I think my taste buds generally respond well to bitterness, because tea, dark chocolate, and beer (though more regular ales than the super-bitter IPAs) are all among my favorite things – I promise, there’s no conspiracy, just human variation!
…we’ve gotten a little off-topic, huh? I mean human variation like the way some people don’t mind unwinnable states and some people hate them.
(There, nailed it).
I do like tea, and in several varieties of black, green, and herbal… Granted, I’m also the kind who makes a quart of hot tea or three pints of cold tea and uses half-a-cup of sugar, which I once worked out would be equivalent to putting 5 standard sized sugar cubes in a standard sized teacup if I were the kind of person to steep tea by the cup…
Unwinnable states are great, BUT the game should detect them and do something cool when they happen (think of many ways you can die in Sierra games) instead of leaving player hanging making him seem like there’s something to be done as no “game over, you messed up” message is shown.
//edit: Also, shouldn’t this be in Authoring/General Design?
My facetious mental response was that it should just print the message “YOU LOSE!” and close the game as soon as you make it unwinnable.
This cued a memory of mine of the experience I had that felt most like this. It wasn’t in an IF game, it was in the PS1 “The Phantom Menace”. Basically you’d be walking around the palace on Naboo and a message would flash up saying “THE QUEEN HAS DIED!” and the game would end. It was probably an escort mission, but the really graceless delivery of that whole game made it seem and feel ridiculous.
-Wade
Yeah, this need to be handled with care (as most game design issues), that’s why I’ve brought Sierra games despite them being Point&Click and not text adventures - they detected you made game unwinnable (at least in most cases) but decided to have a little fun with that.
Some of them did, but definitely not all! Most of the early Sierra games do allow you to get into a dead man walking state without any warning, and that persisted at least through Kings Quest 5 IIRC. Save early, save often (and in different slots) is a good watchword when playing those games, fun as they are 
Aged 14, I threw my copy of Kings Quest V across the room after the game tricked me into an unwinnable state. I lacked a custard pie that was needed to throw at a yeti, and my last save was after I’d eaten the pie, when the character had complained about being hungry! The version I had only seemed to have one save slot (or as a young person I hadn’t figured out multiple slots). The outcome was I never completed the game or touched any other Sierra games.
I was in fact thinking precisely of that pie, since the exact same thing happened to me :). The games designed by the Coles (the Quests for Glory) and Jane Jensen (the Gabriel Knight games and KQVI) generally did a lot better on that front, at least. The Conquest mini-series (of Camelot and of the Longbow) were my other favorites, but alas also had more of that soft-lock stuff than you’d like, at least the first one.
I’m surprised no one in this thread mentioned the Cruelty Scale.
It’s funny when I ran into a lot of these states … I thought it must be me not really paying attention, and I didn’t seem to get better at it, the more games I played. I felt very dumb and immature.
I still remember officious adults saying “life is not a game, son” and with the text adventures I played, and the dead ends I got into, I frequently thought “oh crap life is even more confusing and capricious an arbitrary than THAT?!”
Well, in a way, it is. But also, there are a lot more helpful NPCs (oops, I mean actual other people whom you can ask about more than 2 or 3 subjects) willing to help you with a way out, or a cool alternate path which is at least as good as your original goal. And if you’re soft-locked out of one good thing, you don’t have to rely on programmers providing you with a cool alternative. They’re out there.
I remember being a bit fearful of the prospect of even more advanced games, because I thought they’d have even more unwinnable states. It honestly never occurred to me that game designers wanted to make their games more fair while still being challenging. I just assumed progress meant more arcane and arbitrary and (allegedly) impressive stuff and I always pictured that if I somehow got to complain to the game designers they’d dismiss me with a “BE LUCKY YOU GET TO PLAY GAMES AT ALL. YOUR PARENTS NEVER DID.”
So reading the Players’ Bill of Rights years later sort of blew me away. And I realized games could have bumpers and still be exciting and, in fact, the bumpers they provided helped you focus on the most exciting bits.
This isn’t a perfect comparison (getting an A on a test feels god but doesn’t feel like an accomplishment in life are when you figure a way through a problem without a fixed answer) … but my point is, some early games made you fight a lot for relatively little reward, and sometimes the reason for that fight was dubious. And the energy expended in trial-and-error fighting took away from more meaningful progress and challenges. I was left feeling, well, if I progress this slowly on a game, and it’s just a fun game, what does this mean about progressing in real life?
This isn’t close to all the game’s fault, but it’s a risk of unwinnable states.
It occurs to me, too, that some unwinnable states have really got me thinking, but there are specific things going on – like in Sokoban where it’s not clear that your state is unwinnable, yet, and you have to analyze things. But there, you can figure out why it’s unwinnable and logically deduce “I can’t do X, Y or Z so only W is left.” And of course Sokoban was easier to restart and to see the whole board than, say, the limestone block puzzle in Zork 3.
Yes. All-knowing and everything.