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Why do you need to need to be using the full capacity of your computer, if you are having fun?

One of the real advantages of interactive fiction in the modern era is that it can afford to take more risks, narratively, than a AAA title. Since it can be the work of a single person as a hobby or small business, rather than needing mass-market sales to repay for its development, you can try out different things, some of which may not work out but some of which can be fascinating.

Beside Andrew Plotkin, I've always loved the work of Emily Short, like Galatea which couldn't even really be considered a game but is quite fascinating.

I love Plotkin's games. "Spider & Web" is one of the best games I've ever played... even if it gets a bit too difficult near the end, the premise and implementation is almost flawless. I've seen few games like it, "full capacity of your computer" be damned! :)

Adam Cadre is also good. One short game by him I loved and found hilarious is "9:05" ( http://adamcadre.ac/if/905.html ) -- please don't spoil it! -- and there is also the deeply moving "Photopia" ( http://adamcadre.ac/if/photopia.html ).

Interactive Fiction was a breath of fresh air to me. Experimental, funny, innovative, emotional. There was a time, a few years ago, when IF games were about the only kind of games which could hold my interest.

I think it is the middle of Spider & Web that is the trickiest and where I had to go find a walkthrough. Once you work out "the twist" the end is pretty logical but the setup you have to do before getting there was, for me, not intuitive in the slightest.

For some reason, while I always see Adam Cadre mentioned along with Plotkin and Short among the innovative modern IF authors, something about his writing style just rubs me the wrong way and I've never been able to enjoy his games.

I think he is great, at least the games I've played, but I suppose some could find his writing slightly pretentious.

The first game I played by Adam was Photopia, and while it's not particularly interactive, I found it tremendously moving. It has it all, in my opinion: a moving storyline that doesn't necessarily tie all ends neatly, non-linear narrative, a novel point of view (it's not a big spoiler to say that almost every game segment is "narrated" from the point of view of someone who likes the main character, but we never actually play the main character), and some pretty clever moments (the maze, the exploration of the Red Planet). It's a game I immediately replayed once I reached the ending I finally had the full picture, because some scenes get a new meaning once you know what's truly going on.

Of course, the same applies to 9:05: it's amusing to replay it once you know what's going on.

More in general, I think the IF community is marvellous (I haven't followed it in a while, no idea if it's still active). To me, it was like a games rennaissance. There were authors truly exploring what narrative in games could do, and while there is a mandatory technical know-how -- some of the IF languages are programming languages after all -- it's way lower as an entry barrier than, say, almost anything with graphics, let alone 3D graphics. I think this "not caring about using the full power of the computer" was an advantage to game authors.

I was going to say the same thing. I also love Galatea BTW, it's a showcase of good storytelling, and the best NPC I've ever found.

Have you played Blood & Laurels? I don't own and iOS device, but from what I've heard, it must be like Galatea with a whole city available to explore.

Tragically, Blood & Laurels isn't available any more. It stopped working on iOS 9, and rather than update it, they pulled the app.

It wasn't really possible for the creators to update it, unfortunately (for one thing, the company they originally built it for ditched it): https://twitter.com/emshort/status/653222041265537028

No, I don't own an iOS device; I refuse to support walled gardens financially. So I don't play any iOS or console-only games.

> There was some sentimental fun to be had, but these games take a tremendous amount of time to play and are difficult in a way that modern games are not. Their puzzles are almost unsolvable in some cases, or can only be solved by combining every permutation of every verb with every noun in every place to get the right answer.

It's interesting how intolerable these games would be considered today. I have a choice of thousands of games on steam (not to mention other platforms), many for less than $5. I would give these games such a bad rating, not for "lack of graphics" or anything technological, but for lack of smooth gameplay. But I loved them, and they are considered foundationial to current games.

It's also interesting to me how much time I spent patiently trying different solutions. Nowadays, if I don't get a puzzle in ~30 min, I'm off to google the answer.

I think we're way better off now, but I think there was some dedication/patience/pure-effort that we've lost with our vast number of choices, and access to information.

> if I don't get a puzzle in ~30 min, I'm off to google the answer.

The only loss here is that the reward in googling the answer will never come close to the high of figuring a puzzle out after 2 days.

We always had the option of the "invisiclues" but... you had to order those and wait (time and money) or drive to a local computer store and buy (money). Both put a damper on the urge to "cheat".

> you had to order those and wait

And those were the days of "Please allow 6-8 weeks for delivery". Not like ordering something on Amazon and getting it the next day.

In so many ways, Invisiclues are a fascinating relic. That they existed (and were extremely popular) speaks to a number of different aspects to technology between then and now. (And, as I recall, Invisiclues were also available as some sort of 900 number service at one point.)

I don't remember any sort of phone in number. Possibly would have gone broke had I known of it.

I did find this...

http://www.resonant.org/games/infocom/Infocom_Homepage/Invis...

:)

Actually it apparently started as a pay-per-hint system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InvisiClues

(Although I know the various people involved I don't remember all the details.)

haha, I remember begging my parents to let me make "just one" phone call to one of those

Its very much like learning to code. In the old days figuring stuff out for yourself generated a high you don't get from finding and paraphrasing a stack overflow answer...

