The Computer Games Journal

The Computer Games Journal 2(1) Candlemas 2013

“Likely to be eaten by a Grue” – the relevance of text games in the modern era Michael Heron Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent, UK e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract Spurred on by the success of Tim Schafer and Brian Fargo in crowd-sourcing funds for their newest projects, I look to reinvigorate interest in the humble text game. In this essay I argue that the text adventure is still a relevant gaming genre, and one with particularly high potential in several areas. Text games take on a wide variety of forms, and many currently popular social games are characterised by being primarily text-based in their interactions. However, despite the continuing interest in variations on the format, the classical expressions represented by interactive fiction and multiuser dungeons (MUDs) struggle to recruit and sustain player-bases. I argue that while text gaming is not yet a dead genre, it threatens to become so unless significant changes are made to how text games are perceived and developed. I argue that we should not be apologetic when we choose text as our primary medium of interaction. The best future potential comes from the classical expressions of text games evolving in line with modern design sensibilities to fill particular niches not well served by current gaming technologies. Keywords: games, accessibility, text games, history, multiuser dungeon Article Information Received: September 2012 Accepted: November 2012 Available: online April 2013 Copyright of the author ©2013 • Reproduction rights owned by The Computer Games Journal Ltd ©2013-14

1: Introduction Many genres of game that were popular in the eighties and nineties have outlived their economic sustainability and as a result have been largely forgotten. Games that were viable (even with a much smaller market) when they cost $200k to produce rapidly stop becoming viable once one takes into account the increased costs and production values associated with modern game titles. However, Double Fine‟s recent phenomenal success through Kickstarter has shown there is still interest in point and click adventures (previously commonly cited as a dead genre), and Brian Fargo can report similar success with his Kickstarter campaign to create an „old school‟ top down RPG in the style of his previous title Wasteland. Similarly, Obsidian‟s Project Eternity is now the most funded video game ever on Kickstarter. The nature of crowd-sourced funding models such as Kickstarter mean that it is possible for game developers to satisfy the long tail of gaming preferences whilst avoiding much of the risk associated with development as a consequence of pre-funding. This funding model ensures financial viability before development begins and allows developers to explore titles that are considered too risky for mainstream development. 5, 14, 15, 20, 25, 33

Copyright of the author ©2013 Reproduction rights owned by The Computer Games Journal Ltd ©2013-14 www.computergamesjournal.com

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Crowd-sourced funding has the potential to resurrect dead genres, and this has several important benefits: Developers can revisit old territory and update old designs in line with modern sensibilities (Serrels, 2012); gamers can satisfy those gaming itches that were not being scratched; and, the gaming ecosystem becomes richer and more vibrant, and the range of titles that are „economically viable‟ increases. 32 It could be argued that such projects are viable only as a consequence of nostalgia. The three titles cited may not be the start of a new and exciting trend in game development because the nostalgia market may in itself be unsustainable. I, however, take the more optimistic view that these kinds of games are fun in and of themselves. They are not fun because they hark back to simpler days of game development and remind many of us of the games we played when we were younger. If that were their only appeal, we would never have played them in the first place. These successful fundraising efforts are exciting, but they are not the core focus of this paper. They are raised to show that there is an appetite out there for gaming formats that had previously been discarded as financially unsustainable. In this paper I intend to argue that there is another „dead‟ gaming genre that needs to be brought once again to the forefront – a genre that lost all economic viability in the mid-eighties, but still continues to survive to this day. The genre is that of the text adventure and its multiplayer cousin, the Multi-user Dungeon (MUD). 9 The era of commercial text adventures lasted from around 1979 to 1986, and was dominated by companies such as Infocom, Level 9, Magnetic Sctolls and Adventure International. Figure 1 shows a „hot list‟ of popular gaming titles from 1984, with the titles from Infocom highlighted:

