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The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

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Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#21

Post by alisonatwork »

shevy-java wrote: post #13

I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g. King's Quest and what not, but in the 1980s or so that was novel and creative. Today the games tend to have powerful 3D engines, but the creativity was lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new to the table, for instance) and of course the graphics and sounds are great, but something is gone now. In part this m…

I agree that mainstream games tend to feel more predictable in their mechanics than what we got in the 8-bit era, but I'm not sure that that means they're more boring. There were a lot of crap games that came out in the old days that only seemed interesting at the time because our access was so limited. Nowadays anyone can play thousands of games for free, on pretty much any device, so they can choose to spend their time in the kinds of games that they actually prefer.

I'm not sure it's worth lamenting that the most popular games today tend to have addictive mechanics and otherwise little novelty. Clearly that's what people enjoy. If you are interested in experimental or avant garde games, then that stuff is still out there in the indie scene. Lots of them are bad games, but they still might be good ideas.

There's plenty of examples I am sure people can share on the thread, but here's one that comes to mind for me as interesting but not very fun: Bokida - Heartfelt Reunion. It's a gigantic monochromatic world with impenetrable puzzles and weird geometry that reminded me of those old freescape games like Driller. I don't think I enjoyed it very much but somehow I did play it all the way through and it still sticks in my mind today because no other game I played really did the same stuff. But, then, it's possible that that's just my subjective experience and for someone who plays Minecraft or something similar, Bokida was just derivative and forgettable? I dunno.

There's a lot out there, though. I think we're in a golden age of games! As a kid I could never have imagined having a literal "backlog" of dozens of games I've already bought but not even started yet because there's so much to play.

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#22

Post by egypturnash »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #16
shevy-java wrote: post #13

I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g. King's Quest and what not, but in the 1980s or so that was novel and creative. Today the games tend to have powerful 3D engines, but the creativity was lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new to the table, for instance) and of course the graphics and sounds are great, but something is gone now. In part this m…

When the first-person shooter arrived, somehow we collectively decided that's what all games should now be. I think we've learned that creativity comes from constraints. Early computing platforms certainly were replete with that.

I've never been into Doom clones (to use the term from back in the day) and yet I have enjoyed playing countless video games from about 1984 through to the present. Very few of them are first-person games, whether they're head-clickers or other forms of first-person gaming.

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#23

Post by egypturnash »

alisonatwork wrote: post #18
JKCalhoun wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people with little technical skill a means to create a world—or extend an existing one. And then I wanted a way to join MUDs together—like if you leave a forest by a certain path you are, unbeknownst to you, rerouted to a different MUD that picks up where the forest left off. In this way I imagined in time a world larger and richer than any that had come before it—wh…

I never got deep into it, but I remember reading magazine articles back in the 90s that that's exactly what the new generation of MUDs were. Wiki has pages on MOO, TinyMUCK, MUSH etc - these are basically platforms where the players themselves can expand out new objects and locations, presumably in a similar way to Second Life or other MMO sandboxes do today. So the tools already exist, but it seems to me that they p…

My experience was that in practice all that mapped-out world of most social mu*s was largely ignored by players; they'd all end up in a few gathering spots, or in private spaces disconnected from the main map, open only to their owners and people they teleported in.

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#24

Post by c22 »

hackshack wrote: post #5
glimshe wrote: post #4

One of my dream games is a truly open world text adventure. I got a glimpse of it by having ChatGPT run this game, but it started hallucinating and misremembering after a few rounds. It has to be perfect to avoid breaking the immersion, but I'd pay $100 for such a game even without graphics.

You're on to something. I tried this too, a few months ago, with offline Ollama/Magistral on Mac. "You're a dungeonmaster for a single player adventure game, with me as the player..." It lost track of things almost immediately. But the foundation was there. Maybe if we had a MUD-tuned model... If it has an approximate way to track state, and a "pre-caching" method where it can internally generate an entire town all a…

Maybe you could ask an LLM to build a campaign then ask another one to run it.

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#25

Post by JKCalhoun »

egypturnash wrote: post #22
JKCalhoun wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the first-person shooter arrived, somehow we collectively decided that's what all games should now be. I think we've learned that creativity comes from constraints. Early computing platforms certainly were replete with that.

