This article brings to mind what I dislike about the modern game industry.
First off, what is a game? Let's consider two broad types of games: competitive games and puzzle games. Competitive games (like chess) feature more than one player and the outcome of the game is unknown (both in terms of the winner and the final game state). Puzzle games (generally speaking) don't have a strong competitive element and the final outcome is known (i.e., a lone player solves the puzzle).
I contend that first-person shooters (in single player mode) are nothing more than big puzzle games. This isn't bad per se, but the problem lies in how these games have evolved.
Rather than make the "puzzles" in FPS games more challenging and innovative (i.e., focus on gameplay), the major game studios have instead focused on increasing the audio-visuals and cinematic attributes of their products. As a result, gameplay has consistently been minimized in favor of eye candy.
No better example comes to mind than the recent smash hit, L.A. Noire. The extent to which the producers of this game clearly wish they were making movies comes off as obsequious. The tiny sliver of game mechanics they did include is mind-numbingly repetitive and utterly without challenge.
These things are no longer "games", they're shitty movies.
While I agree with everything you've said, I really only apply these criticisms to the so-called "triple-A" developers out there. There are quite a few indie developers out there that are making engaging, thought-provoking puzzle games. They are typically short, have interesting gameplay mechanics, and inexpensive.
One great example is SpaceChem. It's a joyously frustrating game that revolves around "programming" reactors to create molecules from other molecules. The joy of finishing a level (particularly if you can beat the curve in terms of time/instructions) is tangible.
Don't despair too much at the state of the game industry, just don't look to the "leaders" for your interesting games.
Interactive Fiction as a genre is significantly less accessible than FPS. Not only due to the medium of text, which is inherently less flashy and instantly compelling than 3D environments, but due to the nature of the puzzles.
Taking the rose-colored glasses off, a large part of the adventure gaming genre (including point-and-clicks) relied on obscure object interactions or guessing the right command to proceed. Freeing a bird to drive away a snake in Colossal Cave Adventure is not necessarily intuitive.
For some people, including myself, this is fun. But it's not an easy, thoughtless, escapist form of entertainment - which is where the modern FPS comes in.
While many generic games may have been reduced to, 'shitty movies', I think developers have evolved gaming into a medium that would have been hard to imagine twenty years ago. Games like Fallout 3 or Mass Effect 2 are brilliantly designed hybrids of action, adventure, startegy, puzzle and rpg elements all wrapped in gorgeous, well written and immersive worlds built to evolve around a player's individual play style.
Even the base concept of challenge is not a given in modern gaming with titles like Little Big Planet where creating games is a major focus, or Kinectimals in which atmosphere and light hearted play trump all (actually, that second title could use even less, 'forced' challenge, IMO).
I applaud modern developers for constantly pushing the limits of what it means to 'experience' a game, rather than just play one as we have in the past.
That said, Zork totally rules! I've always thought there was room for Interactive Fiction in the modern world, it's just a matter of how/when (I hope!).
Calling all non-competitive games "puzzle games" is too reductionist. For a long time now - as far back as the SNES and perhaps even NES era - games have been about more than just the raw gameplay at their core. They are often just as much about having an interactive experience.
There are so many FPSes that don't match the "bad puzzle" description at all... Portal being one of the very good ones, very close to puzzle type games. Multiplayer shooters which are a good mix of competitive and puzzle (strategy-wise) games - just look at how many shooters and re-releases of the older versions are still very popular: quake 1, 3, 4, rtcw-et, tf. They don't really go for nice video effects. Actually many players happily sacrifice them for higher framerate / responsiveness (or will even tweak the display parameters to get mostly high-contrast, almost flat polygons - like quake3's filtering + overbright). And you can still find servers full of people playing them.
It seems that the shitty movies are pretty much only the single-player ones.
1911: "Edison's Frankenstein proves the simple fact that these things aren't 'film', they're shitty books."
I think at their best, video games do better than "shitty movies". If someone made a list of "Top 10 Moments" from film & video games, I'm betting Aeris' death at the hands of Sepiroth makes that list.
Someone should make a satirical text adventure about doing startups, where you wander around the valley trying to get funding and so on.
>LOOK
You are in a brand new air conditioned Palo Alto office.
Empty packets of ramen litter the floor. There are two desks,
each with brand new macbooks on them.
>SIT DOWN
There are no chairs. What are you, some kind of loser?
>PIVOT
You are bought by a google.
And so on. I know suggesting things for other people to do is bad form, "do it yourself!" goes the familiar cry. Unfortunately I don't have the requisite insider knowledge to make it funny.
