Does anyone here play IF?

[GarageGothic]

I'm curious about this. It seems that while most amateur designers of graphic adventure are merely revisiting the territory of commercial titles,  amateur text adventures are going in all kinds of new directions. The genre of IF has gradually moved into puzzle-less narratives, and the games that still use them are so innovative, that you'd be hard pressed to point out if you've seen these puzzles anywhere else.

How come we're moving in such different directions? Is it just the graphics that make the difference? It's hardly a new thing that text adventures have more sophisticated narratives. Compare two games from 1987: Infocom's Border Zone, where you play through three parallel chapters from three different character perspectives, and Sierra's Leisure Suit Larry, an utterly plot-less quest for the right objects to give to the right people.

Does anyone else here play IF, and if so, do you think it could inspire the graphic adventure community to take game design in new directions?

[LordHart]

Well, I haven't played many IF games, but most just annoy me. The only one i've actually finished was Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy...

I just can't believe the ultimate goal of the game is to have Tea and No Tea at the same time.

[GarageGothic]

Well, I think that's a Douglas Adams thing rather than a general IF thing

[scotch]

It's because IF people are all clever and literate and we're mostly just dumb teenagers.

It's also less time consuming to develop text adventures, I think if it was just a case of writing out a description of a room or character in AGS then we'd all have much more time to come up with innovative designs.  IF can't show off with graphics and music, so writing quality and new game concepts are what all the effort goes into, that's not usually the case here.

I'm not saying people here couldn't come up with somethng new, we just need to stop describing our games as having 'Monkey Island' style humour or a 'Gabriel Knight' style plot and start thinking of new kinds of adventure games.. it's only been a few years since we were made able to make our own graphic adventures, amateur IF has been made for much longer, after their first few games people will get bored of generic designs and start innovating.. that's what I'm predicting.

[James Kay]

I was showing the wife what I had been working on for the last few weeks (DevCo Quest) and though she thought it was cute, she said something that hit the mark really uncomfortably close: "It's just a dolls house for boys You're just playing with your dolls making them do stuff".




And she's right you know.
IF is a kind of interactive literature, Graphical Adventures are toys for boys.  

[LordHart]

It's because IF people are all clever and literate and we're mostly just dumb teenagers.

Hey, I'm not a dumb teenager, I'm eighteen thank you very much...

[GarageGothic]

It's because IF people are all clever and literate and we're mostly just dumb teenagers.

Hey, I'm not a dumb teenager, I'm eighteen thank you very much...

I'm not a dumb teenager either. I'm a dumb 26 year old

[Dave Gilbert]

With IF you only need one talent to make it great - writing.  With a few well-written sentences, you can part the heavens, pour forth fire from the sky, level mountains, drain oceans and achieve things that would take a graphic artist AGES to get right.  With that kind of flexibility, IF can really achieve anything.

I used to hang around the IF forums in college.  I never wrote anything, but I inhaled everything that came out.  I even bought a few of the titles that were sold commercially ("Once and Future" was one that I bought, and it was worth it).

To a degree, I miss it.  It seemed that the age range in that crowd was always older than me.  When I was 18, the crowd was generally in grad school or older.  The writing in general was more mature than most of the stuff we see in graphic adventures.  

I've always wondered why the graphic adventure crew was always so young.  I guess it leads to more light-hearted and comedy games.  Mature writing is difficult to do well when you're young, since you usually lack the life experience to make it come to life.  

[GarageGothic]

I think Dave brings up an interesting point with the age thing. Could it be that graphic adventures are less mature, simply because they are more accessible for a younger audience?

With a few well-written sentences, you can part the heavens, pour forth fire from the sky, level mountains, drain oceans and achieve things that would take a graphic artist AGES to get right.

But I do think there are plenty of excellent one-room IF games to show that there must be more to it than that. If one-room AGS games (of which there have been several great ones, 6 Day Assassin and Little Johnny Evil come to mind) were even NEAR the quality of well written one-room IF, there might be something to it. I mean, art, and possible a little animation, for a single room can't make THAT much of a difference to the burden of work.

[Ghormak]

Playing an IF is like reading a book, whereas playing a graphic adventure is more like watching a movie. One can be just as interesting and mature as the other, and they both have their own advantages and disadvantages.

It is easier for you as a player to get involved in the world of the IF game (if it's done well), simply because there are more verbs than "walk to", "look", "use" and "talk" at your disposal. There's also something about reading descriptions of rooms instead of actually seeing them that makes the whole experience much more real. You get to imagine what it's actually like.

On the other hand...

...

Actually, I can't really think of any major advantages to graphic adventures when compared to interactive fiction (graphics and sound may or may not be an advantage).

I still love both, in case you were wondering.

[Bionic Bill]

It might very well have something to do with the age of the medium. I play IF and grew up with it, though I might be an exception in my age group(I'm 20). The people who "grew up" with IF are by and large older, right? So maybe the people who hang on to their old forms got mature along with the medium. In another five-ten years the teenagers making teh n00 /\/\onk3y 1slandzorz will have graduated from university with degrees in thoughtful (and intensely lucrative!) things like philosophy, English, art, etc. etc. So when they revisit their old stomping grounds for nostalgia's sake they can't help but hit at things that are about a million times more deep than the "original" art. Zork was not a "deep" game by any estimation, I don't think, but Adam Cadre's Photopia will make you crap your pants. Eventually there will be steps forward in defining interactivity and narrative. IF is interactive literature, and maybe graphic adventures will make visual art a part of that. I hope so anyways.

