Revisiting 'Zork': What We Lost in the Transition to Visual Games

Re:Revisiting 'Zork': What We Lost in the Transition to Visu... by localtalent on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @11:57AM (#2705876)

Interactive Fiction as a genre is significantly less accessible than FPS. Not only due to the medium of text, which is inherently less flashy and instantly compelling than 3D environments, but due to the nature of the puzzles.

Taking the rose-colored glasses off, a large part of the adventure gaming genre (including point-and-clicks) relied on obscure object interactions or guessing the right command to proceed. Freeing a bird to drive away a snake in Colossal Cave Adventure is not necessarily intuitive.

For some people, including myself, this is fun. But it's not an easy, thoughtless, escapist form of entertainment - which is where the modern FPS comes in.

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Re:Revisiting 'Zork': What We Lost in the Transition to Visu... by zem on Wednesday June 29, 2011 @07:25AM (#2709071)

the really annoying bit was when you had figured out what to do, but had to play "guess the verb". (i remember the otherwise very fun "unkuulian unventure" having a few frustrating examples, e.g.). and later, when graphical adventures got popular, that was supplemented by "hunt the pixel".

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Re:Revisiting 'Zork': What We Lost in the Transition to Visu... by colomon on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @03:54PM (#2707019)

I feel that both forms are missing the mark for my taste. Essentially, they represent two of the classic failures in crafting a good ("pencil and paper") role-playing game: This game is all fighting and This game is all puzzles. The really fun games are the ones that have a cool environment (like text adventures) and let you make interesting choices.

I know there have been some efforts to do that sort of thing with a text-adventure-y environment (Storytron?) but don't know of anyone who has really gotten it right yet.

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