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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: More on What IF is...
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Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 15:16:03 GMT
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Jean-Henri Duteau (jeand@myrias.com) wrote:
> I grant you that IF _started_ with the idea of putting the player in
> the story.  But I contend that it's grown past that.  I also contend
> that IF has grown past the use of 2nd person narrative.  To provide
> more interaction between ALL the characters and the player, we're
> going to need a shift in paradigms.

Actually, to reiterate history again, the Scott Adams adventures were 3rd 
person. And the first three of these predate Infocom, though not Colossal 
Cave or mainframe Dungeon. (I can prove this, really. When my father 
bought our first little old Apple II+, the first two game disks we got 
were S.A adventures 1, 2, and 3, and Zork. The Zork disk was not yet 
labelled Zork I; it was not yet labelled Infocom. I think Eduware was the 
publisher.)

(Actually, I may be misinterpreting; it may be that Infocom had formed as 
a company, but had not yet started publishing their own titles.)

The point was, at that time, 3rd-person adventures outnumbered 2nd-person 
three to two. :-)

*At the time*, I decided that I liked the 2nd-person viewpoint better, 
for pretty much the reasons people are still posting. (And not because 
the S.A. games were written with sentence fragments and a two-word 
parser. That was a separate problem.)

--Z

-- 

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