I do actually like IF games! But I do think the genre has fundamental problems, and I think it’s okay to speak openly about that, even though I like them.

A few IF developers wrote posts like the one above. I can only speak in my case, but what prompted it was reading an opinion that modern text games have the same problems they did 30 years ago, by someone who clearly knows what it is like to create on the fringe. Riccitello or Kotick could say something about how the medium has stagnated and who cares, they can each split a gallon of lye with a straw. If someone had said that there haven’t been any advances in platformers, that the same frustrations from the 80s were there in modern examples like VVVVVV and Braid, well, I would also argue how that isn’t right.

And I *get* that text games are asking the most of any player through the interface, and that they can become almost instantly frustrating. It’s easier to get a stranger’s social security number than it is to convince them to play interactive fiction. I get that. It’s just that I really do think they are objectively easier to play these days. It used to drive me crazy when the exits of a room weren’t instantly available – but any author can now drop in code to fix that. Mapping on paper is awful, but the Inform 7 extensions page has dynamic automapping that any author can use. Modern text games also don’t bother with mazes, hunger puzzles and trying to fix obtuse machines. I think those decisions are improvements that are just as valid as the modern-day platformers that no longer give you just three lives, or make you replay huge sections of a game due to dying. It’s my belief that IF has done as much to make gameplay less of a pain in the neck over the last two decades as other genres. You can still wreck the experience by typing >take the air, but (to me) that’s like playing a console action game and attempting to reason with an enemy sniper, or even more unlikely, someone on the Baltimore Ravens.

(I don’t wish to characterize your experiences with the IF you tried as being that trite. There are PLENTY of ways to get pissed at a text game without referencing objects that weren’t implemented. I guess I am just saying that my colleagues and I work as hard to improve the genre as every other dev working today who truly loves theirs.)

That being said, I think that the system of blogging, commenting and follow-up posts frequently leads to unintentional escalation and the blog’s author acting like he’s running a bad late-night talk radio show. I apologize for the smarmy tone I copped in my initial post. Not a conditional apology, or anything, but a genuine and sincere one.

I have played a number of modern IF games, and I have different opinions about them than you do. I would suggest that incompetence is not required for this kind of situation to arise.

I will just say that in my view the limitations of text games have not fundamentally changed. Things are a bit better these days, yes, but the basic nature of the interactivity is still the same.

I’ll say — can I vent about something basically off-topic? Cool.

So there was this review on Play This Thing of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy graphic adventure remake, which contains the following two sentences:

“Text adventures are designed to be difficult and puzzling because, gameplay-wise, that’s all they’ve got. The joy of unraveling a text adventure comes not just from moments of insight arrived at by clever reasoning and deduction, but from the simultaneously rewarding, humorous, and annoying experience of exhausting every logical action, getting stumped, feeling like you’ve hit a dead end, and typing in something completely absurd that turns out to be the solution.”

Which is fine, whatever, guy doesn’t know about anything that’s happened in IF since, well, probably Bureaucracy. Same old same old, right? Except he’s writing on a site where one of the posters is Emily fucking Short. There’s a “text adventure” tag on the review! And if you click it you get a whole bunch of games that don’t remotely fit that description, and also the Gostak! It’s like talking about RPGs as if they were still all about killing monsters while Greg Costikyan is posting on your site.

Adding grumble to grumble, the first comment is “btw This review was a nice primer to IF, Greg.”