Hi, friends, and Happy New Year! Thought many of you here might be interested in a new blog series I’m launching this year called “50 Years of Text Games.” Each week I’ll be posting an in-depth analysis of one text game from each year starting in 1971 (when the original Oregon Trail was released) up to the present day. My aim is to trace a kind of grand tour through all kinds of interactive text games that have been invented over the past fifty years: BBS games, play-by-mail adventures, hypertext, MUDs, audio games, parser and Twine games, and more. There will definitely be a lot of parser IF classics in the mix (as well as games you may never have heard of). You can read more about the project at my introduction post:
“When a high school sophomore’s favorite TV show is cancelled, he sets out on a determined quest to recreate it on a computer—even though he has no way to access one.”
“After a caver halfway across the country discovers D&D, he makes his own digital adaptation—inventing an almost entirely different kind of gaming experience.”
“A middle-aged lawyer lets his kids choose how their bedtime story ends, and plants the seeds for a new kind of book that would become ‘as contagious as chicken pox.’”
“In the early days of text games wild experiments flourished, like the obscure series that pioneered the term ‘interactive fiction’ where instead of typing commands, you wrote your own florid dialogue.”
Well, from reading Aaron’s description (and Jason Dyer’s), it seems like pursuing this style would lead you straight to the Choice of Games model.
Remove the 8-bit memory limitations. Keep the chain-of-scenes-with-variations model but fill it out with a lot more content. Drop the pseudo-parser (which would really wear out its illusion after a couple of games) and instead let players find surprising endings by combinations of simple-but-meaningful choices. Add smoochies. You’ve invented Choice of Broadsides, which was COG #2, if I recall.
Jimmy Maher also tried reimplementing the game as a Choicescript adventure. Although to my mind this loses some of the (illusory) magic. It’s a card trick that doesn’t always (or even often) work, but I think explicitly listing the choices robs this particular model of some of its uniqueness.
Ironically, since the technical back-ends couldn’t be more different, the “type whatever you want and the story will respond” interface makes me think of A.I. Dungeon more than anything. Which is also a magic trick that doesn’t always work, but is cool when it does.
I guess, but with the hiding of the choices within the black box being the significant difference. This pseudo-parser (or just parser? I suppose it is still parsing, after a fashion) stuff might even have appealed to those of today’s players who are allergic to undisguised choice-based games. I know a few of those.
Whatever the case, there is definitely something a little bit magical about it and magic, illusory or not, is always real.
I daresay something like this could be made with a modern IF language, and without the memory limitations of the TRS80, so that the illusory magic could be made that bit more magical.