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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Frankly, this sounds like terribly punishing game design. Why did so many players put up with it? Was there really nothing better?

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The other responses about difficult Infocom games are all accurate, but it's worth noting that Hitchhiker's Guide in particular played this as comedy. There were genuinely tough puzzles, but there were also lots of elements which essentially pulled the rug out from under the player to amuse them with unreasonable demands. Broadly, the game didn't feel as fundamentally hard as many of its contemporaries. Instead, it felt like competing against an obstinate and sarcastic opponent, so failing repeatedly was exasperating and funny instead of aggravating.

For instance, lots of early text games required tricky-to-identify commands for technical reasons, like the myriad ways to phrase "use key on door". Mostly, that was just frustrating and accepted because there was nothing better. Hitchhiker's Guide came late enough to parse language somewhat more gracefully, so it replayed that trope as parody by occasionally requiring absurd phrasings for basic commands. "Take aspirin" didn't work, but "get buffered analgesic" (a phrase the game did present to you) did. And then the rest of the time, it went back to fairly normal naming standards so as not to irritate the player.

As a horribly-dated example: Battletoads is infamous as one of the hardest platform games in history, but it was challenging by simply taking the standard play elements of a game like Mario and making them excessively tight and demanding. Syobon Action is also infamously difficult, but its gameplay is (often) relatively forgiving. The challenge comes from suspending normal conventions of games like making threats visible and giving consistent behavior to objects. Putting any one instance of that style in a normal game would be a ridiculous design error, but Syobon is built on escalating that unfairness to the point of humor, and openly demands trial and error as the way to progress.

+1 - Another great example of difficult games as parody is I Wanna Be The Guy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Wanna_Be_the_Guy). Take all the existing conventions and stereotypes of difficult platform games and exaggerate them to the extreme.

IWBTG is another great example, definitely. And almost the exact same type of classic-NES parody, where Mario:Syobon::Metroid:IWBTG.

Thinking about it a little more, this pattern seems to describe an entire class of games, including non-parodies. Dark Souls is famously hard because of sheer mechanical difficulty, certainly. But it's also rife with learnable, low-threat moments like "when you walk up this staircase, a boulder will fall on you from offscreen". They don't alter the overall difficulty too much, but they clearly convey that the game isn't honoring standard design principles about giving the player a "fair chance". In an odd way, it makes later departures like "the illusory wall doesn't have anything marking its location" feel more justified.

When you put it that way, I can almost see the brokenness of the controller support in the PC port as part of the joke. Almost ...

It's also why the later Infocom game that Douglas Adams collaborated on, Bureaucracy, is one of the best comedies that Infocom released. The subject matter, the obstinacy of parser-driven IF, and increasingly absurd solutions to puzzles all worked hand-in-hand given the subject matter.

Basically, punishing game design was somewhat traditional. It was only later that the IF community (game authors and players) shifted towards an understanding that games should be "fairer". For instance Graham Nelson's "Bill of Player's Rights" in chapter 3 of his http://ifarchive.jmac.org/if-archive/info/Craft.Of.Adventure... lays out some rules, many of which Hitchhikers and the other classic Infocom games break (indeed it's only necessary to state the rules because so many games were breaking them).

Personally I find the appeal of the Infocom games to be fundamentally in their usually very good writing -- it is light years ahead of other text adventures of the time.

Indeed. And one of my favorite Infocom games was A Mind Forever Voyaging which was arguably more tilted towards the literary and less towards hard puzzles than most. Which probably is one reason it's not as well known.

I'm sympathetic to arguments that you should be able to--at least in principle--be able to work your way through IF without having to rely on trial and error. Which wasn't the case with a lot of Infocom games.

You have to remember that the majority of people with computers at this time had to be into this sort of thing just to get their computer booted. Much less loading a game.

> Turn on computer

"You turn on the computer, after 3 minutes a glowing green block slowly flashes on the screen in front of you"

> Wait

"You wait a while. A glowing green block slowly flashes on the screen in front of you."

...

I hope you had a mimeographed sheet of paper that would tell you to type "CLOAD VISICALC"

Infocom games played a key role in my learning to be a programmer, sysadmin, hardware geek, network guru, etc. It is all about exploring what these machines can do. I remember poking around Infocom games with a hex editor looking for clues.

Upvoted you on looking for clues with a hex editor. Little did you realise you were setting yourself up for a lifetime of debugging.

I remember getting stuck in an early C64 text adventure and reading the BASIC code to try and find a clue.

