Re: Limitations of Inform and TADS?


Tue, 07 Nov 1995 08:44:52 GMT

lazuli@eskimo.com (Fred Sloniker) wrote:

>You must remember, however, that we are talking about text adventures.
>Almost *no* one plays text adventures any more. I'd guess the exact
>number is in the thousands.

You would be wrong. Or rather, yes, but high thousands. Certainly
vastly more than ten thousand people world wide. Look at the evidence.
Activision is still selling the Infocom games, with some success. For
every one that is sold, I would hazard a guess that a hundred are
pirated - the portability of these games is a real asset for those
people who are stuck with obsolete equipment.

Obsolete equipment is far more common than games designers tend to
believe. There are lots of people out there using it. They're playing
text adventures.

Text adventures are the state of the art in games available for PDAs,
such as the Psion 3a. Lots of owners of these machines play them.

It's a great temptation to believe that lurkers don't exist on
newsgroups - that the couple of hundred people who post now and then
are the only people who read the group. A group I read was recently
subject to an entertaining and virulent flame war. Dozens of people in
the precise geographical area of the controversy posted for the first
time. It gives you a sense of the number of people out there. How many
people subscribe to r.g.i-f? How many people would subscribe if only
they knew what if was?

Not as dead as you think.

--
Alison Scott      alison@fuggles.demon.co.uk