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It is Dark. You are Likely to Suffer a Critical Failure.

Fishing for new RPG fodder, some designers have gone too far afield. Parsley Games are self-contained scenarios designed to mimic old-school text adventures like Zork. The players attempt to win the scenario with simple verb-object commands like “get lamp” and “go east” and “eat profiterole.”

One poor player is stuck with the role of “parser;” he reads the scenario ahead of time and judges, when play starts, whether the other players’ commands are succinct and relevant enough to have any effect at all. In some ways he is analogous to the more traditional GM, minus all the interesting parts: creating the scenario, judging the action, and guiding the story. All acceptable actions are described in the game itself; anything else earns some variation on “You can’t do that.” Presumably, the parser tries to construct his refusals as wittily possible, partly because snarky variations on “No” were part of the fun of the old text adventures and partly because he’s got nothing else to amuse himself.

This sounds like a lot of fun. For twenty or thirty minutes. For the players. If they, like me, played enough Infocom games to enjoy the nostalgic thrill. Otherwise, it just sounds like an ordeal. There’s a reason people gave up on those old Infocom games. Several reasons. And grappling with the parsers, no matter how sophisticated they got, was a big one. Tamping the creativity inherent to any decent tabletop RPG back down into a finite list of acceptable commands transforms the RPG back into a mere puzzle again, most of which finds its challenge in grappling with a cumbersome interface, made doubly cumbersome by passing a computer’s dogmatic reactions through a second interface of fallible human speech. Something like writing letters by passing text through a babelfish translation and back again, the fun only lasts as long as you’re willing to put up with it.

As a big Infocom fan myself, I would love to play one of these. Once. Then I would like all evidence they ever existed destroyed, before people begin thinking, “Hey, what a good idea!”

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