The problem with IF at the moment is that modern game developers pay little to no attention to the current scene, and the lessons they could learn from it. The modern consumer is simply no longer arrested by a screen of text. So maybe graphic adventures could someday help connect art with mainstream video games. Blah blah, viva la revolucion! etc.

[MrColossal]

I restarted playing some IF a few months ago and the first one I downloaded [not counting the Pick Up The Phonebooth and Die series] was Fine Tuned and it was a gorgeous game. I fell in love with it right away and it's the reason I made Spellbound.

"But Fine Tuned is so amazing and the atmosphere and characters are so well defined, if you loved it so much why is Spellbound kinda 2 dimensional?" Cause I tried to make it in a month.

I think graphics are a huge hurdle for anyone, it doesn't matter how intelligent you are if you feel you can't draw then you won't draw and if you can't match art styles with what's in your head you really aren't going to want to spend 5 years learning art. If you're a smart person who likes to write you can get into IF much easier than graphical adventures. How many people who have appeared in the AGS message boards looking for a team may have had an amazing story that would have blown us all out of the water if only they had some artists? With IF you can do it alone and you can better realize your game without any visual arts knowledge.

But enough rambling time for recommendations: Fine Tuned, Moments Out of Time, Blowjob Drifter. Two of those are recommendations and one is to show that there also a lot of "juvenile" IF games

it was still hard as hell...

eric

[Dave Gilbert]

Yeah, that's what I mean.  IF is very easy for a good writer to get into with a minimum of coding effort.  The good thing about these forums is that we have such a nice pool of talent to choose from, but it takes a ton of effort to get things done.

And eric... heh heh.  Blowjob drifter.  Hard as hell.  heh heh.  

/immaturity

I'm ashamed to admit that I played that game.  It was surprisingly well-done for something so juvenile.

[Las Naranjas]

IF's development is also helped by the fact that there is no doubt whatsoever that it is dead commercially. There's no gasps like Runaway or BS3 to confuse the issue. It leaves the amateur community in no doubt as to their role.

Then again, the triumphs cited from the IF arena, such as Photopiaesque, or puzzleless games have been attempted in graphical games. Of some 7 games I've attempted making, none have ever had puzzles, but the hurdle of exploiting the visual element prevented me but finsihing all but the silliest, that is Novo. Most of them would have been finished if they were IF, but I lacked the time and talent to realise them in a  visual context like I wished to.

Take also into account that the IF community has been around almost as long as the internet, the amateur graphical community had a genesis 5 or so years ago, and only 3 years ago you could count the number of games without removing your socks, including all engines.

[BerserkerTails]

...There's more than ONE "Pickup the Phone Booth and DIE"?!?!?
When I was in the IF community, there was only one! It was brilliant though...

Anyway, more on topic...

I agree with the whole "IF is a book, GA is a movie" statement, which why I'm trying my hardest to make my game enjoyable graphically. There's too many games which have little to no animations done, because the creators just get lazy. If AGS games aren't going to use the fact that they have graphics at their disposal, they should just write IF!

Oh, and I just counted. In my game so far, my character has 47 unique frames of animation. And my game can be completed in 10 minutes. It's gonna be awesome one it's done!

...Sorry for the shamless plug  

[James Kay]

Though I love and loved IF games, it's what I started out with and I always thought "How cool would this be if it was graphical?", and then lo and behold, GA made the scene. I always saw GA as an evolution of IF so I find it very hard to make that mental step-back and enjoy IF again. But that's just me.

Oh, and I just counted. In my game so far, my character has 47 unique frames of animation. And my game can be completed in 10 minutes. It's gonna be awesome one it's done!
...Sorry for the shamless plug  

47? Pah! My main character alone has more than 50 already and will probably have a lot more than that when the game is done!  

[BerserkerTails]

Well, yeah, 47's my main character. And like I didn't say, my game's not nearly close to a quarter done, so yeah, alot more from where that came from!

And... Umm...

<Picks up phone booth>

<Dies>

[Nellie]

Well, as people have already mentioned, the combination of the IF community being much longer established than the GA community, and the speed with which IF games can be written helps.

I also think the general attitude of the IF community is a big spur to original and innovative IF.  There have been many discussions and articles analysing the various aspects of the format, and they are soon to publish a book called 'IF Theory' collecting some of these articles together.  There just seems to be a significant driving force in the IF community to get to know the mechanics of IF inside-out, so they can take it to greater heights.

The GA community just hasn't developed to that stage yet.

[loominous]

I think the point-and-click genre's biggest problem is that it's simply point-and-click. The concept isn t  bad per se ofcourse - it works well in genres like FPS since pointing at your enemy and firering gives the sensations and realism the players are after - but in (serious) adventuregames I think it's a hugh limitation; narrowing it roughly down to find object A and combine with B giving it to C and giving the dialogs the same limitations.

In FPS the main objective is to shoot baddies and the games lets you do this without restrictions using the tools you want - guns. The main objective in AGs is to solve problems but instead of giving you the full range of tools that is the human being, it s limited to the selection of predefined dialogtopic and combining objects that are found.

My guess would be that this is a significant reason as to why the GA (point-and-click) genre is ignored by more seriouslyminded IF-writers.

Personally I think this can be overcome by the use of textparsers in innovative forms.

[Kweepa]

I love text adventures, but I'm not a fan of "pure IF". If there aren't any puzzles, it might as well be a short story, and I'd much rather read a book on real paper than on a computer screen.

That said, the winner and runner up of the IFComp2003 were good fun, although I had to resort to a chemistry book to finish "Risorgimento Represso" which I thought was a little unfair.