Games: March 2008 Archive Page

Play This Thing offers this review of "Photopia" (a text game by Adam Cadre).

Photopia is very, very linear. It has very simple puzzles. It's barely interactive at all.

And yet it works. Photopia could be a short story, but it would lose most of its impact. It's difficult to explain why that is without ruining the game. The key to Photopia's success is the interactions between the player and the main character (who, interestingly enough, is never actually playable).

Photopia takes the term "interactive fiction" to a new level, because that's really what it is.

Photopia actually brought IF to that new level almost 10 years ago, back in 1998, so this isn't exactly news -- but the game is still worth the praise today.

Just watch it. You'll get it.

I can't wait to see more of Get Lamp.

The Independent has a good tribute to Gary Gygax.

If D&D is a nerd's pastime, then there are a lot of nerds around. Guesstimate calculations - it's impossible to reach a precise total - suggest that Dungeons & Dragons has about 25 million regular players worldwide. Certainly Gygax made more than $1bn in sales since he invented it in 1974, a figure which he claimed surprised him, saying he thought he would have made about $50,000. And the game's legacy has been massive. "Interactive fiction" - the first commercial example being Infocom's Zork of 1981 - occupies the same landscape of abandoned mine-workings, semi-medieval villages, mysterious strangers and supernatural monsters as D&D, sometimes quite explicitly, as in the Infocom trilogy of Enchanter, Sorcerer and Spellbreaker. Sophisticated graphic games such as World of Warcraft, Quake and Doom draw so heavily on the D&D mindset that it's hard to imagine them without it. MMUDs - "Massive Multi-Player Online Dungeons" - make their debt clear in the name, and you might even view Second Life as a D&D game without a quest. D&D reanimated the fantasy genre of fiction, whether straight or, as in the case of Terry Pratchett (whose first Discworld novel appeared in 1983), comic; geeks, after all, notoriously love intricate jokes. From the sublime - the Armoured Bears in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy - to Xena, Warrior Princess, the culture is rich in material which seems to link back to Gygax.

It's not true that Zork was the first commercial interactive fiction -- Scott Adams founded Adventure International in 1979. While the Scott Adams games were very minimalistic, "Adventureland" (1978 or 9) seems to have the honor of being the first commercial computer game for home PCs.

Gravitation: an autobiographical video game. I'm sick right now, or I'd give a better description. Not quite as emotional for me as the same designer's Passage, but another short game that illustrates the possibility of packing games with an emotional argument.

Wired:

Gygax designed the original D&D game with Dave Arneson in 1974, and went on to create the Dangerous Journeys and Lejendary Adventure RPGs, as well as a number of board games. He also wrote several fantasy novels.

"I don't think I've really grokked it yet," said Mike Mearls, the lead developer of the upcoming 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. "He was like the cool uncle that every gamer had. He shaped an entire generation of gamers."