A Command Prompt and an Active Imagination

Like most boys, I grew up playing computer games. Never got too obsessed with them though, but the immersiveness of it all did creep into my life sometimes. There were so many times I've gotten myself so deep into a game that neither sleep nor food matters. And games these days follow a somewhat staid formula: you do a whole bunch of shit, mostly repetitively, and with some variation in storyline; at the end of all that shit which you had to do (some shit are more interesting than others), you get a 3D video clip as a reward to nicely tie up the story. After that, credits roll (doesn't it make you wonder why games have to be end like movies?)

Well, back when I was a kid, games were much simpler - technology hadn't introduced us to 3D animation as of yet, and games relied a lot more on your active sense of imagination. Like now, games were immersive - you can seriously get yourself lost in one. But they had less whiz-bang graphics and tinny sound effects (I remember the first time I heard sound coming out of a soundblaster and thought that it was the coolest thing on Earth to hear bloodcurling screams of a banshee getting hacked to death in a D&D game).

The really stripped down game was the text adventure, a very early form of the RPG on a PC. In the text games, the player is typically an avatar, and things are seen through the eyes of the avatar. However, the scene around you is described in text form - it is very much like reading a book of fiction. The difference though is that the avatar tends to go over the same ground while walking around, and repetition does set in when you keep reading descriptions of the same scene.

The interface is really simple - all you're presented with is a command prompt:

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That's it! How simpler can a game be? The learning curve isn't that steep: all you have to do is type in commands such as "Go north", "Examine door", and "Talk to Edmund". What's more, the commands can usually be shortened, so gameplay is a whole lot easier. And like any RPG, its easy to get stuck: it's really bad to get stuck in a text-based game not knowing what to do, as there's no visual cue, and hardly any option other than to refer to a walkthrough.

It may not sound like much to people these days, but some notable text-based games that I remember playing were The Hobbit (of Lord of the Rings fame) and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (I got stuck walking around a spaceship with Marvin the paranoid android).

Oh, on a side note, the text based adventure later took on a more interactive element as MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) in the Internet, but are now long forgotten due to the likes of whiz-bang online games like WoW. Most MUDs played like a D&D game, but with a computer describing the scene for you rather than a dungeon master. Dice rolls were truly randomly generated by the system as well.

Over time though, this kind of games lost its allure. It's not hard to see why: the demand was for more graphic intensive adventures, with sound effects to add to the realism of it. Technology kept up and the result is the plethora of games we get nowadays deluged with moving images and mindblowing sound effects. Hardly anything is left to the imagination anymore: the world of computer games took the same route that movies did, by moving beyond imagination and text to visualising directly for the consumer.

Thus, it was interesting for me then to discover that the text-based game isn't dead though. There is a small pool of enthusiasts keeping it alive via a competition. The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is an annual competition to see who can create the best text-based adventure, with judging entirely done by the public. The best games read like a well-written book, with descriptions that are vivid and characters with distinct personalities (most game characters these days are cardboard cutouts - after all, you can't really delve into their minds like you do in interactive fiction).

Much as these games bring back a sense of nostalgia in me, they aren't likely to ever become mainstream again - the dynamics of the gaming industry have shifted to the ever more visually appealing. Sadly, this means that the text-based game (or interactive fiction) is relegated to the cottage industry that it is, supported only by enthusiasts and individuals with a love for words. Still, I like to think that such games have so much more 'soul' than the whiz-bang stuff I see nowadays. Oh, that and the fact that I can actually play them at work without attracting too much attention - long live the text-based adventure!