Mass market AAA FPS sequels are made and played by very different people. IntFic scene seems to have the producers and consumers a lot closer. Rogue-likes are the same way.

It's also worth noting that the ability of Infocom/IF games to simulate real-world puzzles is fairly limited next to what can be done with two- and three-dimensional graphics, stereo sound, various input method, etc.

There is some novelty in solving some problem abstracted into written language, but I find it to be most analogous to reading a good novel. Calling these kinds of things "interactive" is a stretch to me, because the "interaction" is severely limited. It really is, an another commenter implied, more akin to solving a coding problem using a REPL loop.

On the other hand, the potential landscape of IF games is unlimited, bounded only by the author's imagination!

Still, at the end of the day, given an hour to play games after work, I'm going to reach for something new and shiny because some of the newer games are truly astonishing in scope, story, and technical accomplishment.

I'm sure there are exceptions but there seems to be a general "dumbing down" (or at least arcade-ification) of games if you look at things like the strategy or simulation genres.

>I would give these games such a bad rating, not for "lack of graphics" or anything technological, but for lack of smooth gameplay.

Like anything else, some are better than others. In general, though, it's fair to say that the parser wasn't very smart (by modern standards), so solving puzzles could sometimes seem like an exercise to coming up with a specific incantation. And, in the absence of walkthroughs etc., that could be really frustrating. I gave up on a number of their games because I just lost interest in digging up how to get past some puzzle.

None of the Infocom games are in the public domain. The copyright of most of them is held by Activision, which sells them as iOS ports.

Oops! Err, I just made that assumption based on the ease I had in finding them. There are a variety of places to download them right off the web.

That is generally quite bad assumption to make. Safer one would be to assume that everything is under copyright unless indubiously demonstrated otherwise.

That would be roughly what the law says.

guess it's a good thing then that society is crumbling

That is correct, although certain versions of Zork I are freely licensed.

Classic Infocom games are probably too hard, but you should give modern Interactive Fiction another chance. Because anyone can write IF games, and this means Sturgeon's Law applies, you should look for the masters first: Andrew Plotkin, Adam Cadre, Emily Short, and I'm sure I'm missing many more.

Modern IF can be emotional, suspenseful, hilarious, surprising, experimental. There is a downplaying of "gamey" elements, and more focus is there in the storytelling or using the textual platform in surprising ways.

For example, one game -- Fail Safe by Jon Ingold -- has the player trying to communicate with the single surviving crew member of a spaceship in distress. Communication is limited, and the game's parser is the crew member. Anything the crew member doesn't understand is turned into a comms error ("zzhghfz... sorry, can you repeat that?"). It feels natural because it means you're not simply typing verbs; instead, you are "giving commands" to a person! Anyway, play the game: it's innovative like only modern IF can be.

Have you checked out Em Short's work? A lot of her pieces are more fiction-heavy than "gamey", but if you're looking for a more Infocom-esque experience then Counterfeit Monkey is an absolutely stunning example.

Going down another thread, have you been keeping abreast of non-parser IF? There are a lot of incredibly polished, beautiful pieces of choice-based IF for mobile platforms (check out 80 Days if you haven't), as well as a whole lot of wonderful, incredibly deep and personal works happening in Twine.

If you wait a few more years for the industry to develop its narrative legs, I think you'll really enjoy playing Escape Room Games (ERGs). Very few have any semblance of story at this point, but it's absolutely a topic of discussion amongst ERG designers. For my own part, I'm busy building a platform/operating system for ERGs that is essentially a version of Z-machine that interacts with hardware and handles multiple players (readers) simultaneously. All going well, in the future it will power a lot of ERGs by better storytellers than myself.

They're not public domain, where'd you get that idea? Copyright lasts a very very long time now and Activision is no charity.

they're still commercially available on Gog.com

they were temporarily offered as freeware to promote a later game, but that neither makes them permanently freeware nor public domain.

if they are public domain and I've somehow missed that happening id love to hear about it

>> Their puzzles are almost unsolvable in some cases, or can only be solved by combining every permutation of every verb with every noun in every place to get the right answer.

That's an interesting reaction. I spent my teenage years playing Infocom games and agree that some of the puzzles were quite difficult. But they always seemed logical and discoverable - the opposite of random. Several friends played as well, and I remember many a study hall spent noodling through solutions to various puzzles. Some took weeks, and the sense of pride we found when cracking something particularly vexing was immense.

I think there is a parallel in modern gaming: difficult raid bosses in MMORPGs. Solving the Babelfish problem in HHGTG = defeating Ragnaros for the first time in vanilla World of Warcraft.

Try going back and playing these games. I find they are quite difficult to wrap your head around.

I played a large number of these games as a youth, including the notoriously hard A Ming Forever Voyaging. And I find I have a hard time enjoying them as an adult. Maybe I need to give it another go.

Maybe it's the pace of the puzzles. I know I spent a long time solving individual puzzles in Spell Breaker and it took combined effort with another friend to make it through.

Surprised that you found AMFV to be notoriously hard. As I recall, it was less puzzle-oriented than most of Infocom's games. It may be my personal favorite precisely because it wasn't so much about working your way through difficult puzzles.