Why Text Games are Important

Authoring General Design Discussions
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I agree, and this is why I found the thread disorienting to read.

The dichotomy between text games and AAA titles as defined by the OP is false because it misdiagnoses the problem of AAA games: it claims that AAA games do not have enough player agency and hide this deficiency through scenes of mandatory violence. There is now a revitalized AA-scaled industry of CRPGs that allow pacifist options in so-called violent video games, and non-violent video games are the norm for many “casual” and independent spaces. Yet, I argue they are still missing something because they’re reiterating on the same formulas that make money.

And I don’t think text games are immune to this tendency either. There are many sloppy horror IF that border on the insensitive and cruel, but they can make a splash on the Itch homepage. Mediocrity has very little to do with player freedom, which I genuinely care little about: it’s more about not wanting to take risks that may offend many players.

When it comes to interesting games, I think text games are in a better shape than most scenes because they are not embedded within profit structures. I sincerely doubt the likes of SPY INTRIGUE or Prince Quisborne would be possible in a more money-driven space. While it’s true that “anyone can make IF” as the OP says, I think it’s less about expanding systems to allow for deeper interactions and more that people are able to stamp their authorial vision on their works. That’s why I think that even if I encounter a flawed IF work that irritates me to no end, I would never consider it “mediocre” in the way I buy games I’ll only play once from Steam sales.

I will still consider it a profound experience, and that’s why I think text games and independent media as a whole are mportant.

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I’m seeing a lot of interesting interrelated dichotomies in this discussion: text games vs. AAA (and non-text narrative indie games in between), scope vs. depth of implementation (and intentional implementation of boundaries in between), immersion vs. medium awareness. The idea that text is superior to graphics because it actually allows for a more complex simulation and provides a more intense immersive experience (“the best graphics card is your imagination!”) was an important part of Infocom’s marketing, and has been more or less present in IF discourse ever since, I guess most emblematically in the idea that mimesis is an important goal for IF games. A 1980s guide to creating text adventures I read recently put this as a battle between “playing against the machine”, i.e. being reminded one is operating a computer, which is considered undesirable, versus “playing against the game” - its puzzles, obstacles and enemies, not its technical components - through a supposedly seamless translation of the player’s ideas → parser input → action in the simulated world.

At the same time, I think the wider public still knows IF mostly as an early, incomplete attempt to implement perfect natural language human-computer interaction. In this narrative, error messages are nothing beyond a reminder of where this implementation falls short, due to, it is assumed, the limited technology of the time. Error messages force one to play against the machine, and take them away from the game. But IF’s development from its early days hasn’t resulted in an elimination of error messages but, as paul-donnelly pointed out, more in a sophistication of how error messages are used, as constitutive of how IF works.

I have also seen some recent LLM-based interactive fiction draw on this idea by saying LLMs are “finally” the full realisation of IF’s primordial ideal of complete player freedom. Obviously, this has been very much rejected by the people who actually play IF, suggesting, maybe, that the appeal for them isn’t being able to type anything and get a response. I think many would also argues the problem is just how bad most of these LLM games are, but I do think it’s fair to say there is a broad anti-AI sentiment in the IF community that does indicate that “being able to do anything I want” was never really the point.

Is the goal of games, or of narrative media in general, to immerse us in stories and make us forget the medium through which they are being told? Do books really still exist alongside movies because they are a more direct way of transmitting the contents of an author’s mind, or do they both exist because they are just different things? Sorry for the dumb comparison, but to me that sounds a bit like saying that we still have lasagna when burgers exists because lasagna is better at some things that burgers just can’t do. There isn’t some single goal of tastiness or nutrition that all food shares. They are just different. A good book, in my opinion, needs to be a good book. Good to read, good chapters, good paragraphs, good descriptions, good narration. A movie isn’t narrated. A good scene is not the movie equivalent of a good paragraph. The distinctions are central.

This thread started with the argument that text games are important because text still stands as the most efficient channel between reader/player and narrative. I want to say almost the opposite: text games are important not because they are better at things AAA games fail at, but because they continue to explore and extend certain specific ways of interacting with the computer. They thrive against a teleology in which text, graphics, 2D, 3D etc. are all deployed to bring us closer to the same goal of forgetting all mediation, and just being in the story world. Text is not “flawed” in relation to direct manipulation - but it is also not “actually better”. It is different, and it is interesting in itself, and playing text games reminds us that there are many ways a computer can be, and invites us to actively reflect on those ways, and imagine other possible ones. That is a very good awareness to have.

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I, for one, and am in favor of narration in movies and television… granted, I’m blind, so I miss a lot of things when consuming the, for lack of a better term, normal version of a movie, and I get the impression descriptive audio, where it exists, is often an ad hoc thing made after the fact rather than something made along side everything else… and it can be a bit immersion breaking to listen to a production with an American cast with a British narrator reading the descriptive audio or vice versa, or to listen to something with a human cast but a TTS description, especially if its one of those uncanny valley “natural” sounding synths that tries, but fails at inflection… though I find AI generated speech seems to climb out of the uncanny valley much of the time, though admittedly I haven’t knowingly listened to anything as long as a movie with AI speech.

