articles/ComputorEdge.txt

Subject: Body of IF Article in ComputorEdge Magazine
Date: 26 Feb 1998 14:50:46 GMT
From: chascarr@aol.com (ChasCarr)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction

Here it is, in case 1) Anyone was looking for and couldn't find it 2) Anyone
cares!

IF: The End of an Error?
by Charles Carr

Can it really be 15 years?

Before we bought our ranch, my wife and I rented a little place in a nearby
town. Our landlord, Phil, could not believe someone who used as much modern
synthesizer and sequencing equipment as I did (we'd just come off five years of
playing music on the road), knew next-to-nothing about computers. Finally, one
hot summer's day, he convinced me to trek down with him into his cool,
cave-like basement study to see his marvel, a fancy new Kaypro. (It had not
just one but <<two>> 5.25" 360K floppy drives, an incomprehensibly vast 10MB
hard drive and ran the operating system of the future: CP/M.)

He loaded a word processing program for me. Uh huh, that's nice, I thought. He
ran a database. I stifled a yawn with the back of my hand. He booted Lotus
1-2-3. I surreptitiously looked at my watch, started making little "gotta go"
noises. Then -- he showed me a sort of interactive book in which you journeyed
through an enchanted underground world by typing directions and simple
commands. Something clicked (or possibly snapped). All I remember is nudging
him off his seat, grabbing the keyboard and asking that he leave us alone -- me
and the computer. I showed up trance-like every morning for the next month and
stayed all day, pitiful junkie that I was.

The game he showed me was called "Adventure." Before it, players had pretty
much needed to sneak time on their company's mainframe for that kind of
experience. It started a desktop computing sensation: the text adventure, also
known as Interactive Fiction or IF. Fans of the new genre clamored for more.
Companies like Level 9, Magnetic Scrolls and, by far the most famous, Infocom,
cranked out dozens of titles over the next 10 years including "Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy," "Leather Goddesses of Phobos," and "Zork," named the best
adventure of all time by hallowed Computer Gaming World magazine.

But inevitably -- tragically to some -- the siren song of sumptuous graphics
and simple point-and-click interfaces lured away IF supporters. Finally market
share diminished to the point that a profitable IF game could not be produced.
Activision bought Infocom and used its sterling name to garner credibility as a
publisher of graphical titles like the superb "Zork Nemesis" and "Zork Grand
Inquisitor."

So, was IF's glory day its only day? I don't think so, no more than the written
medium has acceded to motion pictures. But for IF to survive and flourish, two
things need to happen:

First, more games need to be written. Ever run into someone who tells you old
movies were better than movies made nowadays? They weren't really; it's just
that we see the best few from the thousands that were produced. Future
generations may never know Ishtar was ever made. IF needs lots of titles to
generate its own classics.

And, second, the bar needs to be raised on what is considered an average
effort. At its best, IF is more satisfying than even the finest written fiction
because your decisions are part of the story. But at its worst, IF is worse
than a circa 1975 Jerry Lewis movie (apologies to the French!): inanely
plotted, abominably paced, and hair-rendingly illogical.

Happily, the IF community is way ahead of me. Text adventuring is enjoying a
renaissance. Powerful freeware authoring systems (called <<parsers>>) like TADS
and Inform (the latter written by an Oxford mathematics professor) make it
possible for diligent dreamers to create IF works as good or better than those
of the golden age of Infocom.

Incentive and motivation are being provided by the annual Interactive Fiction
Competition, now in its third year, and the XYZZY Awards (christened after a
word of magic uttered in the original Adventure). Activision has included the
six winning games from the first year's competition along with virtually all
the wonderful old Infocom titles on one CD, called "Classic Text Adventure
Masterpieces."

Such mainstream affirmation was all the validation many authors needed: this
year's competition had dozens of entrants with themes as diverse as a
surrealistic getaway of self-discovery to seeing life through a teddy bear's
eyes to an interactive version of Shakespeare's the Tempest. You can find all
the winners, losers and hundreds more IF games at the Internet site:
ftp.gmd.de:/if-archive. Most are free and many can be played in only a couple
of hours -- and they can be run on almost any computer.

Support and encouragement are in abundance at the IF-specific user groups
rec.games.int-fiction and rec.arts.int-fiction. There are even a couple of
excellent Net-based magazines for text adventure lovers.

I often wonder where IF might be now had the same amount of money and energy
been thrown at it as graphic adventures. You can get a dozen or more
average-sized text adventures on a single 3.5" floppy, hundreds in the space
Duke Nukem or Quake takes (Two games you could not get off my hard drive
without a court order.). Room for graphics notwithstanding, imagine the plot
depth, character development and worlds-within-worlds a text-only game could
have with that much code.

So, as much as I love running around my beloved 3D shooters, I know I'll hold a
special place for old -- and new -- text adventures. A great one can take you
to a place more colorful than the most extravagant graphical adventure: into
your own lavish imagination. In a stouthearted move, Douglas Adams' (author of
"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy") is aiming to marry the best of both --
photo-realistic graphics and a type-in-commands text parser -- in his soon to
be released adventure, Starship Titanic.

No, I'll never forget that feeling -- that entire dream-like summer fifteen
years ago. If someone could put that in a pill ... It's why you occasionally
see desperate Internet posts, someone trying to find that very first IF game
they ever played, even going so far as to buy funky old equipment to
memorialize the experience. Of course it's pointless and ultimately, I suppose,
a little sad ...

... Gee, my ex-landlord, Phil, just put a new Pentium down in his study. I
wonder he'd want for that old Kaypro?

Charles Carr
Reviews Editor, ComputorEdge Magazine
San Diego/Denver

http://www.computoredge.com
reviews@computoredge.com

chascarr@aol.com
http://members.aol.com/chascarr