[extropy-chat] Petals around the rose: underdefined games: IF

[Reason]

> > Spike wrote:
>
> Example, in 1981, I was playing Mansion with an attractive
> 18 yr old woman, the one to whom I have been married for the
> past 20 yrs.  We had one of the old amber screen monochrome
> monitors, running on an HP 3000 mainframe.
>
> The game was going well: we had the Star Trek transporter, we
> had the crystal goblet, we had the food and the gold.  But when
> we got to the very narrow passage (my fellow geezers may recall this)
> one must drop *everything* to get thru, everything including ones
> clothing.  Then we could find the map and get back around
> to our stuff, but in the mean time everyone was laughing
> at us because we are naked.  The game keeps reminding
> one of this constantly.  We were doing really well, finding
> the stuff we needed to solve the mystery, but my blushing
> girlfriend was completely obsessed with getting back to our
> clothing which (turns out to be a mere distraction after
> one finds another Star Trek transporter).  Eventually we
> had Scotty beam us up, and theres the whole crew, including
> the ordinarily somber and stoic Spock, laughing at us, so we
> had to beam back down for the clothing.  It was a hoot, even
> if we didn't actually solve the mystery.
>
> Is there anything analogous to Mansion these days?
> Whats it called?  Do they still have Dungeon?  Myst?

The closest mainstream things these days would be games like

Syberia
Syberia II
The Longest Journey <--- very good
Myst + sequels
etc

These are basically graphic versions of those early text only games. The
mechanisms of figuring out/guessing the right thing to type in have vanished
in favor of searching for clickable scenery and the additional types of
puzzles possible in a visual interface.

Interactive fiction is of course still going strong. Commercial companies
that work with text interface games (like http://www.skotos.net/ ) tend to
focus on the MUD space, but there is a large non-commercial interactive
fiction gaming community. The engines are open nowadays and anyone can write
stuff for them.

http://www.ifarchive.org/
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~wsr/IF/
http://ifcomp.org/

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme