Re: Myst vs. Text Adventure

[michael.gentry@ey.com]

If I may once again play Devil's Advocate:

What I find baffling about most of the Myst-slammers out there are their
accusations that Myst was so un-interactive -- that the mouse-click interface
was a "thin veneer" of interactivity laid over a rigid, prearranged storyline.

The accusation is correct, of course -- the plot of Myst is entirely
pre-ordained, and the player doesn't "interact" with it so much as stumble
across it, piecing it together bit by bit until the last puzzle is solved and
you see the whole picture.

What puzzles me is that I fail to see how text adventure games are all that
different.

They have the POTENTIAL to be different, obviously. But I've seen very few
that honestly allow the player to interact with the plot to the extent of
actually changing it from its pre-ordained course.

"Losing Your Grip", "So Far", "Jigsaw", "Trinity", "Curses", "Babel",
"Christminster" -- all of these have pre-ordained plots. The player is allowed
some flexibility regarding the order in which he/she can solve the puzzles
(which, for that matter, is also the case in Myst), but in every case the
object is to simply get to the ending, not to write your own. In some cases --
"Grip" and "So Far" in particular -- the final (and I mean VERY final) move
allows you to alter the ending's emotional coloring a bit, but it really has
little effect on the overall story arc. A "thin veneer" if ever I saw one.

Now, this state of affairs doesn't bother me. A truly interactive plot (as
opposed to one you just have to work to get through) is always a nice thing,
but it's rather trickier to code than the standard fair, so I don't expect to
see it as often. It's a structure that you could implement in either a text-
or a graphics-based interface, though, if you worked at it. But most people
don't. I know I didn't.

So, what's my point? Well, I think that we should all encourage more truly
interactive plots, whether in text- or graphics-based fiction. The ability to
create that is, I think, what really sets IF on a level above the frothing sea
of DOOM-clones currently swamping the game market.

I also think that if one is criticizing a game for its lack of
plot-interactivity, one should keep in mind that most of the text-based IF out
there -- including those which we generally consider to be the "really good
ones" -- suffer from the same defect. One should a) be more consistent; b) be
more tolerant; or c) write better games yourself.

--M.

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