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Comment by Baeocystin | Hacker News Reader

It is an interesting article, but I think the rose tint of nostalgia is a bit too strong.

Loom was an attempt to push gaming forward and explore new territory, and for that it deserves commendation. But it failed in the primary goal of any storyteller, which is to make the listener/reader/participant care about what happens in the world. It was a dreary and dull experience.

From the wikipedia page, a quote from the creator of Loom:

"Contrary to popular belief, the Loom sequels were not abandoned because Loom didn't sell well. Loom has sold more than half a million copies in various formats since it was published in 1990. The reason the sequels weren't made is because I decided I wanted to work on other things, and nobody else wanted to do them, either."

The final sentence, I think, is most telling.

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Loom was the single most formative game for me as a child. Though I readily agree that it didn't make me care much about the game world. To me that doesn't even seem like an important goal of art. A more interesting goal is offering the viewer a new way of relating to the real world, and Loom somehow succeeded at that for me, much more than Sleeping Beauty that it cites as an influence. There are many other fun perspectives that I've absorbed through art, but Loom was among the first.

I get you. Very similar experiences.

Clarity above all!

I am glad you enjoyed it. I have a different perspective, but I don't fault you yours.

But this wasn't an article about Loom pushing storytelling forward. It pushed interaction forward.

Adventure games like Zork wanted a sentence typed. Later, a sentence was constructed using a mouse.

Loom removed the sentence as the player's action upon the game, and realized the player's intent didn't have to be a literal sentence.

It's just as much a breakthrough as Nintendo understanding that "pressing up" on a controller to lift a racket could be replaced by lifting an arm with a controller in it, in the case of the Wii.

That's the thing- it really didn't. Loom was novel for its lack of violence, and lack of a way to lose. But games like Neuromancer predated Loom by years, and were already using (comparatively) complex interfaces, for example.

I praised Loom for its inventive simplicity, and how it avoids text towards direct interaction, and you refute that by referencing Neuromancer, a game with, in your words, a "(comparatively) complex interface."

Neuromancer is riddled with complex text interfaces for every interaction. Every choice demands a read through, along with several text selections to decide from. Here's a video of how awful it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tNMdbq_Z7w

How is that more simple?

Awful? Those few minutes of example show more player agency than the entirety of Loom combined. This is not a novel criticism- it was one of the main complaints levelled against Loom when it first came out.

There's a difference between text you read, and text you have to guess at/type (ie, the find-the-synonym frustrations of Infocom games).

Player agency in a medium without unlimited outcomes is a Choose Your Own Adventure, where the trick is done in plain sight and therefore unconvincing. Loom is just trying to tell a linear story in a convincing manner with the tools it has available, and it elevated the tools available. That's my only point.

Fair enough.

(Although speaking of Choose Your Own Adventure: http://io9.gizmodo.com/remember-inside-ufo-54-40-the-unwinna... had a fun "choice".)

I had that book. Very weird and trippy to my pre-teen mind.

After many, many readings, both legitimate play-throughs and cheating flip-throughs, I don't think I realised what the article points out.

> Loom was novel for its lack of violence

Bishop Mandible's death wasn't exactly non-violent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEQ6Kx0wY0c&t=1h23m29s

True, but notable in that the player had nothing to do with it.

LucasFilm Games was a noteworthy studio, among many other reasons, because they weren't dedicated to making shooters when that was clearly where the money was going. The shooter that they did produce (Dark Forces) was also better than Hexen. The "lack of a way to lose" was what distinguished them from Sierra Publishing, the only other interesting video game studio of the era.

LOOM™ was novel within the context of the studio, for being radically simplistic with the interface, considering how far they'd already "dumbed down" the interface from spiritual predecessors like Zork.

A side note: If you have not already seen Professor Moriarty's lecture on the actual origins of the CYOA format, this is probably the most interesting thing you will read all year: http://ludix.com/moriarty/electric.html

That was a fun read. Thanks for sharing it.

An interesting read. I was just wondering what Moriarty had done since Loom, something the article doesn't mention (presumably saved for the future article it hints will feature his exit from the industry), so thanks for a peek into his more recent career.

Loom is, to this day, my favorite adventure game of all time. For me, at least, it succeeded at the primary goal of any game, which is to be fun.

I don't think it's nostalgia, because I didn't play Loom until long after it first came out. I had played many of the other LucasFilm games at this point and most of the AGI Sierra games.

I agree that it was inferior in storytelling to many of those[1], but it was just a heck of a lot of fun, with the puzzles ranging from obvious to "obvious in hindsight."[2] combined with the extremely minimal, yet novel interface just struck exactly the right chord with me.

1: Gabriel Knight, Day of the Tentacle, and Planetfall stand out in my mind as some games from 3 different companies that spoke to me in the way that you seem to be talking about

2: Even LucasFilm, which was 100000x friendlier than other adventure game companies (don't ask me how many AGI games I finished), had the occasional terrible puzzle). Loom is on the extremely tiny list of adventure games that I completed 100% solo; most games I've finished I played with friends and we usually could get each other un-stuck.

I've replayed it recently and I found the world to be magical. I can't see how anyone would call it dreary and dull and I cared about what happened. But to each his own taste.

I am glad you enjoyed it!

To explain where I'm coming from: I found Loom frustrating because it removed what I enjoy most in almost all types of game, which is agency. I remember several points where Bobbin's actions were very different than what I would have chosen. I had no say in it, yet still had to do the 'work' of advancing the story. I enjoy linear narratives, too, but Loom felt, to me, like the worst of both worlds, not the best.

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