Reflections An article by Sue Is it progress or a sad reflection of the times we live in? I'm talking about the ever-increasing sophistication of adventure games. Most of you have probably played one of the following blockbusters - one of the Monkey Island, King's Quest, Space Quest or Indiana Jones series, Myst or Riven, Full Throttle, Phantasmagoria or Zork: Nemesis. But how many of you have played Dungeon? How many of you have even heard of it? Yet if Dungeon hadn't existed, many of those games wouldn't have either. Dungeon was one of the earliest text adventures, the forerunner of the Zork series. It was originally written in the 70s to run on mainframes and programmed at MIT by two of the guys who went on to found Infocom. If you wanted an illustration of the evolution of adventure games over the last 20 years, you couldn't do better than take a look at the history of the Zork series which was set in and around the GUE, the Great Underground Empire. Dungeon started a gaming revolution with the simple words: You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded up front door. There is a small mailbox here. From this humble start, two decades on and eight games later, the series has gone from the initial small text based Dungeon which would fit onto a floppy disk several times over to their current game, Zork: Grand Inquisitor, which comes on two CDs and requires a massive 50 to 125 meg installation. In between these two extremes, each game in the series has tried to improve, technically, on the ones before. Mouse control took over from keyboard input, text was replaced by graphics, and silence was broken by speech and sound effects. Some games in the series toyed briefly with role playing elements, random factors and on-screen mapping. When Infocom introduced graphics, I experienced a similar feeling to the one I got when the 'no synths' message disappeared from Queen's albums. To me, Infocom had sold out and joined the graphically-oriented rat race. What it comes down to is - do we need all the extra thrills of graphics, speech and sound to fully enjoy the games? Don't get me wrong - I thoroughly enjoyed Zork: Grand Inquisitor. It's an excellent game with some neat puzzles and a gripping storyline. But anyone who has played adventures since their early days will remember the thrill and atmosphere of the original text games as we moved a pile of leaves in a forest to find a hidden grating, flew a hot air balloon, were chased by a dragon, surprised a Cyclops in his lair and cursed as the Wizard of Frobozz cast spells beginning with F on us! Words are powerful. With them we create fantasy worlds to explore through the power of our imagination. Once graphics are added, however marvellous they might be, our imagination is no longer essential. We don't have to visualize the Great Underground Empire; it's there for us to see but does it look like we'd expect? Or is the picture in our own mind's eye more vivid than one created by a bunch of pixels? The fact is that we seem to have turned into a society where instant gratification is the norm, and we are less willing than ever before to put effort into things we do. Graphic adventures are easier to solve because you don't need to consider the vocabulary; you can often find the answer to puzzles by blindly trying objects with each other or your surroundings until something works. This happened to me in Zork:GI - I hadn't realized that an object I was carrying, which looked like a Swiss army knife, was a much larger object which is related to a vacuum cleaner. Apparently I have capacious pockets! The days of the text adventure are long gone apart from those produced by stalwarts who write their own games using utilities like TADS or Inform, and release them into the public domain or as shareware. Only a few puzzles in Zork:GI couldn't have been easily programmed into a text adventure (the revolving drums at GUE Institute and the scratch card, for instance, neither of which was particularly taxing), and sound effects were only used for information or atmosphere - Myst is the only game I can think of which used sound as an integral part of a puzzle. It's time for more, people! Authors and programmers should ensure that forthcoming games' puzzles have visual or audio components - otherwise their games might just as well have been written in text and their fancy, disk-guzzling graphics are no more than eye candy, certainly not the advance they would have us believe they are. In the end, isn't it more satisfying for games to stimulate the imagination rather than make a take-over bid? Otherwise the servants become the masters. - o -