Re: Marketing, was Re: C


Mon, 11 Dec 1995 12:01:30 -0500

jwinkler@coil.com (John F. Winkler) writes:
> > Are any of the adventures we're writing really on a level with Infocom's?
> >No story I've downloaded yet has absorbed me the way 'Planetfall' did. How
> >did Infocom do it?
>
> That's an excellent question! Infocom is the de facto IF standard, like
> it or not. While it's probably a waste of effort for people to try and
> produce IF adventures that are "just like" Infocom (knock-off, more or
> less), it is a great idea to try and identify what made Infocom's games
> so good.
>
[..]
>
> At any rate, identifying what made Infocom's games so popular, so
> lasting, and so outstanding is the first step towards resuscitating IF as
> a serious commercial enterprise.

To be completely honest, I think a lot of it is Golden Age Syndrome.
Anything ten years old is terrific. We remember _Beyond Zork_. Anyone
look back fondly on _Moonmist_? (If you do, substitute some other game
you didn't like.) The good stuff sticks in memory.

Plus, they did a lot of things first, which made them terrific, but
repeating the same thing today would be terrible. (You may recall that
one of my comments about "Zebulon" was that it had lots of
brightly-colored magical items sort of arbitrarily scattered around.
In fact, it reminded me of _Starcross_. I *loved* _Starcross_. But
that was not a point in favor of "Zebulon"; it was a point against.
(Not that it didn't have many other points in favor of it.))

I think that YES there are games on gmd.de which are the equal of
Infocom's. (And not just Graham's, either. :-)

Advantages that Infocom had that we currently lack:

1) Much more beta-testing. No game I've seen here has been really
polished until the second or third *public* release.

2) Much more internal design support. By which I mean, Infocom people
(being in a company of full-time people) obviously spent some amount
of time looking over each other's shoulders, chatting at lunch about
programming points, etc, etc. We talk a lot about design in general,
but we're very secretive about specifics. This makes sense; the only
people we can discuss them with are the audience who're going to play
the final product! But the difference shows up in a sort of raggedness
*between* games. There's less consistency.
Example (no spoilers): In _Shelby_, "garage" and "garage door" are
separate things. "unlock door" works, but "unlock garage" gets you a
befuddled message. In "Weather", I took it for granted that "unlock
shed" and "unlock door" must do the same thing. Regardless of which
custom you like, you're going to be confused by the other.

That's the sort of raggedness I mean. Different games make very
different assumptions about level of detail of action, level of detail
of description, amount of hand-holding, etc, etc. These are not just
deliberate differences of difficulty; they're different assumptions
about how games should go.

What we can do about it:

There is nothing we can do about it.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."