Figure 1: Infocom chart positions


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A mere two years later, Infocom was acquired by Activision as a result of financial difficulties as an attempt to diversify their portfolio into business software. However, the changing climate of the computer game scene also had much to do with their fall from prominence – the period of 1985-1992 saw most of the big players in the text adventure market close or become acquired by larger gaming companies. Adventure International closed in 1985. Synapse Software was acquired in 1984 and closed the next year. Magnetic Scrolls closed in 1992, a year after Level 9 (which closed its doors in 1991). Infocom, under the Activision brand, struggled for a few years before it was closed in 1989. Despite the incredible popularity of text games in the early 80s, the market declined steadily as graphical games became more sophisticated and the computing power available to games developers increased. Text was no longer the only way to tell an engaging story or to create a comprehensive interactive world. By the time British developer Level 9 closed its doors for good, games such as Dungeon Master (1987), Ultima 65 (1990), the Secret of Monkey Island (1990) and Civilization (1991) had reached the market. By then, text was no longer the only format in which complex stories could be told, and no longer even the default medium for adventure games. MUDs continued to thrive for a good deal longer, but the rise of massively multiplayer online games such as Ultima Online (1997) and Everquest (1999) marked the beginning of their slow spiral into obscurity. MUDs never commanded large player numbers at the best of times, and found it difficult to recruit and retain new players in the face of the competition posed by complex graphical alternatives. Despite this, text games in a number of variations still flourish in the modern era. These particular modern expressions of the form have lost most of their favour and prestige. They are in danger of losing sustainability even amongst those hobbyists creating projects for no financial remuneration because people simply aren‟t playing the games any more. The long-term survival of these classical expressions of the text gaming format must innovate and modernise if they are to survive. Tim Schafer, Obsidian Entertainment and Brian Fargo demonstrate one thing in particular: there is a desire out there for games that can successfully marry new stories to „classic‟ engines. There is no reason why their stories could not have been told using existing gaming frameworks. However, there are design and artistic aesthetics that can only be properly appreciated when games are deployed in the most appropriate context; we should not shy away from telling new stories in old ways. This essay will argue that we should not be apologetic for using classic game engines, and that we should always strive to couple the design to its most eloquent expression. In some cases, this is going to be textual - it is not out of nostalgia that I say that text games are still relevant, but instead because they offer their own unique advantages over graphical games.

2: Anatomy of a text game First of all, we must start by discussing what I mean by a text game. Within the context of this essay, I will define text games as incorporating both the principles of ergodic literature and cybertext. E.J. Aarseth defines the term Ergodic as follows: 1 In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be non-ergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages. On the topic of cybertext, E.J. Aarseth wrote, “I suggest the term cybertexts for texts that involve calculation in the production of scriptons.” 1


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Text games then are literary forms in which a non-trivial amount of effort must be spent navigating the narrative (they are ergodic), and the narrative they expose is a consequence of user interactions and internal processing of states (they are cybertexts). These definitions are not unique to text games, although it is in that context primary that E.J. Aarseth defines the term. The novel House of Leaves by M.Z. Danielewski can be considered to be ergodic. The I Ching can be considered to be cybertext. Choose your own adventure games are ergodic. Chat bots such as Eliza are cybertexts. 7 For the purposes of defining a text game, it should be possible to play the entirety of the game through textual interaction with no loss of interactivity. Where graphics are used, then the game remains a text game in so far that all necessary game information is presented textually and no input regime more sophisticated than text entry is required to manipulate the game state. The key element is that the primary interactions with the system are in text - it is thus possible to have a graphical text game (such as Echo Bazaar, which I will discuss in the next section). Classic text adventures, such as the Quest Probe series (by Adventure International) or The Hobbit (by Beam Software) incorporated colour graphics along with their text passages to create the user experience. However, these were ornamentation rather than a fundamental aspect of interaction - they served to illustrate, rather than describe, the nature of the game that was being played. 2, 3 As with a novel, a text game provides its user feedback via the medium of text. However, unlike a novel, the user can direct the story and participate within internal game systems. In both interactive fiction (classic single player text adventures) and multi-user dungeons (multiplayer role-playing games), the textual interface is the primary means of both user input and user output. Additionally, in order to classify as a game there is an expectation that some measure of interactivity is provided. While this is difficult to precisely quantify in terms of the level of interaction that must be balanced against narrative and gameplay, it is the position of this paper that users must be challenged within the confines of the game to progress the narrative by substantial interaction with the underlying game engine. While interactive fiction and multi-user dungeons remain the traditional forms for text games, there remains likewise an interest in alternate formats such as Steve Jackson‟s fighting fantasy books and choose your own adventure stories. Apps built around these formats enjoy modest success on various mobile platforms, although the level of interaction provided in comparison with other formats means that while they are both ergodic and cybertextual, they lack many of the interactive elements by which we would traditionally define a game. Similarly, the visual novel style of game that is so popular in Japan lacks the expectation of interaction that we would normally associated with a game. Other experimental formats exist, such as the twitter game Tinder City, which allows players to issue commands via existing social network tools in a manner somewhat similar to how IRC servers provided bots to implement multiplayer gameplay. The move to conduct such games via twitter based instructions is a new and exciting development, and one that shows that even now there is considerable unexplored design space in a genre that has in many minds been written off as commercial untenable. 23

3: Popular modern text games Despite the dearth of commercial interest in the classical expressions of the genre, text as a primary interaction regime has never really gone away. However, for the majority of such games their text roots are obscured and hidden. Developers on the whole have become apologetic for using text as an interaction mechanism and this has had the knock-on effect of stigmatizing the development of text


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games as being something about which one should feel embarrassed. primarily text based rarely tout this as a core, necessary feature.

Those games that are

Mafia Wars (by Zynga) is an example of a hugely popular game that conforms to the principles of text interaction outlined above. While the game has a highly graphical interface, the graphical elements do not fundamentally alter the nature of game interaction. The player issues text commands such as do this job or find more operations or go to war with and the results of those interactions are displayed as text feedback. The interactions are simplistic and the feedback lacks any narrative flourish or decoration. However, the issuing of textual instructions (even if by a button press) and the reporting of the results have no mandatory graphical component. Interaction could be switched to the typing of commands rather than the pressing of buttons, and nothing would be fundamentally altered. Despite this, Mafia Wars is rarely (although occasionally) acknowledged as being primarily a text-based game. While it could be argued that it is not literature (as a result of the highly spartan and utilitarian text), it still conforms to the principles of being interactive ergodic cybertext. 38 Urban Dead pitches itself as a Massively Multi-Player Web-Based grid game, but it again is a game in which all of the fundamental user interactions are handled textually. Upon moving from grid location to grid location you are given a simple room description like you'd see in a MUD or text adventure: 8 You are standing outside a factory, a fire-damaged grey-stone building plastered with posters. The building has been extremely heavily barricaded. There is another zombie here. There is a dead body here. Commands are issued via button presses, and these are presented in simplistic forms such as attack with . Moving is handled by clicking buttons on the page, but as the locations are handled on a 3x3 grid they fall into the standard N/S/E/W/NE/SE/NW/SW set of directions used in most text games. The game itself is very simplistic, but boasted at one point around 1.5 million accounts and around 30,000 players online at any one time. In terms of the nuance of the text output, it is more sophisticated than Mafia Wars and is certainly ergodic. The nature of the room descriptions, too, is largely dependent on the previous interactions that users have had with the environment - this ensures its viability as cybertext. The range of options provided to individuals in the course of playing demonstrates its interactivity. Finally in this section I want to discuss Echo Bazaar (by Failbetter Games) - a browser based game that doesn't so much honour its text-based roots as rejoice in them. While it does offer graphics to ornament the interface, all interactions are handled via the input of text commands and the reading of text output. It is the latter that forms the core of the game's reward system; your reward for reading a few paragraphs of flavour text is that you get to read a few more paragraphs of flavour text. Despite the relish the developers have for text based interactions (or, more likely, because of the relish) the game has been critically lauded from many quarters and has developed a fan-base that is remarkable not only for its persistence but also for its eloquence. Of the games discussed in this section, Echo Bazaar is, in my view, the best example of literature that is ergodic - the themes are deep and the world is complex. The writing is disciplined and involving. 13 In many ways, Echo Bazaar is more like an unusually nuanced choose-your-own adventure book than it is a traditional computer game. However, as the player progresses through the game they develop


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'qualities' that reflect the paths they have taken, the decisions they have made and the allegiances they have formed. These qualities then impact on the possible future directions that the player can explore. The game mechanics, such as they are, are simple - but the work still neatly conforms to what we mean by cybertext. The level of decision-making and the persistent consequences of that decision making ensures the interactivity of the game. These are not, by any means, the only currently popular text games that exist. They are chosen primarily to show the range of games that can be properly considered to be examples of the format. Of the three, only Echo Bazaar incorporates its text roots as a key feature. As with the best text games, it does not shy away from the fact it has a markedly different demographic from other games. It's a game for literate gamers - for gamers who enjoy reading. It melds together modern design sensibilities (in its graphical aesthetics) with the nuance and power of the written word and as such represents a significant evolution in story-based interactive fiction.

