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Jan. 24th, 2006 12:16 pmI was eaten by a grue last night and I feel fine; or, in praise of antiquted video entertainment.
While Moira worked on some Ebay tasks she needed to take care of last night, I began to cast about for something to do. I couldn't boot up Ultima 7 again because I don't have speakers for my DOS machine and I still don't have the mouse working. I didn't feel like doing any picture editing or work on my server. Then I remembered all the games I'd installed from my Lost Treasures of Infocom set the night before.
I fired up the 486, found a notebook with some blank pages (after rooting through things like notes on a fantasy world I was creating ten years ago and strange bits of dreams I'd jotted down in college), sharpened a pencil, and soon enough I was in The Great Underground Empire.
I've played a number of Infocom games in the past; Hitchhiker's Guide, Enchanter, Wishbringer, and Planetfall were staples of my entertainment as a young boy. But I've never sat down and played Zork before.
Oddly enough, with the likes of Final Fantasy Online and Unreal Tournament available to me, I find myself anticipating coming home and losing myself in simple black and white words on the screen with more fervor than most any game I've been exposed to for quite some time. I have a clearer mental image of the world of Quendor than I do of many game worlds that are comprised of thousands of colors and vast vector-mapping databases. I find that, just like reading a book, my mind produces a more vivid reality than anything that can be shown on the computer.
That's not to say that I'm giving up games with pretty images and flashy lights; far from it. I'm a game addict and I'll always be more than ready to try the latest games. But it seems to me like the further back in time you go, and the more detail that, the underlying hardware lacking the ability to produce in a concrete form, you have to supply from your own mind, the more those games tend to feel somehow personal. Like they were crafted specifically for you. And in a way they were; it's just that you are the one who was doing the crafting. I have vast stores of images of breath-taking landscapes and surrounding backstory involving my group of adventurers in Ultima 4; a simple, sixteen color, tile-based game. Are they anything like the mental images other players constucted? Of course not. Yet they are intrinsically part of the game. The less rigid and detailed a world is, the more you have the chance to make it your own. That's something that I think a lot of newer table-top roleplayers have forgotten too, but that's a whole 'nother essay.
I just want to say that I'm going to go home tonight and spend an hour or two playing a text-based game that was originally written for a mainframe well onto thirty years ago and have just as much fun as I would have hacking demons into bits in Diablo. If you've never tried the old Infocom games, think about giving them a chance. If you've spend all your gaming life in the world of flashy graphics with story and game-play added as an afterthought, you might be surprised by how enthralling mere words can be.
While Moira worked on some Ebay tasks she needed to take care of last night, I began to cast about for something to do. I couldn't boot up Ultima 7 again because I don't have speakers for my DOS machine and I still don't have the mouse working. I didn't feel like doing any picture editing or work on my server. Then I remembered all the games I'd installed from my Lost Treasures of Infocom set the night before.
I fired up the 486, found a notebook with some blank pages (after rooting through things like notes on a fantasy world I was creating ten years ago and strange bits of dreams I'd jotted down in college), sharpened a pencil, and soon enough I was in The Great Underground Empire.
I've played a number of Infocom games in the past; Hitchhiker's Guide, Enchanter, Wishbringer, and Planetfall were staples of my entertainment as a young boy. But I've never sat down and played Zork before.
Oddly enough, with the likes of Final Fantasy Online and Unreal Tournament available to me, I find myself anticipating coming home and losing myself in simple black and white words on the screen with more fervor than most any game I've been exposed to for quite some time. I have a clearer mental image of the world of Quendor than I do of many game worlds that are comprised of thousands of colors and vast vector-mapping databases. I find that, just like reading a book, my mind produces a more vivid reality than anything that can be shown on the computer.
That's not to say that I'm giving up games with pretty images and flashy lights; far from it. I'm a game addict and I'll always be more than ready to try the latest games. But it seems to me like the further back in time you go, and the more detail that, the underlying hardware lacking the ability to produce in a concrete form, you have to supply from your own mind, the more those games tend to feel somehow personal. Like they were crafted specifically for you. And in a way they were; it's just that you are the one who was doing the crafting. I have vast stores of images of breath-taking landscapes and surrounding backstory involving my group of adventurers in Ultima 4; a simple, sixteen color, tile-based game. Are they anything like the mental images other players constucted? Of course not. Yet they are intrinsically part of the game. The less rigid and detailed a world is, the more you have the chance to make it your own. That's something that I think a lot of newer table-top roleplayers have forgotten too, but that's a whole 'nother essay.
I just want to say that I'm going to go home tonight and spend an hour or two playing a text-based game that was originally written for a mainframe well onto thirty years ago and have just as much fun as I would have hacking demons into bits in Diablo. If you've never tried the old Infocom games, think about giving them a chance. If you've spend all your gaming life in the world of flashy graphics with story and game-play added as an afterthought, you might be surprised by how enthralling mere words can be.
