Between Trilobite and Carrier Pigeon
Last night, Eileene fell asleep early on the couch, so I entertained myself surfing the internet, and stumbled across the interactive fiction archive. This is a collection of largely amateur imitations of the old text adventures like Zork, or, more often, adaptations of the basic format to a narrative. While I had some fun with them, the results were also worrying. I’ll get to that in a bit.
The format of old school text adventures was dead simple to implement, and perfect for the dawn of the age of the personal computer, when 64k of RAM was considered ample. The game comprised a list of rooms, a list of which directions out of each room went where, a set of objects and their locations, a set of flags for what state certain objects were in, and a remarkably sophisticated parser. You could travel from room to room, and the computer would describe the room you were in, then list all the objects in that room. The objects acted as obstacles or tools for overcoming those obstacles, which you controlled with verb-object commands: “eat the muffin,” “jump,” or “throw the magic coconut at the steam release valve.” The computer would reset the flags accordingly—noting you’d recently eaten and sending the muffin out of the game by moving it to an inaccessible room, or moving you to the room labeled “bottom of the cliff,” or simply replying that the coconut bounces off the valve and nothing else. If you were clever, you could reach the end goal and win. The whole thing took virtually no memory, but, done right, could entertain for weeks.
Alas, text adventures did not survive the exponential growth of computing power, and the whiz-bang graphics and the instant gratification of real-time play that came with it, though one can trace the influence of text adventures through titles like Myst and World of Warcraft. Happily, text adventures are easy enough to implement that any dedicated amateur can make one. A talented amateur can even make a good one, and a handful of devoted artists use internet archives to keep the genre alive.
Alive, perhaps, but on life support. The list of games is short, about ten or twenty a year, too few to justify the half dozen annual awards. I also see a strong trend away from game or puzzle value, and towards experimental narrative that threaten to save the patient by killing it. The more recent the title, the more likely it is to simply encourage the player to wander from room to room, reading back story without solving any puzzles, or to be minimalist ironic statements, or simply to be too weird to understand. I won’t go so far as to say the genre is dead, but it looks like the devotees are running out of ideas, first for the basic zork-style approach, and increasingly even for experimental games.
That’s sad enough. I enjoyed several text adventures, as I later enjoyed their graphic descendants like Monkey Island, and I miss them. But as I was pitying the die-hard text adventure fans, I began to see an analogy to tabletop role-playing, which hits closer to home. Dungeons & Dragons hit the market, followed by a flurry of imitators, and quickly drained the hack-n-slash genre dry. A second wave took the game out of the dungeon-crawl and into every possible milieu: space, superhero, cartoon. A third wave of story-driven games followed, exploring RPGs as an art, and demonstrating what RPGs could be.
And now…? It’s hard to find any new products at all on the shelves other than d20 (D&D’s latest face-lift), and World of Darkness (built on Vampire), and even these become rarer and more repetitive. The business model depends heavily on getting players to buy rules revisions instead of creative settings, and jaded players aren’t really biting. Even the encyclopedic GURPS hasn’t come out with an interesting and original world book in years. To find something new, you need to dig around the internet, where you can find homemade games. With minimalist systems. And a high proportion of self-satire. And occasionally really, really weird premises. While the nerd demographic upon which RPGs used to draw are increasingly pulled into computer games instead, with their whiz-bang graphics and instant gratification.