04 Jan 2008 [ Prev | Next ]

Thy Dungeonman

Part of Strong Bad's Videogames animation.
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2 Comments

Ashley F said:

Oh, this was interesting. These are one of the games I can not play because I can't pay attention or I get frustrated I quit. I know a quite alot of these games exist but HOW DO YOU MAKE THE RIGHT CHOICE? I do not know. Maybe someone more experienced at text games would see clues in the words, but I am a visual learner. Strongbad did imply you must have a great imagination for those types of games and I agree. Some people prefer letting their imagination explore in already made up worlds and some prefer to create their own.

When this Strong Bad animation first came out, about four people e-mailed me over the space of a few hours, telling me I HAD to watch this.

Playing these text games does require a great deal of concentration, but remember at the time they were first created, the only way anyone really interacted with computers was by typing a line and reading the result. As we can see from the graphic interface of Space War and Maze War, at this point in the development of the computer, text really was a more efficient way to display information about a complex system. So the skills required to use a computer trained computer users to have the skills necessary to enjoy these kinds of text games.

I also think that, because young people are so used to texting to each other, and they can get away with lts f spllng mstks & pppl cn stll mk out what dey r syng, that for that reason people are less patient with a computer interface that demands accurate spelling. (But in the mid 80s, there were some librarians and middle school teachers who thought that text games would make a good way to teach kids basic literacy skills.)

Believe it or not, there was a time when text games were the best-selling titles -- in part, though, that was because there were dozens of different competing computer platforms, and a company called Infocom did a good job figuring out how they could easily convert their text games from one platform to the other.

I not only played these games as a kid, I wrote my own text simulation of a house, and I wrote a haunted house game. I still remember the line "Pale moonlight filters through dusty windows," which I lifted from someone else's game.

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Dennis G. Jerz on Thy Dungeonman: When this Strong Bad animation first came out, abo
Ashley F on Thy Dungeonman: Oh, this was interesting. These are one of the gam
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