Scott Adams Adventures - What can be learned in 2012?

To the original poster, if you’re looking for a more modern IF game that carries on something of the spirit of the original Adventure (and probably Adventureland, to some extent), you might want to check out Lost Pig (and Place Under Ground) and The Dreamhold. Lost Pig involves moving around a cave system solving puzzles with some odd devices, but also has a memorable NPC with a lot of conversation and, well, give it a whirl to see. The Dreamhold is not entirely in caves, but the puzzles and setting seem kind of Adventurey to me, and it’s a treasure hunt in a way that most modern games aren’t.

People may totally disagree with these assessments, and I also suspect that these games were influenced by Adventure/Zork a lot a lot more than by the Scott Adams games. Which people may also disagree with. (I mean, zarf is here, he can speak for himself if he likes.)

…and you can always play these games a little bit if you don’t have time to finish them. Lost Pig is playable in a couple of hours, though.

I certainly esteemed the Infocom games above the Scott Adams ones, when I was a kid. But I played them all. (Although only the first nine SA games – I missed Savage Island and the superhero ones.)

Adams deserves some props for getting the most possible milage out of his limited text space. And some of his puzzles really do work well, considering the limited parser. As Jimmy Maher has said in his blog series (linked somewhere in these comments), “The Count” has a very sophisticated event structure for early IF – remember that it predates almost all of Infocom’s releases.

Now that reply I can use! Keep it coming. Thanks so much.
If you can further elaborate on these thoughts, I’d really appreciate it.

Bad design choice? Or 16KB of memory?
Are old text adventure games just considered bad design lessons?
Old TRS-80 action games have design lessons for modern designers,
so I find it strange that there’s nothing that can be learned from old text adventure games.
Has modern interactive fiction truly carried everything forward?
If old Scott Adams games have nothing to offer, please post.
That’s what I’m looking to quote.
Related: If old Infocom games (Zork, Planetfall) have nothing to offer, please post.

Back in 1979, I did not play text adventures (Scott Adams or Infocom) - I did not like them. Even if I played some quick IF today, I definitely don’t have time to play the originals to thoughtfully evaluate what’s different. Playing modern interactive fiction won’t make my presentation richer whatsoever since that’s not what my presentation is about. I want opinions from people familiar with old text adventure games and new modern interactive fiction to tell me what’s been lost.

@matt w >
Thanks for the reply. Do you think “The Dreamhold” and “Lost Pig” found inspiration from the old adventure games? Without the TRS-80 constraints/limits, were they able to expand the text adventure ideas in new meaningful ways? Could modern game makers benefit from a treasure hunt lesson?

@zarf >
It sounds like you’re saying Scott Adams games were great for their time, but they’ve been long surpassed.
i.e. Everything has been carried forward.
If you could confirm this, that would be great.

@everyone >
I focussed on Scott Adams (as opposed to Infocom) since he is tightly tied to the TRS-80.
Let’s open the question up…
If you compare modern interactive fiction to Infocom games, has anything been lost?
Can anything be learned/salvaged from old Infocom games (Zork, Planetfall)?
Is there any reason a modern game designer / interactive fiction creator should play those?

Final Note
I fully intend to play some of the interactive fiction recommended in this thread.
My tastes have changed over the years, and the descriptions sound great.

Thanks so much everyone!

I can’t help feeling you’ve too tight a deadline for this one. The questions you’re asking are answered in design papers, in reviews, in The Craft of Adventure, in posts, in Usenet… we’ve been living side by side with the difference between oldschool and modern - with the knowledge of what to use and what not to use (mazes and hunger timers are, nowadays, out) and what to marvel and gawk at (Nord And Bert Couldn’t Make Head Nor Tail Of It remains unique to this day, with only a couple of games following in its footsteps). It’s the sort of thing you’d need to spend some time in the community for. Jimmy Maher’s excellent History of IF would certainly be one of THE things to read. So is IF Theory Reader.

A bit of both plus a dash of “There’s so little done yet, there’s no such thing as bad design”.

But in the case of the puzzle being discussed - bad design.

As far as I can tell - and it’s certainly my opinion - that mostly old text adventures suffer from what is today considered bad design, for a number of reasons. Reason #1: Adventure did it. Adventure had mazes, light puzzles, inventory limit, huge number of rooms… let’s add all that in.

Another big reason was “value for money”. You paid for that game; you expected it to be worth your while. That usually meant length of game, not quality. Level 9 went WAAAAY overboard with number of rooms in one of their games, and failed to implement them properly, resulting in a 2000+ room boring maze, for all practical intents.

And again, they were doing it for the first time. There was no “good design” to check their design against, because there was mostly no design at all.

Again, this is the sort of thing we’ve discussed so much it’s pretty much overhead for most of us, we don’t even think about it…

But my point: NO, old text adventures aren’t just considered bad design lessons. They had good qualities - some of them, anyway (realise that at one point, there were as many crappy z80 adventures as there were crappy FPSs in the '90s). Some can even be enjoyed by modern gamers. But it’s all in a case-to-case basis.

Thankfully, not yet. If it had, it would be pretty stagnant. No, there’s lots of creative people here - why, just last month Jon Ingold tried to do away with the parser while retaining the feel of IF.

And then there’s greedy people like me, who like nothing better than to play the games and post reviews.

I’m not sure you understand, dude: Infocom and SA games were worlds apart. Aside from the heavy treasure hunting in twisty mazes of Zork and a few limited first entries in other genres such as Deadline, Infocom games hold up well enough today, with excellent prose and fair puzzles in such gems as The Lurking Horror, Spellbreaker, Trinity and others. Five minutes with any of these contrasting to the SA ones should make it very clear the distinction.

The design issue with The Hulk we’ve been discussing is a flaw called “guess-the-verb” (look it up), something Infocom and modern IF rarely suffer from. Of course, dealing with synonyms and fair answers is far easier without so small memory as the TRS-80.

Peter, what’s wrong with inventory limits? IF is usually less cartoony than your average game, where Link can pull a huge hammer out of thin air or something…

You could also ask, and you’d be right, “what’s wrong with mazes? Infocom did them brilliantly and originally”. Or “what’s wrong with hunger puzzles, they can help pace the game”. Or “what’s wrong with light timers”. The answer to all of those is that there’s nothing wrong with them… if they’re not gratuitous. Mostly the inventory limits were gratuitous and artifically prolonged gameplay time by forcing you to juggle your inventory in a boring manner. You could also have red herrings, and you could also have situations where you couldn’t come back to earlier rooms, so what to keep and what to leave?

Nothing wrong with inventory limits if they serve a function, be they realism, pacing or part of a puzzle. But when umpteen games have gratuitous limits that serve no other function but to piss the player off, then there’s something wrong.