The One Thousand Most Annoying Things Ever!!

[A Black Falcon]

Ever read those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books? They were interactive, but still books. Of course they weren't anywhere near as interactive as text-based games, but you did choose the outcome of the story.

Yeah, I liked those books. Ever read the Nintendo Adventure Books? They had puzzles in them as well as the standard questions... fun. :)

As games, however, they are extremely simplistic. Text-based adventures are, usually, many orders of magnitude more complex... there really is no comparison. Well, not much of one...

Wouldn't those be classified as "video games" by ABF's logic? You use mental images AND you control the outcome!! Videogames!

No, because its not ON A COMPUTER...

If it's all text then it isn't a movie. A movie is a motion picture, as in a drawing or a photograph, not text. We call bunches of text put together to form sentences books.

GR is the one who said it was still a movie... I just agreed with him... when I think about it more, a movie in pure text is called a book, or a movie novelization. A movie in just voice is called a radio show... it was a movie originally, but its not anymore. At least not in that form.

Text-based games are so different from that that you can't really connect the two, though...


Okay, this is what I think about this topic.

Text as pictures... I admit saying that a text block describing a picture is quite different from a picture. Sure. However... I just think that saying that videogames need to have graphics is absurd! I see no reason to categorize games by graphics like that... gameplay/genre is what matters. And on those counts interactive fiction is adventure games.

In Zork, you wander around a strange land. You collect items. Solve puzzles with them.

That is also the description for gameplay in Zork: Grand Inquisitor (graphical Zork game with mouse interface)... its the same genre! So they are the same kind of game! The question of if they have graphics or not is immaterial (and before you say I'm changing my position, I seem to recall that for most of our original arguement I was saying something like this. I just tried to change it to try to end this stupid arguement...)

But if you insist that for some reason graphics are vitally important I'll just say again that I think that the text descriptions, while certainly a very, very different form of an image, are still a representation of that image just like a picture is.

WHAT?! Are you insane?! 2D game do NOT by anyway stretch of the imagination require you to imagine that they are 3D! How can you possibly believe something so crazy as that?! When I play a 2D game I do not imagine the world as anything different from what it shows me.

I generally don't either, I admit, but still... you must agree that a 2d piece of art and a 3d one of the same image are different forms of that image? Text is just another kind of it...

Now, there is one point where you are right -- text-based games usually did not generally give lots of detail. They didn't spend paragraphs describing the room, so there was a lot for your imagination to fill in... true. But that's just a gameplay thing, not something that greatly affects if its a videogame or not...

Oh yeah, and you still aren't covering the subject of text-based RPGs...