Zork really isn't the best example, just the first (and even then it was just an adaptation of Adventure). The Infocom adventures got far more sophisticated in every way over the following few years, in terms of prose, setting, gameplay and atmosphere.
I credit adventure games with teaching me to touch type. To this day I can still type "inventory" far faster than any other nine-letter word.
endgame's comment below is dead, so I'll repost it here because it is very good:
I think that the old MUDs have great potential as a teaching tool. It might be harder in this modern age of fantastic graphics, but if you get someone hooked on a MUD, they usually get a typing speed of 200wpm or so. Further, the persistent nature of the world lends itself to programming.
I've been meaning to write a small mudlib and course around MudCore, a server I finished recently. It's at github.com endgame/MudCore , if anyone is interested.
We didn't lose anything -- interactive fiction games are still being produced, and you can play them on your android or iphone these days, too. http://ifarchive.org/ and http://xyzzyawards.org/ are good places to start.
If someone wanted to write an interactive text game like these and put it on the web, are there any frameworks available? If not, a lot of the work would be on figuring out how to parse the player's input, how to map out the possible paths through the game, etc, instead of writing the story.
Let's also not forget the mechanics of these games tended to be maddening at times. Knowing what you wanted to do and having to guess at the nouns and verbs the designer expected was beyond frustrating.
I'm all for fond remembrance. But the problems of text-based games weren't limited to comparing poorly to graphics. Some of them were inherent; implicit companions of the desirable parts of such "written" games.
Awesome documentary on the history of interactive fiction - big focus on the early days up through infocom (actually, I just realized I never finished watching it!)
This may be true, but it doesn't really address the point of the article. The argument is that modern games could take a lesson from text adventure games in engaging the players' imaginations.
Relatively recently the IF community has experienced a bit of a renaissance because of the release of Inform 7, which allows you to program games in the most natural sounding English I've ever seen in a programming language. Here's a sample:
---
"Cave Entrance"
The Cobble Crawl is a room. "You are crawling over cobbles in a low
passage. There is a dim light at the east end of the passage."
A wicker cage is here. "There is a small wicker cage discarded
nearby."
The Debris Room is west of the Crawl. "You are in a debris room
filled with stuff washed in from the surface. A low wide passage
with cobbles becomes plugged with mud and debris here, but an
awkward canyon leads upward and west. A note on the wall says,
'Magic word XYZZY'."
The black rod is here. "A three foot black rod with a rusty star
on one end lies nearby."
Above the Debris Room is the Sloping E/W Canyon. West of the Canyon
is the Orange River Chamber.
---
As you can see, it reads just like regular English, and it's very easy to understand what's going on here.
Ultima 7 was a graphical game that had a similar effect on me. The graphics were somewhat abstract and generic and left a lot for the imagination to fill in. The writing was wonderful and put flesh on the world. Playing the game was like reading a novel.
It seems like game makers need to focus less on graphics and more on music and writing.
I still remember bicycling over to the "L" building on Auburn's campus to play ADVENT and DND and DUNGEON on their PDP-11 (or whatever model of minicomputer it was at the time). Thanks to the OP for sharing this article. Now I have to will myself to do some actual work today instead of playing old IF games online.
A ADVENTURE The original Collosal Cave adventure
B BLIND Escape the unseen maze
C BUNNY Destroy the man-eating bunny rabbits
D CATCH Navigate a star-field
E CHICKEN Chicken hunt
F CONNECT4 Connect 4 in a row
G CROSSFIRE Evade and attack within the grid
H DALEKS Terminate... Terminate...
I DEFENDER Defend the planet from the invaders
J DESTROYER Destroy the aliens
K DIG Dig Dug
L DOOR Watch out for the monster in the maze
M EMPIRE The original single player Empire
N GRANNY Road Rage!
O MOLE Hunt the moles
P TETRIS Manipulate the falling blocks
This is exactly why I tend to prefer books to theatre, and theatre to film. Filling in the details engages my imagination in a way that the polished, finished surfaces of contemporary games and films do not.
I miss the Infocom games. One of the most enjoyable parts of them was the feeling that you were engaging with an actual person and their own personality, sense of humor, etc. The programmer and author of these games were often one and the same; at the least, they weren't a huge team of people writing off a spec.
I love many modern games but the better they get, the more they seem to be strangled by their own content pipeline; the requirement to produce AAA-level graphics, sound, writing, advertising means the scale of these things is very large and the appetite for risk is low.
