I did like Blue Chairs, and I loved Shade! Unfortunately those were the only two really surrealist games I’ve been able to find.
Of course you’re welcome to like whatever sorts of games you like, but for me, “randomly generated” is a huge turn-off. A randomly generated game, to me, seems to have no meaning or purpose–you’re just doing stuff to do stuff. And a game that randomly generates the illusion of purpose (ie, you visit the guy’s house and there’s a “hook” that he’s having an affair) would be an incredibly, practically impossibly complex undertaking.
You could just say you don’t like them, since your thesis boils down to “nobody likes IF except people who like IF.” (I’m a writer/reader/game player myself who found my way into the periphery of the IF community because I quite like doing all of them and enjoy how they work in combination. I think the community is small because, most people don’t know it exists.)
People don’t have this. I’ve never played World of Warcraft, but I suppose the heart of the game, what keeps people playing, are player-to-player interactions. I played the last GTA and found it was incredibly empty : you can steal cars, drive around, kill people, buy a hot-dog - and of course conform yourself to the player-character by completing predefined missions. That’s all.
I envisage text as a convenient short-cut. When you can’t afford the means to produce, write and direct a movie, what do you do ? You write a novel. I don’t have the skills nor the time to sculpt 3D models and animate them, nor do I have time to paint textures or build audio and physical engines. But I do think text is as efficient if not superior to images when it comes to transmitting certain mental structures to the audience, all the more so when you have no budget at all.
I don’t think people come to IF because they want to read good literature : personally, I discovered the word “interactive fiction” by looking up “text-based game” in google. Actually, the fact that IFs mostly rely on puzzles (as opposed to “freedom-generating”/exploration-based games, like GTA, WOW, or Minecraft) and that the same piece of text will get printed 5, 10, 50 times during the process in which the player engages in order to find clues/keys/doors and get to the next step of the puzzle, is rather appalling to most of people who come to IF with the hope of finding literary texts.
It’s not really the “randomly generated” bit that matters to me. I’d just like to play a piece of IF that is genuinely oriented towards the feeling-of-freedom side of video games. I’m in my 20s and I stopped playing video-games a few years ago because most of time they don’t satisfy my expectations. The last games I played are : Animal Crossing (it’s all about social interactions), fallout 1 or 2 (again, social interactions), and minecraft. This latter is quite an amazing game to me, since it relies on a very simple atomic concept : blocks. As a consequence, it opens a vast field of possibilities, new traps and mechanisms the game’s inventor hadn’t planned are invented every day. This is the kind of game i’d like to create : as a player, I’d like to be confronted to situations I did not plan when writing the game as an author. I want to be surprised.
I know what I am describing is far from the way IFs are designed nowadays (and 30 years ago), but when I started searching for text-based games, I was surprised by the hidden mechanisms they rely on : mostly, IFs look like [if … else if … else …] static tree structures. Actually, I haven’t found a game that develops its own narrative schemes (there are theories for this).
I know this an ambitious project and that I have like 20 years of development ahead of me, but I also consider it an occasion to learn new theories : of course that spying-the-husband-telling-the-wife-about-it example I picked seems to be extraordinary hard to implement. But it might be easier than you think once you’ve defined a social engine based on theories coming from the field of sociology, and people coming to IF in the hope of finding something similar to literature, might be more interested in playing a sandbox kind of game that offer a (hopefully) wide range of “superficial” social interactions than a game with a strong linear “emotional plot” punctuated with numerous puzzles that force you to read the same never-changing piece of text over and over again.
I suspect that novel may not be as satisfying to its audience or its author as one written by someone who writes a novel because they want to write a novel. (Love of the written word and so on…) I can’t see treating one medium as a cheaper alternative to another as a good way to look at things. Yes, IF is easier for one person to make than most kinds of games, and IF can even be used to prototype another game (unless my memory is playing tricks on me, the developers of one of the graphical Zork games did that), but to think of a novel as a poor man’s movie or IF as a poor man’s computer game is missing the point. Each medium has its unique strengths and weaknesses (even if we discount production costs).
I realise (or at least hope) that your intention wasn’t to value novels less than movies, but that’s how it read to me and that kind of statement rubs me the wrong way. I’ll stop my rant now. “kthxbye”, as the kids say.
To echo Trumgottist, there are actual good solid reasons for choosing the text medium other than budget constraints. As I said way back in my original response in this thread, I particularly like IF that uses the medium as part of its message. The Gostak: The Graphical Adventure would simply not be interesting or fun, and For a Change with 3D graphics and music might be okay (it would probably be basically a Myst knockoff) but wouldn’t have much to recommend it. Similarly, games such as Delightful Wallpaper and Shrapnel work precisely because of the very peculiar spatial paradigm IF has developed, and Shade and Rover’s Day Out play merry havoc with tropes that other genres just don’t have. I could imagine an illustrated Pacian game, but his prose is so fun that honestly I’d be a little sad to be pinned down to any particular visual interpretation of it.
Sure, some people use the text medium as a way of prototyping a game (and I say “prototype” when the envisioned gamed could well encompass more expensive assets, even if, as a necessarily time-limited hobbyist, the author has no intent to ever make the “real thing”), much as people may write scripts or create storyboards for movies that will never be produced. And that is great and noble. But text (and the specific medium of parser IF, with all its shorthands and quirks) can be more than just a short-cut.
I’m not even sure this is true anymore, with the rise of cheap/free game-making systems like Flixel, Unity, and GameMaker. (Though you might be able to say better than I have, as you’ve actually made games with graphics.)
One difference I can think of is in level of polish; it costs money to make graphics like Shadow of the Colossus, but it doesn’t cost any more money to write prose that’s as polished as that found in any professional game; you just have to be able to write it. OTOH, I’ve seen a lot of absolutely gorgeous games made with free tools; they just didn’t have the kind of 3d graphics that basically every big-studio game has, as far as I can tell (don’t play them).
All that said, I would really like to play Phonatacid’s game (and even share some of the concerns about the general design of IF; not that I think it’s fatal that you have to reread text sometimes, it’s just part of the medium, but I think IF could do more to exploit different ways of playing. Part of the reason gravel’s game seems so cool.)
It’s easier in the sense that fewer different skills are needed. To make IF, you need to be a writer, a designer and a programmer. To make a graphical adventure game, you need the same and a musician and a visual artist. And possibly voice actors.
IF should definitely be easier for me, because I have absolutely no hope as a visual artist; but some of the games I play seem to have better art than writing.
(Maybe roguelikes should be the easiest? You can do without writing or graphics. Design is pretty hard though.)
Do you really think there is a link between the size of your userbase and the amount of learning you can do as a writer? Yourself and two or three insightful critics – wouldn’t that be enough to learn what can be learned, and move on to the next attempt? I am certain that several thousand user reviews on Metacritic will not help, and my opinion of professional game journalism is not much higher. (Or maybe I am expressing that too negatively: many professional and non-professional game journalists do a good job reviewing games, but there is little worthwhile criticism going on.)
Also, as far as I can see most industry writers are (a) working on a team, and (b) not the creative director of the game they are making. This is surely a formula for failure, since ruthless solipsism is the hallmark of all good writing. Art is, I wouldn’t say the expression, but certainly the product of a unique consciousness.