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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: WHICH OF THESE DO YOU PREFER IN IF?
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Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 19:02:14 GMT
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Andrew Plotkin  <erkyrath@eblong.com> wrote:
>Sean T Barrett <buzzard@theworld.com> wrote:
>>>About 95% of commerical adventure produced before 1995 could be made
>>>unwinnable
>
>> Indeed, I meant to type "...of many MODERN commercial games".
>
>> With the intended implication "commercial game developers have
>> gotten past this design mistake at long last; can't we too?"
>
>Commercial game developers are developing graphical adventure games.
>The pacing issues are different.

I did not mean to type "of many modern commercial adventure games",
and in fact I didn't. (I expressly mentioned unwinnability-due-to-
running-out-of-ammo thinking that would be moderately clear.)

You may consider that claim irrelevant, and perhaps turn-based
all-communication-through-text somehow radically changes
the medium compared to everything else, but it seems unlikely
to me.

It is true that UNDO reduces the tension significantly if you can
never go more than one turn off the winning track, but I'd choose
that as the lesser of the two evils versus tedious replaying.
The commercial game industry has gone through the same issue in
the form of save-anywhere-unlimited-times, and the masses have
spoken resoundingly on that. [*]

Perhaps it is simply the case that there is a small niche
audience that appreciates certain kinds of gameplay that go
against unwinnability (would it be bad if Sokoban stopped the
game if you closed it off? probably, but I'm not an expert),
although I'm not one of them; but I have doubts about the
overlap of that audience with the IF audience.

Of course you can make your art be anything you want.

SeanB
[*] more complicated than that, really, but hey
