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From: librik@cory.Berkeley.EDU (David Librik)
Subject: Re: Upload Infocom Walkthroughs! *and* IF Game Literary Analysis?
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Date: Mon, 7 Dec 1992 04:12:55 GMT
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dmb@xbar.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett) writes:
>Comments, questions, rude remarks?

I'll go you one better.  I want to see real, useful hints for Infocom games.

In the old days of 8-bit computers, hint sheets for adventures were done
like this: the questions were in ordinary plain-text, the answers in a
simple letter-for-letter cipher (say A=Z, B=Y, etc.) and the cipher "key"
was plainly printed at the bottom of each page.  You could read through
the hint book, find the problem you wanted an answer to, and then decode
the clue in a minute or so -- less if you use a computer program.  Low-tech
as this might seem, it accomplishes EXACTLY what Lost Treasures of Infocom
fails to do: it lets you choose which hints you want without having to
read all the answers; unlike the "InvisiClues" invisible-ink approach, it is
reusable; and unlike the on-line "VisiClues" it's not so tempting for you
to just type "hint".  I don't remember ever minding the decoding -- I mean,
you only ask for the clues when you're really stuck, in which case you don't
mind the minute or two it takes to decode the hint.

Scott Adams' hint books used a similar approach that worked a bit faster:
each game had a huge list of words, all indexed by numbers.  The hints looked
like:
    How can I get past the Guardian?
    - 105 27 83 56 114 65 10 98 150 3
    - ... more hints if necessary ...
You looked up the numbers in the word list and decoded the message.  There were
more words than were necessary in the word-list in order to keep you from
reading the list to figure out the game -- not like it was possible, we're
talking about a big random list of words here.

The effect of both of these systems was not to make it hard on the user to find
hints, but to keep you from accidentally finding stuff out that you didn't
want to know.  The LTOI "plain text hints" approach really stinks -- simply
by opening the hint book to a page, I subconsciously read the page and
spoil the game.

Sometimes low-tech is the right answer.  Print out the hint files, and decode
the hints you want, when you need them.

What do you think?  Would you welcome "hint books" in a simple code like this?
I'd love to have the Infocom LTOI hint book transcribed like this: I'd pitch
the original immediately.  I haven't done it yet because I don't want to spoil
all the games for myself.

- David Librik
librik@cory.berkeley.edu