4: Benefits of text What is it about text gaming that makes it worth pursuing? It's not that only text games can tell engaging stories. Recent titles such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Heavy Rain show that text is not the only medium in which complex, nuanced interactive stories can be told. The Mass Effect series (2007 to 2012) demonstrates that persistence of action and complex branching story arcs across an epic saga is perfectly possible with graphical engines. 12, 27, 34 However, we should certainly put at the core of the benefits of text gaming that it is so much easier to weave an engaging, complex story than it is in other forms. The written word doesn't have the monopoly on this, but the novel is almost always far more nuanced and subtle than its movie. For me, text-gaming is a novel and graphical gaming is a movie; I enjoy both, but certain kinds of stories and certain kinds of game situations are just much more compelling when the graphics aren't getting in the way. I have rarely encountered a horror movie that has chilled me with the same effectiveness as the stories of Lovecraft: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” (Lovecraft, produced in 1928) The subtlety of such sentiments is difficult to capture graphically, and while it's always possible to weave a voiceover or such into a narrative; it is difficult to capture the very delicate tone of menace without coming across as a caricature. According to A. Kennedy, the chairman of Failbetter Games: 22 “Text-based stuff gives you an incredible amount of latitude in what notionally occurs in the fictive world, and frees us from the need to reflect that with expensive tech. What interests me is interactive story - text is probably the purest, most concentrated way of conveying story. Not necessarily the best, that's a value judgement, but most other media have distractions, compensations, dilutions.”


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Text games are, in the view of this author, worthwhile in and of themselves. The nature of text means that games can be profoundly accessible in a way that other games simply cannot. In a recent paper, I argued that many games are inaccessible primarily as a result of oversight, and noted that disabled gamers don't want to be stuck in accessible gaming ghettos. As a relatively able bodied gamer, I still play text games. I develop text games. I proselytize for text games. The accessibility potentials are secondary to that; I play text games because text games are highly enjoyable. Thus, while text games have the potential to be extremely accessible, they are not stigmatized as being 'accessible games'. 18 “A good text game should be equally enjoyable to everyone” (c.f. W. Carter and G. Corona). 4 It is not possible to give accurate or representative figures with regards to the proportions of MUD players with accessibility issues: some MUDs (due to their inaccessible designs) have few to no such players, while others report as many as half of their player-base are blind or partially sighted. * Text games, by virtue of the low barrier to entry, are also tremendously effective ways to examine issues of game design and narrative. Most individuals will not have the skill or resources to be able to source attractive graphics for even a simple game. However, with a copy of a text-game tool such as Inform7, any individual can create complex and compelling games utilizing the greatest graphics card of them all - the human imagination. These kind of text adventures rarely stress complex game mechanics, but for that an individual can turn to one of the freely available 'mudlibs' that allow for the construction of multiplayer online games. The cost for an individual to make a game in this style is only in the time needed to learn the environment and make the game. On a personal website (named “Epitaph Online”) I have provided such a development manual for one such mudlib. 17, 29 As a consequence of this, text games can be as demanding as the individual likes. There is no need to worry about whether your recommended system will be able to render the flight of dragons pouring down like rain upon the defenceless town - you weave that scene with your words, and it'll be rendered in the player's mind. Oftentimes, it will be rendered in far more detail than the best graphics card could possibly manage. * Website sources: http://www.mudbytes.net/topic-400l (and) http://www.alteraoen.com/alter-2.1/blind.html

