I remember when I was thirteen I was entranced by whatever computer games I could tweak my computer to get DOS to run. I was a huge fan of Lucasarts’ adventure games (Loom, The Monkey Islands and so on), and the fact that they were primarily word driven. There were graphics – and what graphics! – but for the most part they presented the player with an interesting dichotomy – nothing ever really happened, but you were responsible for it all. You would chat to somebody who would tell you that they wanted a compass, for example, and it was up to you to get that compass. Only, they would never just say “Get me the compass”. Instead, it would be a conversation that could take up to twenty minutes, where you found out about the character’s history, family, likes and dislikes, and, above all, the reason for them wanting the compass in the first place. And this was presented by a question and answer process, in which you (the player, avatared by somebody like Guybrush Threepwood, a comical, useless pirate [Monkey Island], or Bobbin, a young man out to prove himself [Loom] or even Indiana Jones [Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis]) had to choose the right answer (though, really, there were no Wrong answers – at least, no game-ending ones) in order to progress with the conversation. And it was the fact that you a) Read your way through the game (this was before the advent of Talkies) and b) felt like you were having a hand in the writing of the game because you chose the answers and the questions that made the games so wonderful to somebody like myself.
And then came Return To Zork.
Essentially, it was an adventure game. These games came from a long hierachy, a family tree that started with ‘Adventure‘ and ran through the previous Zork games, darting into luminaries such as Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and finally running into Lucasarts’ games division in the late 80’s. Only, this adventure game had spoken dialogue, which, in 1993, was still quite new and exciting. It was only available on CD. Most people didn’t even have a cd drive in their computers. And, more than this, the most amazing thing of all was that it had video. Not just little bits of video – whole chunks of recorded, digitised characters, played by dodgy actors (or possibly great actors, with a wonderfully dodgy script) and put, green-screen, onto computer generated backdrops. And it was jaw dropping. It required 591,072 bytes of available low memory to run – an enormous amount, given that my humble 386sx sat at around the 575 thousand mark at most times – and it needed SVGA graphics in a world of 256 colour monitors. All told, it was the grail of games.
But. But. But.
It was dreadful. I mean, I tried to love it. It had so much going for it. I tried really, really hard. I wanted to love it, because of what it meant; it was the future of computer games. But in all the protesting that the written medium was dead, in all the converting beautiful hand-drawn animation with gaudily dressed old men doing generic ‘Wizard’ voices, in all the getting rid of printed dialogue, allowing you to stew in the nuances and jokes and subtleties in favour of clipped dialogue to save cd space, in all the loss of art-driven backgrounds to be replaced by polygon windmills… In all that, they also lost the feeling of immersion, of imagination, the feeling that despite it being a heavily scripted game, you, the humble player (reader?) could have some say in the universe that you found yourself playing in. They stopped you having to use your imagination at all in the text-based adventure game.
But for millions of others, Zork was the way forward. It showed you that you could be guided through something, and that maybe the quickest way forward was the best. And it started a trend of the puzzles in these games becoming more mathematically orientated, and moving away from the word-based play that they used to hold so dear.
And all I did was want to have a sword-fight with words instead of actions.
technorati tags:PhD, ARG, TextAdventure, Zork, Lucasarts, MonkeyIsland
July 4, 2006 at 5:04 am
Good post. I agree, Return to Zork was a disappointment — a shining beacon of the limitations of the blocky live-action video capture that CD ROM games pushed into the gaming cosmos. While the multiple icons representing different potential actions (tying, cutting, taking, etc.) attempted to preserve some of the perceived freedom in a text-parser game, the end result was that the game was essentially a multiple choice game now. At least the Myst games were gorgeous to look at, with a deceptively simple interface (the opposite of RTZ).
So are you doing PhD work in this area? Are you incognito? I didn’t see a profile anywhere on this site.
July 4, 2006 at 12:26 pm
Came via Dennis Jerz and will be very interested in your discussions on this subject. Though late to the party, I’m currently exploring all forms of new media in search of story in particular. Storytron may hold some promise in building relationship-based story that allows greater freedom to both writer and reader/writer. Please do keep us updated on your efforts.
July 4, 2006 at 5:21 pm
In reply to Dennis Jerz, I’m working in an area not unrelated to this, yes; primarily, fiction with an ARG slant to it. And consequently, the interactivity aspect of the games is what’s most interesting to me. I shall be doing a post in the not too distant future about the relationship between, for example, ‘Zork’ and Majestic, In Memoriam and other ARGs.
Susan, I agree that relationship-based stories can hold the key to greater common understanding and freedom; however, they bring with them the issue of how they relate, and the issue that one person may relate more than another, and thus lost much of the experience that the text would otherwise offer. I shall visit your site and read up.
BTW, my profile will be up under the ‘about’ button at the top of the page. Thanks for reading.