I've never been into Doom clones (to use the term from back in the day) and yet I have enjoyed playing countless video games from about 1984 through to the present. Very few of them are first-person games, whether they're head-clickers or other forms of first-person gaming.

To be sure, all games are not FPS. But you know, what are the so-called "AAA" game companies constantly grinding out…

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#26

Post by vunderba »

shevy-java wrote: post #13

I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g. King's Quest and what not, but in the 1980s or so that was novel and creative. Today the games tend to have powerful 3D engines, but the creativity was lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new to the table, for instance) and of course the graphics and sounds are great, but something is gone now. In part this m…

It's less mainstream, but there are still a lot of good adventure games released in the indie scene. The Crimson Diamond released last year got a lot of good press and is a text parser + graphical adventure game with an EGA style palette.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crimson_Diamond

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#27

Post by breve »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #17
alisonatwork wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this what MUDs are? I tried a few in the early days of the internet and even back then they were like much bigger and more dynamic versions of text adventures of the 80s. For me I bounced off the idea that I had to role-play with other humans - I thought it was far more interesting to chat with other humans about real-world topics - but if you are looking for a large, text-based role-play experience then it's p…

What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people with little technical skill a means to create a world—or extend an existing one. And then I wanted a way to join MUDs together—like if you leave a forest by a certain path you are, unbeknownst to you, rerouted to a different MUD that picks up where the forest left off. In this way I imagined in time a world larger and richer than any that had come before it—wh…

> What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people with little technical skill a means to create a world—or extend an existing one.

Those are MOOs. They're fully programmable in MOO code. Here's the original MOO: https://lambda.moo.mud.org/

There's no point to a MOO other than to be itself, although LambdaMOO does have an RPG system in it you can play: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO

Server resources: https://www.wrog.net/moo/

Programmer's manual: https://www.wrog.net/moo/progman.html

yduJ's venerable duck tutorial: https://jkira.github.io/moo-cows/docs/tutorials/wind-up-duck...

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#28

Post by stevekemp »

griffzhowl wrote: post #8

There was a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, with writing from Douglas Adams. It's entertaining, but insane what you have to figure out to get the babel fish... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...

There's a good three-part writeup starting here, covering Douglas and the game:

https://www.filfre.net/2013/11/douglas-adams/

For my money the "best" adventure game was and is The Hobbit, but that may well be because it's the first one I was haunted by.

Similar two-part writeup starts here :

https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#29

Post by ido »

shevy-java wrote: post #13

I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g. King's Quest and what not, but in the 1980s or so that was novel and creative. Today the games tend to have powerful 3D engines, but the creativity was lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new to the table, for instance) and of course the graphics and sounds are great, but something is gone now. In part this m…

I think it's mostly that you're no longer interested in computer games and as such aren't aware of what's currently available. IMO there has never been a bigger and more varied supply of good games as there are today, in pretty much every genre (my personal taste is mostly for small indie games, not AAA). I started playing computer games in the late 1980s myself and have never stopped.

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#30

Post by Apocryphon »

shevy-java wrote: post #13

I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g. King's Quest and what not, but in the 1980s or so that was novel and creative. Today the games tend to have powerful 3D engines, but the creativity was lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new to the table, for instance) and of course the graphics and sounds are great, but something is gone now. In part this m…

> All games involve some kind of exploration, but I’m talking about something like Myst, the long-ago graphic adventures by LucasArts and Interplay, where the whole central mechanic of the game was basically “click on everything everywhere.” Today, those games can feel hilariously primitive, and they were probably always pretty boring for the vast majority of people who didn’t start playing videogames until they got an iPhone. But there’s a serenity to Myst that you can’t really find in any major videogame today. It’s videogame Tarkovsky, really: The whole point of the game is experiencing the quiet, looking at everything. So Myst is boring, but only in the way Tarkovsky and Russian novels are boring. (The problem isn’t that they’re slow. The problem is that the world has made you too fast.)

- Darren Franich, "Metal Gear Solid: The strangest great videogame franchise"

https://ew.com/article/2015/09/04/metal-gear-solid-strangest...

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