All that being said, many of the Infocom games were stupidly obscure and irritating and relied on you doing something almost completely arbitrary at some given point to make things work. But they were just so good in so many ways that this was forgivable. All of the Zorks, the Enchanter series, Suspended, Starcross, Deadline... the list goes on and on.
It's worth noting that Infocom themselves moved into a dodgy neither fish nor fowl territory towards the end with added graphics and some pretty mediocre titles.
Almost 30 years on, I can't work on a house using a ladder and not think "It's too bad that the ladder analysis department closes at noon".
I built a VoiceXML interface for Zork back in 1999. It was meant as a demo application for a VoiceXML interpreter that Cicso was trying to push and I was a test engineer on. It had automatic speech recognition and text to speech. So you could say "Go South" and then hear "You are standing in a forest. There is a bucket." Or whatever.
I thought it was really neat but it never made it past demo stage. I wrote a kind of lazy socket engine in PHP and then used phpzork.com for all my data. It was crude and you couldn't complete the entire game on the phone because I didn't have time to encode all possible actions for the ASR engine. But you could move around and grab a few things. All via telephone ;)
I just checked and it looks like phpzork.com is no longer. Pity, as it was a great way to enjoy Zork 10 years ago.
"Visual" vs textual games is a bit of a false dichotomy though; in particular the Marathon series does a great job of blending action and intelligent, literary story: http://marathon.bungie.org/story/shakespeare.html The first Deus Ex also had plenty of literature in it, sampling heavily from The Man who was Thursday and other classics.
[+] [-] rsbrown|14 years ago|reply
First off, what is a game? Let's consider two broad types of games: competitive games and puzzle games. Competitive games (like chess) feature more than one player and the outcome of the game is unknown (both in terms of the winner and the final game state). Puzzle games (generally speaking) don't have a strong competitive element and the final outcome is known (i.e., a lone player solves the puzzle).
I contend that first-person shooters (in single player mode) are nothing more than big puzzle games. This isn't bad per se, but the problem lies in how these games have evolved.
Rather than make the "puzzles" in FPS games more challenging and innovative (i.e., focus on gameplay), the major game studios have instead focused on increasing the audio-visuals and cinematic attributes of their products. As a result, gameplay has consistently been minimized in favor of eye candy.
No better example comes to mind than the recent smash hit, L.A. Noire. The extent to which the producers of this game clearly wish they were making movies comes off as obsequious. The tiny sliver of game mechanics they did include is mind-numbingly repetitive and utterly without challenge.
These things are no longer "games", they're shitty movies.
[+] [-] falcolas|14 years ago|reply
One great example is SpaceChem. It's a joyously frustrating game that revolves around "programming" reactors to create molecules from other molecules. The joy of finishing a level (particularly if you can beat the curve in terms of time/instructions) is tangible.
Don't despair too much at the state of the game industry, just don't look to the "leaders" for your interesting games.
[+] [-] localtalent|14 years ago|reply
Taking the rose-colored glasses off, a large part of the adventure gaming genre (including point-and-clicks) relied on obscure object interactions or guessing the right command to proceed. Freeing a bird to drive away a snake in Colossal Cave Adventure is not necessarily intuitive.
For some people, including myself, this is fun. But it's not an easy, thoughtless, escapist form of entertainment - which is where the modern FPS comes in.
[+] [-] theflyingswami|14 years ago|reply
Even the base concept of challenge is not a given in modern gaming with titles like Little Big Planet where creating games is a major focus, or Kinectimals in which atmosphere and light hearted play trump all (actually, that second title could use even less, 'forced' challenge, IMO).
I applaud modern developers for constantly pushing the limits of what it means to 'experience' a game, rather than just play one as we have in the past.
That said, Zork totally rules! I've always thought there was room for Interactive Fiction in the modern world, it's just a matter of how/when (I hope!).
[+] [-] scott_s|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viraptor|14 years ago|reply
It seems that the shitty movies are pretty much only the single-player ones.
[+] [-] boredguy8|14 years ago|reply
I think at their best, video games do better than "shitty movies". If someone made a list of "Top 10 Moments" from film & video games, I'm betting Aeris' death at the hands of Sepiroth makes that list.
[+] [-] JonnieCache|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wazoox|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hugh3|14 years ago|reply
I credit adventure games with teaching me to touch type. To this day I can still type "inventory" far faster than any other nine-letter word.
[+] [-] sltkr|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|14 years ago|reply
I think that the old MUDs have great potential as a teaching tool. It might be harder in this modern age of fantastic graphics, but if you get someone hooked on a MUD, they usually get a typing speed of 200wpm or so. Further, the persistent nature of the world lends itself to programming.
I've been meaning to write a small mudlib and course around MudCore, a server I finished recently. It's at github.com endgame/MudCore , if anyone is interested.
[+] [-] Lazlo_Nibble|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endgame|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dsr_|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billybob|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmkoliver|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xurinos|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shawndumas|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roc|14 years ago|reply
I'm all for fond remembrance. But the problems of text-based games weren't limited to comparing poorly to graphics. Some of them were inherent; implicit companions of the desirable parts of such "written" games.
[+] [-] jonhendry|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shawndumas|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgkimsal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nprincigalli|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smackfu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] widget|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cschmidt|14 years ago|reply
http://www.c64gg.com/Adams_Scott_DL.html
although that version seems to have some simple graphics, which is just wrong.
There's more information on the Scott Adams games here http://www.lysator.liu.se/adventure/Adventure_International/...
Good times....
[+] [-] frobozz|14 years ago|reply
You can download Windows versions of all the SAGA adventures there (apart from the Marvel ones, I think), and he has links to web-playable versions.
[+] [-] gnosis|14 years ago|reply
There's still a vibrant interactive fiction gaming scene. It has thrived despite Infocom's demise.
Many interactive fiction games continue to be developed, played, entered in competitions, and reviewed.
Here are some links to get you started:
http://www.wurb.com/if/genre
http://www.ifreviews.org
http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive.html
http://ifdb.tads.org/search?browse&list&sortby=new
[+] [-] gnosis|14 years ago|reply
---
---As you can see, it reads just like regular English, and it's very easy to understand what's going on here.
Here's a more complete example:
http://inform7.com/learn/man/ex74.html#e74
And here are some full, playable games (with source):
http://www.hpiweb.com/newmedia/
http://inform7.com/learn/complete-examples/
A couple of quick tutorials:
http://www.brasslantern.org/writers/howto/i7tutorial.html
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Beginners_Guide_to_Interactive_...
The full manual:
http://inform7.com/learn/manuals/
Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Inform_7
[+] [-] kingmanaz|14 years ago|reply
Ultima 7 was a graphical game that had a similar effect on me. The graphics were somewhat abstract and generic and left a lot for the imagination to fill in. The writing was wonderful and put flesh on the world. Playing the game was like reading a novel.
It seems like game makers need to focus less on graphics and more on music and writing.
[+] [-] MetallicCloud|14 years ago|reply
u6project.com/
[+] [-] lylejohnson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hoff|14 years ago|reply
Login: games / pressplay
[+] [-] cageface|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onan_barbarian|14 years ago|reply
I love many modern games but the better they get, the more they seem to be strangled by their own content pipeline; the requirement to produce AAA-level graphics, sound, writing, advertising means the scale of these things is very large and the appetite for risk is low.
All that being said, many of the Infocom games were stupidly obscure and irritating and relied on you doing something almost completely arbitrary at some given point to make things work. But they were just so good in so many ways that this was forgivable. All of the Zorks, the Enchanter series, Suspended, Starcross, Deadline... the list goes on and on.
It's worth noting that Infocom themselves moved into a dodgy neither fish nor fowl territory towards the end with added graphics and some pretty mediocre titles.
Almost 30 years on, I can't work on a house using a ladder and not think "It's too bad that the ladder analysis department closes at noon".
[+] [-] jonhendry|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] starwed|14 years ago|reply
Lost Pig is a short, interesting one: http://pr-if.org/play/lostpig/
[+] [-] ramchip|14 years ago|reply
Out of curiosity, what game is this?
[+] [-] smutticus|14 years ago|reply
I thought it was really neat but it never made it past demo stage. I wrote a kind of lazy socket engine in PHP and then used phpzork.com for all my data. It was crude and you couldn't complete the entire game on the phone because I didn't have time to encode all possible actions for the ASR engine. But you could move around and grab a few things. All via telephone ;)
I just checked and it looks like phpzork.com is no longer. Pity, as it was a great way to enjoy Zork 10 years ago.
[+] [-] saddino|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minikomi|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] technomancy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] palebluedot|14 years ago|reply
I think the game that had the biggest impact on me, though, was a game for the Apple ][ called "Odyssey"... I remember many hours lost to that game:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_The_Compleat_Apventure
[+] [-] orenmazor|14 years ago|reply