This was deliberate on Douglas Adams' part [0]. It's all part of the joke. Other notable sections are where the game actively lies to you about being able to access a particular room (you need to try to enter several times in a row), and then sulks when you call it out and lies about the contents of the room.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...

Yep - a lot of text adventures were brutally hard, often to make up length, but the Hitchhiker's Guide game was something else altogether. It was tricky, but also gratuitously unfair for the sake of comedy. A lot of it doubled as parody of earlier text adventures, like recreating "guess the command" difficulties by forcing the player to "take buffered analgesic" instead of "take aspirin".

The most famous example, I think, is the babel fish machine: it wasn't actually hard, in the sense that each failure told you exactly what you needed to do fix. But it was unfair, because you got one fewer attempt than the number of steps required. The designers basically expected you would roll your eyes, laugh, and try again with that extra knowledge.

(Which is a pretty standard part of punishingly hard games even today, interestingly. Dark Souls is mechanically hard, but it's also full of easily-managed surprises that are mostly present to create a feeling that the implicit rules of fair design aren't in effect.)

To preface this explanation, remember that it "was a different time" so one's expectations for what a game could and could not do, or even what a game was, were very different. The best way I can explain it is if you have ever played a modern game that you liked so much you went back and did all the side quests (or maybe you are just a completist when it comes to games), the Infocom text adventures were something like the side quests with no main mission. Yes there was a successful endpoint, but even that could be achieved in different ways and most of the fun was exploring all the different things that could happen. 99% of the outcomes were $NOT_SUCCESS but almost all of them removed the sting of "failure" with something to make you laugh.

I think I beat Zork II before I discovered the Invisiclue book series but either way, "winning" didn't stop me from playing it many more times to see what could happen when I got to that room right near the end with a bunch of exits.

And part of the joy of reading through the source code is that I can see text prompts for eventualities that I never once stumbled into while playing the game.

First, the game is funny and entertaining from moment to moment. Second, games were a lot harder back then, so players expected to fail repeatedly - although Hitchhiker's Guide is particularly sadistic

Part of the answer might be that the game had to be small (fit on one floppy disk, say), which limited complexity (or rather, the complexity came from intricate connections and puzzles, rather than much "content").

Imagine the game had been easy, fair, and providing guidance, as today's casual games - you'd have played through it in an hour and a half. And for that you had gone to the mall and paid quite a sum!

So, the games were harder, and you had months of fun (for some value of fun...) playing the same thing again and again, until you made progress.

Figuring this stuff out is part of the challenge. These days you're supposed to experience the story and hard challenges shouldn't be getting in the way of that. Standards were different then.

Keep in mind that you are criticizing this from the perspective of a game culture that defines this is bad. But that culture didn't exist yet and games like this were part of the early process of creating it.

Players put up with it because this hadn't been defined as "bad" yet. The whole field of what games could and could not expect players to do was wide open.

It's a bit like criticizing Georges Méliès's "A Trip to the Moon" for having poor character development and a weak third act. Those expected aspects of film structure hadn't even been invented yet.

It was kind of the point. His other Infocom game was called Bureacrary, so you can see the theme developing...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)

An infamous scene in Bureaucracy was when you had to order some food in a diner, and you'd spend 10 minutes on that (How do you want the burger, rare, medium, or well done? With fries or onion rings? Small, medium, or large? Coke or Fanta? Regular or light? etc. etc., really drawn out), and then the waiter comes back and explains that the computer crashed and you had to go through the whole tedious process again...

Come to think of it, why did we put up with it?? :-)

There was a similar scene in Leather Goddesses of Phobos (think Leisure Suit Larry on an alien planet, in text form):

You're on a barge in a river, and in the distance is something that "looks like a giant naked lady, breasts pointing to the sky".

So you sail down the river towards it, and it gets bigger and bigger over the next ten pages.

And then the river turns, and it fades away, but is still there. So you keep sailing.

"Getting bigger. You must be getting closer now". You keep sailing.

"Sunlight is gleaming on the statue, and it feels so close you could touch it". You keep sailing.

"You turn around another bend in a river, and there's... nothing there. You look around. Nothing. It was all a mirage. And the barge can't go any further."

So you sail all the way back...

Sounds like a recent experience I had trying to book tickets to a Disneyland park online: Registration, email confirmation, multiple options and numerous validation pain points for it to report their payment system was offline at the end.

The game at least was intentional rather than incompetent.

Sounds like every customer experience at Subway or Chipotle or Blaze Pizza, except for the computer crashing at the end.

British humour at its finest.

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