Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: neilg@fraser.sfu.ca (Neil K. Guy)
Subject: Re: Cheerful thought of the day.
Message-ID: <neilg.759146396@sfu.ca>
Sender: news@sfu.ca
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
References: <2hlljc$7qn@agate.berkeley.edu> <1994Jan21.025225.26504@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 1994 09:59:56 GMT
Lines: 34

pshepard@nyx.cs.du.edu (Pat Shepard) writes:

>I think that the situation is this: Text adventures have no market.

 (other stuff deleted)

 I'd tend to agree with what you've said. Perhaps not quite "no"
market, but certainly an utterly insignificant one.

 I saw a copy of Doom, the much-hyped video game, the other day. And
quite a remarkable feat of programming it is, too. As a game it's
pretty tedious and promotes a tiresome ideology - murder constantly,
violently and thoughtlessly - but it has those realtime simulated 3-D
texture mapped graphics. Cutting edge algorithms, all right. And it
looks damned cool, too.

 What about text adventures? Well, the problem is you have to *think*.
Thinking is becoming an anathema to our society, it seems. And if that
wasn't bad enough you get parsers that say "I don't know what xxx"
means all the time. No wonder those video games sell so well.

 I'm writing a text adventure myself, though. I'm only partway through
and it's already a 1 megabyte binary with a 3000 word vocabulary, so
it represents a tremendous amount of time spent on my part. But I'm
doing it for one reason only: I find it kind of fun to write. I'll try
putting it out shareware and if I make enough money to recover the
costs of my development system and buy a couple of CDs, great! But I
think it'd be foolish to expect anything more.

 The world is going to hell. Nobody wants to buy text adventures
anymore. Clarence L. Thomas IV says that Jesus is coming soon... say
no more! :)

 - Neil K. (n_k_guy@sfu.ca)