But yeah, different mediums are different and that’s okay. Some may be better at some things than others(Describing how a character looks will never be as good as a competantly drawn picture of them, describing their voice will never be as good as a recording, etc.), but no medium is better at everything and no medium is worst at everything, and even the advantages one medium seems to have over another are often just general trends, not inherent differences(take anime versus manga, the common weekly serialized manga gets adapted into a weekly serialized anime often results in the anime having a slower, more dragged out pacing or needing to insert additional content to avoid catching up to the source material, and manga readers will often cite faster pacing and lack of filler as reasons manga is better than anime, but nothing about this is inherent to the medium).

And yeah, most dichotomies are false and rarely is there just two poles to a subject… I use to have a signature on another forum that said something like,

Things are never black and white and seldom are they gray. Reality is filled with infinite hues in infinite shades.

As a metaphor for the diversity of things in idea space… granted, “idea space” probably wasn’t in my vocabulary at the time, though I was already familiar with concepts like the political compass, D&D-style alignment with separate order/chaos and good/evil axes, dynamics instead of dichotomies, etc. and well, colors are probably one of the most natural phenomena humans are familiar with that is routinely organized as a 3-d space with variation along every axis… it’s everything else we have a bad habit of collapsing to binaries that are useless in practice.

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We can ask whether this is even true now. Implement a rope in your IF, versus implementing it in a graphical game. Which is the more straightforward, physically-correct simulation? Or do sub-room positioning, or different movement speeds. Do liquids. In each case, the physically correct solution is straightforward to envision, and the computer’s ability to do the math quickly enough is the issue (but computers are much faster now).

Really what we’re claiming is that text is a better medium for abstracting details so we don’t have to simulate them. But is that true either? If you use your abstract IF-style rope simulation in a graphical game, doesn’t that work? Thief had abstracted ropes. Quest for Glory II had a magic rope, which I believe is found in similar form in Adventure. As long as players buy in to the abstraction, it’s hard to see where text has the advantage, except that some people just like to read.

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Ironically, the absolute poster child for “text adventure” — Choose Your Own Adventure/Fighting Fantasy, and similar gamebooks — were always heavily illustrated, to the extent that a gamebook without illustrations will be seen as “boring” or “low quality”.

Basically, I suspect the only games to really ever get away with text only, are games running in environments where graphics were not possible :smiley: (And then those styles of games hung around into platforms where you could have graphics, and then lost out)

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I wouldn’t say the early CYOA books were heavily illustrated, although they had some.

Not at all. Infocom’s games were best sellers throughout the 80s, competing on platforms that had plenty of graphical games.

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That was what my second clause was meant to be about. Game styles that emerged when graphics were not accessible and then hung around, as opposed to launching on graphics-capable platforms in the first place.

I could be wrong, but I think that the conceit of “text is better than pictures” has never been 100% true.

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And like to type!
I think this is something that a lot of people miss about parser-only players like me. I’ve been typing on a computer keyboard constantly since 1983, and I was exposed to text adventures very early in that experience. I am still in love with this mode of gaming. I never even saw a mouse until about 1989, never had one in my home until 1996, never really got comfortable using one until about 2004 (I’m also a keyboard-only Doom player!).

The medium of IF isn’t just reading text; it’s typing text too! I have a special connection to that.

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I don’t understand this. “Game styles that emerged when graphics weren’t available” would by definition mean text games. If I’m not mistaken even Infocom’s earliest incarnation of Zork for the PDP-10 and Crowther and Woods Colossal Cave Adventure coexisted with graphical games. It feels like you are saying that text adventures were a holdover from earlier text-only platforms. That seems wrong to me. Graphics are almost as old as computing.

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Who plays DOOM with a mouse?! :slight_smile:

Saw and used a mouse in 84 on one of the first Macs and got my own in 90. Played plenty of text and graphical games before I ever saw a mouse.

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From the monitor’s perspective, is text fundamentally different from graphics? did early systems with tile-based graphics not store their fonts as tiles and display them like they would any other bit of graphical data?