5: Future possibilities However, despite all of the inherent value of text based gaming, it must be acknowledged that those who are most enthusiastic about the form are often the ones least willing to consider updating it in line with modern sensibilities. This is perhaps the largest barrier to MUDs and interactive fiction retaining their relevance, and greatly complicates the task of converting new players to text-based games. In order for future possibilities to be seized, it is necessary for developers to be willing to take their cues from modern games. One such analysis of the different philosophies between the old and new was published in a journal paper by F. Karlson. 21 In MUDs, there are a number of new protocols and features that make them far easier to play: the MXP format (also see: http://www.zuggsoft.com/zmud/mxp.htm) incorporates hyperlinks into MUD output, allowing an individual to simply click on a piece of text to issue a command to the game. The result is an experience that is more user friendly and obviates the need for a player to memorise complex and often arcane command line syntax. MXP links can also offer contextual menus, whereby the player can right click on a piece of MUD text and then choose from a list of actions to perform. A MUD developer may use this to create a more fluid gaming experience that mirrors the interaction metaphors familiar from internet browsing.


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A typical example of a MUD incorporating MXP can be seen in figure 2:

Figure 2: MUD output with MXP

However, uptake of MXP and related protocols has been slow, with many MUD clients offering only partial or token implementations of the standard. Attempts to increase the penetration of MXP are often done undertaken in the face of significant pushback from older players and developers. Many protest that it „dilutes the brand‟. It would be foolish to think that text games can continue to be relevant in the same forms they took in the 1980s and very early 1990s. All future possibilities are predicated on accepting the need for change and adaptation. By incorporating modern design sensibilities there are routes for ensuring text games are welcomed by the wider pool of game players. Much of that involves increasing exposure to games that are designed primarily around text; MUDs in particular offer teaching opportunities that are simply not present in any other possible scenario, and this would be an effective way to familiarize young gamers with the format. MUDs offer the possibility for exciting and engaging assessment work, and cater to those who are natural programmers and also those who are not. A MUD is a large, complex environment that touches on the outside world in numerous places. My own game is called Epitaph (epitaphonline.co.uk) and exposes much of the internal game information through the web. It incorporates bridges with IRC networks and integrates into twitter, ppBB, Mediawiki, Wordpress, Facebook and Google+. It is around three quarters of a million lines of code and is composed of simple area objects (those that describe environments and creatures), complex puzzles, and low level networking implementations. It integrates with the underlying Linux platform to invoke external tools and handle revision control. It incorporates its own internal mail system, bug tracking system, and dozens of complex game mechanics. There is something in there for everyone to do, regardless of how confident they feel with coding. Similarly, working on a large scale, long-term collaborative project exposes students to numerous lessons they won't learn elsewhere. Epitaph is based on the Epiphany mudlib, which is a derivation of another publicly available mudlib (one which has been actively developed for around 20 years); it is full of legacy code that needs to be updated, and magical, mysterious bugs that are extremely difficult to duplicate. Learning to work in an environment in which new code must peacefully co-exist with legacy code is valuable real world knowledge. Similarly, having code that they write available for others to bug-report means real involvement with a maintenance regime. Working with potentially dozens of other developers will soon teach the value of revision control in a way that a lecture will


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never do. Opening up the environment for anyone who wants to log in can create social cohesion amongst groups of people who would otherwise never interact. Formal management roles can give students the experience they need in managing projects. The text based nature of the environment also lends itself to cross-department collaborations - the English students can be making sure the world is well written while the computing students can be ensuring the world is well run. Those students who don't want to write can instead read - MUDs tend to breed especially literate players by nature of the interaction. Beyond their applicability in education, text based games (and MUDs in particular) also offer significant opportunities for exploring the nature of game accessibility. Text can be parsed easily by a screen reader, and protocols such as MXP can greatly reduce the amount of typing that an individual must perform. However, despite the possibility for highly effective accessibility, it is not the case that all text games are currently living up to the potential. Great strides can be made in ensuring the continuing relevance of text gaming by making sure that all such games are built with accessibility in mind; this opens the format up to a demographic that can especially appreciate the nature of interaction. Coupled to this is the possibility for layering graphical interfaces atop the text-core. Many MUDs are now exploring bespoke graphical interfaces (as opposed to the dedicated MUD clients or telnet clients by which such games have been accessed before). There exists the exciting potential of offering 'multi modal' game interfaces whereby those who prefer a primarily ornamented interface can play without paying a lot of mind to the text - moving with arrows, clicking on icons, and disregarding the complex language as much as is feasible. At the same time, individuals can be enjoying the same game and interacting with the same players through a completely textual environment. Future work for Epitaph, for example, will involve the creation of a dedicated client that offers a classic 'Bard's Tale' style user interface atop the underlying accessible text. This is possible primarily through the highly adaptive nature of a text based game; with only a few meta tags, information can be parsed in many different ways while retaining full compatibility. This has the advantage of allowing a game to cater to specific preferences as well as capture some of the burgeoning market for 'retro' games through the implementation of specific interfaces.

