plays long enough to work out how to beat the system.

Oh, I don't know that you can compel it to give you a /useful/ brick... just that it surveys the current state of the top of the pile, so depending on how you choose to dump your unuseful bricks, you can influence which future less-useful brick it will cough up 8)

You can't change the past, and you shouldn't try.

Well, in a certain sense, the shelf life of retail games has taken care of this as far as most people care.

Besides my general disagreement with that, though, having a copy of the game to potentially play in the future (hosted on the ifarchive) has traditionally been part of our 'payment' for judging games in the ifcomp.

That's an interesting social contract extrapolation! I figure we're entitled to keep the games we get in the comp bundle, but there's not really any promise of future functionality in this crazy 2038-bug world!

But that's a rant for another place, and I guess I don't have to convince you.

Oh, but it's good practice. I like to understand arguments I don't even agree with.

The time and effort spent on the game is always the thing, isn't it? And I think this may be the longest thread on MobyGames not dedicated to either janitorial work or complaints. Well, there are the Game Jorunals, too, but... anyway, we have been spending a lot of words here. For a worthy cause!

Indeed, we're paving the road for the grand return of Mobygames Featured Articles!

Tracy Poff (2094) on 4/22/2014 7:32 PM · Permalink · Report

In the spirit of keeping in practice arguing (since everyone here always agrees with one another), then: it's exactly a matter of keeping the games we get, and it's not just me making an interesting extrapolation.

Rule #2 of the ifcomp is:

All entries must cost nothing for judges to play, no strings attached. While you retain the copyright to any games you enter, by entering you are granting the competition and the Interactive Fiction Archive the non-exclusive right to distribute your game for free, and granting judges the right to play your game for free. No shareware, donorware, commercial products, etc. may be entered.

And the Spring Thing 2014 rule #7 is:

Entries must be freely available to players. While you retain copyright to the game you enter, and are free to sell or otherwise distribute a commercial version, by entering you grant the Spring Thing and the Interactive Fiction Archive the non-exclusive right to distribute the competition version of your game for free, forever.

I think it's pretty clear from these that the expectation is that the games should be available from the ifarchive indefinitely. Yet the Spring Thing 2014, for example, contains three games that are hosted on a web site, and the bundle just has text files with their URLs. What happens when the site (inevitably) goes down? Games are gone. What if the author takes a game down after the comp because it was poorly received? What if an author takes a game down before the comp is over, because it was poorly received?

More sinisterly, what if an author takes a game down after the comp because it was well received, and puts it up for sale? They've gotten a bunch of free publicity, lots of positive reviews (written probably with a fair amount of extra goodwill, since the game was free), and in the end we all have nothing. That sort of thing is supposed to be against the rules, but if the author has sole control over the future of the game, there's nothing we can do to stop it, and who's going to take them to court over refusing to continue personally offering the game to the public for free? That wouldn't work out too well, I'd imagine.

It's not that we are entitled to expect the author to continue making updates to the game to ensure its future playability, but we, as players, are entitled to the minimum of the game that we played not being taken away from us after the fact, whether by the author's action or inaction, or the intervention of some third party (e.g. the site hosting the work removing it, going bankrupt, etc.).

Indeed, we're paving the road for the grand return of Mobygames Featured Articles!

Something I'd love to see. It was an ambition of mine to write one, some day, but I never felt quite expert enough, and now the time has passed. I did imagine that some day MobyGames might occupy the same niche as Hardcore Gaming 101, with articles synthesizing the history of game series and things. We're already collecting so much of the necessary information! I suppose there's always the possibility to write unreasonably long game group descriptions,though...

Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 4/22/2014 5:07 PM · Permalink · Report

Not as much as I hate online-only browser games, though. That's a plague that needs to be stopped.

Ugh, I was hoping to have a chance to actually play through the games in the Fear of Twine collection to document them with a little more flesh on their bones, but they've been retracted with the conclusion of the exhibition! QFD.

Игги Друге (46653) on 4/14/2014 12:17 AM · Permalink · Report

I don't think you can classify Rogue variants as text adventures any more than you can call an ASCII shmup for the PET or TRS-80 a text adventure. They just happen to use the closest thing to graphics they have, which is demonstrated by most ports to graphics-capable systems replacing the letters with custom fonts consisting of humans and monsters.