I’d argue the advancement of video games over text-only games wasn’t a change of how the game outputted to the screen, but an advancement in how many colors could be used simultaneously, how much detail could be on screen at one time, and how fast the hardware could redraw what’s on screen. Pong was black-and-white with a square ball, blocky numbers to keep score, and rectangular paddles with absolutely no embellishment and only 3 moving parts, two of which only moved in straight, vertical lines, the idea of a throw the ball back and forth without dropping it game stripped down to the bare essentials because that’s all early machines could handle without being too slow to be remotely fun to play. Space Invaders was still black and white with barely any added detail and lagged to a crawl when the screen is full of invaders, the final invader isn’t a speed demon because the game is programmed to make it faster, but because the game is no longer lagging from having to draw the whole swarm, making this quite possibly the most famous example of a performance bug being turned into a feature and accidentally inventing dynamic difficulty… And let’s be honest, if people are going to play pong or space invaders today, unless they are hardcore 8-bit retro fans, they’re probably going to play a modern clone where Pong has an actual ball sprite/model, multiple play fields to pick from, some of which might not be just eye candy, actual paddle sprites/models, etc or where there’s an actual starfield, the invaders look like actual alien monsters and not an 70s artist’s interpretation of a computer virus, and you’re shooting actual plasma shots with epic battle music… Pac-Man had color, but the original had the same maze over and over in part so they didn’t have to draw it in-game and could just overlay a transparent screen cover with the maze printed on it, a trick a lot of arcade games did for static parts of the display, one reason home computers and consoles couldn’t match the arcades in fidelity.

Those were the kind of graphics the Zork Trilogy was competing with, and while drawing letters to the screen probably isn’t very different from drawing invaders, You don’t need to redraw what’s on screen several times a second to provide the illusion of movement.

And even in the 80s, graphics still kind of sucked for the most part. Often flat coloring, very limited detail that often hints at rather than showing stuff, limited animation… The NES and Master System have their fans even today, but a lot of stuff from this era is very niche if not in the realm of “only gaming historians care”. Also, best I can tell from a little Googling, the entire Zork Trilogy sold less than a million copies back in the day… while there were dozens of million sellers for the NES… granted, some of those million sellers are from the years when the NES and SNES where both getting new games, but it would seem that, even if they were still profitable in the 80s, text-games were already losing to the limited graphics of the day… and once the Genesis and SNES came along, developers could do almost anything with their graphics as long as they were 2-d… Sure, “16-bit” consoles had their limitations, but those limitations aren’t at all apparent to the casual gamer if the art direction is competent and many more 16-bit games look timeless compared to their 8-bit forebears… and sometimes, even compared to the early 3-D of the PS1/N64/Saturn era.

And to be fair, how many popular novels were only ever printed with plain covers and no internal illustrations?

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Yeah, saying that “graphics are almost as old as computing” to dismiss the idea of text games being displaced by graphical games seems to be ignoring the fact that the quality of graphics has gotten much better over time, making it harder and harder for text-only games to compete.

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Certainly not what I meant. Of course improved graphics has made it more difficult for plain text to compete. My point was that treating text only games as some sort of legacy holdover from platforms that didn’t have graphics at all is just plain wrong. Text games developed alongside graphical games and often outdid them even in the era of “pretty good” 8-bit graphics from the likes of Commodore, Atari, and Apple.

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Then clearly, we need to compete with higher fidelity, 3D fonts! IF made entirely with 1998 Microsoft Word WordArt! /j

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Sure, although I think it depends on where you set the bar for “pretty good” graphics. My impression is that by the time graphics were reaching a standard that I would consider “pretty good,” text games were already dying out, but I wasn’t alive at the time so IDK.

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More pixels = more words.
Every room should come with a multi-page description covering the lighting, color and texture of everything in visual range.

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The funny thing about graphics is that whatever state of the art is at the time seems pretty great. I played a lot of games back then and Commodore 64 graphics were darn good. Even before that, early arcade games like Asteroids were impressive. Through the years, I can remember thinking “these graphics are awesome” about many games that much later look…less so. The original Wing Commander for DOS on PC blew me away the first time I saw it.

Edit: I feel the decline of text can be attributed to a number of factors:

  1. Graphical games have less friction (watching a movie and pointing at things is easier/faster than reading and typing commands)
  2. Increased computational power and memory/storage ate away an advantage of text games - the ability to handle more elaborate game worlds with constrained resources.
  3. Early computer game players were already familiar with the need to read and type a lot to interact with computers. As audiences became more mainstream, familiarity with that basic interaction declined.

So you have a perfect storm - a huge influx of people that aren’t familiar with existing conventions, ever-improving graphics making things easier and faster, and memory, storage, and cpu speeds now being able to offer worlds at least as complex as text games.

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Yeah! I was thinking of link based games too when I wrote that, but typing is too great to not have in games.

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The PDP-1(?) famously having a graphical display that could be used to play Space War doesn’t mean most people had access to anything more than a teletype. I’m thinking the HP2000 era here, because text games are so much more than interactive fiction. And some early 8-bit computers had at best semi-graphical characters. Not even weak graphics. So yes, technology played a role in the popularity of interactive fiction during the early 80s.

That said, saying graphical games did (or could ever) replace interactive fiction is like saying comics can replace books. Maybe that worked for the few decades when games were driven by the numbers-go-up madness. But those times are past, even if the industry still makes token efforts to deny and resist change.

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In the mid-to-late 70s most people had access to nothing at all unless you include handhelds like:

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