50 Years of Text Games – A 2021 Journey from Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon

No, the game I was talking about is IF, as in Interactive Fiction, what text adventures are called now.

Without giving away the major plot twist of the game I'm thinking of, I can assure it has nothing to do with Lifeline.

Edit: found it! It's called Fail-Safe, and if you ever intend to play it, please don't read spoilers. The game is so short, almost a single "scene", that spoilers will really ruin it: https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=c6x835i6o9zqfc59

> one-time chance to pick up bubblegum in the first area of the game isn't something that is done anymore.

This is what I said in peer post a few hours ago. That's because the genre has been critically analyzed over the past 50 years.

Although the "click the keyword" modern I.F. really doesn't do it for me. I prefer the open-ended interpreters.

There is a doctoral thesis on this called "Twisty Little Passages". It discusses several "fundamental laws" of I.F. that were derived from the Infocom games of the 70's and 80's, such as your "bubblegum" complaint.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Twisty-Little-Passages-Approach-Inter...

It's a strange genre, I like it a lot but I can see why there isn't much new content.

One existential problem for the genre is that you really need a physical keyboard -- while the awesome "80 Days" can get by with limited choices, anything parser-based really feels crummy on a smartphone or tablet.

In principle because content generation has slowed down so much it should finally be possible to play everything good. But I don't have a good way to curate a backlog of the IF games I've been meaning to try.

The way I tend to play IF is somewhere between reading a short story and toying with a puzzle, or maybe a bit of something else. I'm happy to lean on hints or walkthroughs to get through content faster. The experience is unique though I wonder if I'll ever bother to introduce it to my kids?

There are absolutely standout entries in the genre, both big and small, that struck some kind of narrative chord and for which the memory of playing is very clear to me ("Vespers', "Anchorhead", "The Meteor, the Stone and a Long Glass of Sherbet", "Photopia", "Shade", "9:05", "In The End", "Christminster", "Theatre", "Curses", "Jigsaw"). It'll be a bummer if these things ever totally vanish.

I grew up playing Return to Zork and just missed the original Zorks. I couldn't get into them but really wanted to. I love the execution of IF and the stories they weave. What would be a good modern IF to jump into that isn't as punishing as the original Zorks, and not too hard for an IF newbie? Thank you!

Relevant username :)

I fully agree that modern IF is vastly better. I have commented on related threads here before that Emily Short's work has freaking blown me away. I'll take her games over any modern 3D game any day.

In my academic studies using IF to teach CS [1], I've found it can be very powerful to "play" or "tell" stories in person. (These are middle- and high-school students.) Usually, at the end of a class authors will volunteer to share their stories, and then they will ask for a volunteer to be the protagonist while the author reads as the narrator. (This becomes important when the stories are serious and touch on real-life situations where it could be painful to have someone else misread, misinterpret, or make fun of your story.)

[1] Proctor, C., & Garcia, A. (2020). Hogg, L., Stockbridge, K., Achieng-Evenson, C., & SooHoo, S. (Eds.). Student voices in the digital hubbub. Pedagogies of With-ness: Students, Teachers, Voice, and Agency. Myers Educational Press. https://chrisproctor.net/media/publications/proctor_2020_ped...

> but so much fun in small groups.

In my 40+ years playing IF, I never considered this. What an interesting idea. I did play an email correspondence campaign in the early 90's but that was a ton of work for the DM since he was writing pages and pages of story. But it was a fun in-between.

I don't know how to find the reference, but I read somewhere that originally they were meant to be played in groups, sort of a campus-wide puzzle contest.

H2G2 was medium difficulty compared to Starcross and Deadline, it just required patience. And MAN was it satisfying to win as a 13 year old. Long before accomplishments were measured in twitch response rather than deductive logic.

Spellbreaker, OTOH, was potentially impossible. It had two puzzles early in the game that were solvable by irreversible methods that made the game unwinnable. (One was casting Girgol to stop time allowed you to solve the Ogre puzzle, but you needed that spell at the very end, can't recall the other).

I really liked Planetfall and it's one I made it through to the end without too much help (also pre-walkthroughs/pre-Web). Steve Meretzky was the author of both that and Hitchhikers--the latter with Adams of course. I also really liked his A Mind Forever Voyaging but that's probably closest to an interactive novel that Infocom ever did; the puzzle content is fairly light.

Interesting. I found Planetfall moderately difficult, but the Lurking Horror was easy (I almost finished it first time I played it---I think it took me two sessions). A friend of mine played HHG2TG (I never did) and almost gave up on it.

Thanks!