6: Relevance Text gaming - save for the few mainstream examples listed above - is currently an incredibly niche genre. In 2010, Jason Scott released a documentary that is something akin to a love letter to the format. As a die-hard text gamer, I was somewhat moved that almost all of the interviewees had come to terms with the fact their beloved gaming format was no longer relevant to the modern world. I take a different view on the topic. The fact that text adventures and MUDs have become irrelevant is because those of us who are stewards have failed to innovate at the rate needed. The first text adventures were popular because they were, in many respects, the only real game in town. They offered so much more than graphical games of the time could hope for. As home computers matured and graphical games matured with them, they lost that edge and collapsed into obscurity. MUDs collapsed into obscurity when MMOs became pre-eminent - the first of these even called themselves graphical MUDs. Text games have always had niche appeal - it's just that in the early days their niche was the only niche that existed. Now, relevance must be fought for within a significantly altered environment. 35 The low cost to develop and run a text game means that there doesn't need to be a huge market for it to be financially viable. Indeed, there remain even now commercial companies who support their endeavours with their text game offerings (such as Failbetter Games, Iron Realms Entertainment and


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Textfyre). Mudstats.com offers an incomplete view of MUD popularity, but estimates there are between 7000 and 12000 people playing MUDs at any one time. Echo Bazaar has estimated there are between 12,000 and 15,000 players monthly. It‟s even possible in the current era for an interactive fiction game to raise almost $32,000 in Kickstarter funding if the author is well regarded enough within the community and pitches the project appropriately. This is in the face of a gaming environment in which text games are virtually unknown. 22, 31 Every year I have been teaching, I have asked a group of students how many of them are aware that text gaming exists. Every year, fewer hands go up. The last time I asked, no hands went up. The proportion of text gamers has gone down, but the overall size of the gaming market has gone up. Along with that has come the increasingly enticing possibility of capturing the interest of the more literate amongst the wider gaming community - of engaging in a large scale courtship with a market share that could sustain commercial endeavours. To do that, text games must evolve. Echo Bazaar is an excellent example of how text games should be pitched. We must do away with the 'old school' sensibilities that stand in the way of evolving so that we can appeal to a newer generation more familiar with a gamepad than a text parser. We should be looking to make the interfaces more attractive to look at. We should be looking to limit the amount of typing that is necessary. However we shouldn't be shying away from the core things that make text games special. Text games are never likely to appeal to all users: the expectation of graphics is strongly ingrained into the mind-set of younger gamers. The thoughtful, contemplative gameplay style of interaction fiction is at odds with the high adrenaline, fast reaction time gameplay that many game players enjoy. However, I believe that markets still exist for which text games are not only a respectable choice but also the optimal choice. Blind gamers have already been mentioned, but to those we can add those who do not have the reflexes or gaming experience to be able to orient themselves rapidly within graphical game spaces. There is also a strong nostalgia market out there, as is evidenced by this year‟s viral marketing campaign for Mark of the Ninja which incorporated a browser based choose your own adventure story into the teaser advertising material. And of course we have a dedicated band of hard-core fans who never abandoned the format in even its roughest and darkest days. Such markets may not be large, but the cost of development is correspondingly lower and the competition in the commercial space is much less fierce. 28 Are text games still relevant? I think they are. You can draw a direct line of inspiration from games such as World of Warcraft to MUDs, and from there back to the very first adventure game, Adventure, by W. Crowther in 1976. They certainly remain historically relevant. However, they are not as relevant to the modern gaming landscape as they should be, and that is something that we die-hard fans can do a lot to change. 6

