Re: Amoral behvaiour in IF


16 Jun 1995 06:06:41 GMT

In article <60.5744.4154.0N1E7167@canrem.com>,
Tim Middleton <tim.middleton@canrem.com> wrote:
> MS= it struck me how often the player character of adventure games (and
> MS= other games as well) behaves in a totally amoral way, gladly doing
> MS= things he/she would never do in real life, and even getting rewarded
> MS= for it.
>
>After much consideration on this topic I finally came to this startling
>conclusion:
>
> Adventure games are NOT real life!

Are you surprised? :-)

Seriously speaking, what I was after was exactly this: what are the
differences between the adventure-game world and the Real World(tm)?
Some of these differences are of course artifacts of the medium, but
others clearly aren't. There's nothing in the medium of IF that says
that you have to get away with - or even be encouraged to do -
breaking and entering and stealing,and yet many adventure games seem
to reward that very behaviour. Why?

Answering that adventure games aren't the real world is just restating
the obvious. The interesting point is _why_ it's different from the
real world in precisely that way. Is it just for historical reasons -
the first adventures were treasure hunts and others followed th
ebeaten track?

Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se) / yacc computer club, Lund, Sweden
Work: Innovativ Vision AB, Linkoping (magnus.olsson@ivab.se)
Old adresses (may still work): magnus@thep.lu.se, thepmo@selund.bitnet
PGP key available via finger (to df.lth.se) or on request.