7: Conclusion Many text games are still rooted in their original design sensibilities and have not adapted to the modern world in a way that makes them accessible to a new generation of gamers. Text games must evolve beyond their original roots; they need to incorporate attractive interfaces and smooth out the learning curve. They need to offer comprehensive instruction to those new to the format. They need to be pleasant gaming experiences and they need to cut down on those elements that are likely to intimidate or put off a newcomer. There are text games out there that have done these things, and they have important lessons to teach us. However, in doing this we must be careful not to lose those elements of text gaming that make it such a unique gaming format. We must knock off the hard edges in our games, but retain the soul. We


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can do both of these things at the same time, provided we are willing to concede that „purity‟ of lineage is not a useful end goal. The future successful text games will look more like Echo Bazaar than Adventure. Regardless of the changes designed to make text games more accessible to a new generation, it is unlikely in the extreme that they will ever become mainstream as they once were. The world has moved on since then. However, that doesn‟t mean that text games cannot be popular, or even commercially profitable. There are niches out there that text games can fill better than anything else. There are itches out there that can only be scratched with a well-formed text adventure. Continued relevance is dependent on us recruiting beyond the existing pool of text gaming fans – that pool diminishes every year. Text gaming is not a dead genre, but it is very much in danger of becoming so. The Interactive Fiction Competition (see http://www.ifcomp.org/) still attracts dozens of entries a year. The nascent community, which crystalized around the increasing availability of distribution channels and maturing development environments persists today. Every year, dozens of MUDs are started up (and many just as soon shut down). People don‟t create these artefacts because they have no alternatives; they do it because there is something in the format that appeals more than any of the other options. Perhaps it‟s the low barrier to entry; perhaps it‟s the flexibility of textual input and output. I make this case for text gaming not because we lack the technology for graphical games, but because text games have a charm and appeal that is unique. I make this case because text games are fun, and more people owe it to themselves to find out why. Acknowledgements My thanks go to Pauline Belford for her assistance in reviewing and assessing the contents of this essay. References 1

Aarseth, E. J. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. The Johns Hopkins University Press.

2

Adventure International (1984). Quest Probe Series [Tape]. Commodore 64. Longwood, Florida.

3

Beam Software (1982). The Hobbit [Tape]. Commodore 64. Melbourne, Australia.

4

Carter, W.; Corona, G. Exploring methods of accessing virtual worlds. American Foundation for the Blind AccessWorld (9) (2008)

5

Curtis, T. (2012). Double-Fine‟s record-breaking Kickstarter closes with $3.33M earned. Gamasutra. Available online at: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/165561/Double_Fines_recordbreaking_Kickstarter_closes_with_33 3M_earned.php. [Last Accessed 4th of April, 2012]

6

Crowther, W. (1976). Colossal Cave Adventures [Online]. Unix. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

7

Danielewski, M.Z. House of Leaves. Copyright ©2000 Transworld Hardbacks

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Davis, K. (2005). Urban Dead [online].


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9

Douglass, J. Enlightening interactive fiction: Andrew plotkin's shade. In: Harrigan, P. and Wardrip-Fruin, N., editors: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. Copyright ©2007 MIT Press, USA

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Electronic Arts (2010). Mass Effect 2 [Disc]. Redwood City, California.

11

Electronic Arts (2012). Mass Effect 3 [Online]. Redwood City, California.

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Eidos Montreal (2011). Deus Ex: Human Revolution [Disc]. Xbox 360. Montreal, Canada.

13

Failbetter Games (2009). Echo Bazaar. [Online]. London, United Kingdom.

14

Flutter, M. (2012). Brian Fargo Talks Wasteland 2, “Abysmal” Publisher Treatment and Having Fun Again. Ripten. Available online at http://www.ripten.com/2012/03/27/brian-fargo-talks-wasteland-2-abysmalpublisher-treatment-and-having-fun-again/. [accessed 04/04/2012]

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Fogel, S. (2012). Double Fine‟s Tim Schafer on Kickstarter success: it can happen again (interview). Venturebeat. Available online at http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/21/double-fines-tim-schafer-onkickstarter-success-i-did-not-expect-this-interview/. [accessed 04/04/2012]

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