I think the loss of parser and subsequently the sanitization of the genre towards “good” design turned me away from the genre completely. All the genre had going for it by late 90s was storytelling and dialogues, something easily picked up by other genres.
I think that the modern gamer mind does somewhat of a disservice to many of the earlier games, in particular Sierra’s. I don’t think they were ever meant to be games that you blow through in a single weekend session and alone. Instead, it would be an experience you shared with your family and something you’d take many breaks from, mulling over the obstacles while enjoying Sunday morning breakfast or whatever. However, now that we’re in a situation where people go through games like checking off items from their things “to-do”, the obtusity of the adventure games of yesteryear comes off as plain annoying.
Personally, I am still stuck in Zork 1. Maybe one day I will figure it out.
It was pretty cool Zork was just in codBlops but trying to use the parser with a virtual keyboard was like trying to use a parser with a virtual keyboard.
This has been said many times, including by the original designers, yes: but the Rumplestiltskin puzzle is some bullshit. The fine line between “letting it cook for a few days” and “this is absolute horseshit” is what separates a great puzzle designer from a mediocre one. When adventure games were popular, there was more werewithal to allow designers to elaborate their visions and create enough of a spectrum that a sophisticated gamer had enough data to draw these distinctions. Now we just get what we get.
Echoing cuba here but there is a very good reason that early Sierra games are not looked upon fondly by anyone that actually cares about the genre. If they were good puzzles, I would find myself agreeing with you but there were both better parser games (all infocom games) and better graphical adventures (lucasarts). There is literally nothing besides nostalgia to Sierra’s games. Quest For Glory and Conquests of the Longbow are the exceptions and neither of those were parser games
The Colonel’s Bequest is also pretty cool. Not as complex as Infocom’s mystery games, but the artistry stands up, and it doesn’t have the nonsense puzzles or random deaths of other Sierra games.
i wonder if when people go back and play the old adventure games they’ll be struck less by the puzzles than a quality i feel is less currently celebrated: that adventure game protagonists are some of the eeriest literary constructs of the last century. in many ways they resemble the stock figures from old print advertising, the same tendency to declaim grinning into thin air and the same uncertainty about the exact metaphysical location from which they’re speaking.
and there’s another connection as well - in both cases a kind of linguistic surrogate is used to mediate between a human viewer and some structural demand too blunt to be directly spoken of, whether it’s to buy a product or combine a fishhook with a sock in exactly the right, fussy way. they’re translators and go-betweens, with the intrinsic faint dubiousness of the go-between, the person who might not be relaying back precisely what they’re told.
i wonder if that’s why so many of these characters end up being written with a certain reflexivity, with some limited ability to step out of and comment on the scenes in which they’re acting. you could trace this reflexivity to a bunch of sources - the early popularity of comedy games in the genre, the nerd- and programming-humour that plays with blunt functionalism in fictional contexts (e.g. rulebook-lawyering d&d players), the not-yet-naturalized nature of videogame constraints which it might have been weirder NOT to somehow comment on. but i think you could also connect it to a certain recurring anxiety around narrative computer games and the role of player-facing elements in same - namely, which side are they on? is the player character, or text parser, a way to beat the game or is it a contrivance of the game itself to slow your progress? is whatever gremlin responds to inputs from a text parser “helping” you against the ones that mysteriously determine what constitutes progress or success? or a-are they pals?
playing an adventure game usually means considering both options - sometimes the characters grab items or perform activities at the merest, languid prompting, sometimes they just stand in place and declare “i can’t do that” over and over as you try ordering them to grab a perfectly viable key hanging on the wall. and to have all this relayed through a singular “voice”, the same one that requests and answers text prompts in a text parser for example, to have the computer game itself speak directly to you, hinting, bullying, pushing you back and cheering you on - - trying to figure out your own role in all this can mean dealing with a stew of motive and suggestion far more imposing than maps or puzzles.
the fbi agents that you play as in thimbleweed park are trickster figures who seem to have given up on the effort required to actually trick anyone - they blandly, haphazardly dissimulate in a way which makes it clear they long stopped caring about whether anybody’s fooled or not. each has a story that start falling apart under the slightest questioning from the other, but neither follows it up and neither seems to care. they don’t even talk to each other outside a few token setpieces - in the original version of the game, at least, later updates apparently add more dialogue- but to me a lot of the tension, the pacing, of the early game particularly is due to the characters always being just a little less communicative than you’d like them to be. they don’t ask enough questions about each other, about the places you’re in - sometimes one or the other agent just disappears, becomes unplayable and unfindable for a period, before turning up again somewhere else later on without a word. rather than being resolved into “characters” they persistently hover in the strange space between gameworld object and UI component. we know they’re “fbi agents” because they wear suits and look like mulder and scully, or maybe scully and dale cooper, and we wait for the game to fill them in beyond a handful of visual signifiers - but that’s not really the project, and the sketchiness remains. the habitual unreadability of the parser surrogate becomes foreground, becomes the atmosphere.
This sounds like it was written by someone who has never even heard of computer code, and has to defend their literature degree’s relevancy at least three times a week
Has anyone written any good, lengthy analyses of Thimbleweed Park? The only Ron Gilbert games I’ve played were the first Monkey Island (later in life), and the early Humongous games and Day of the Tentacle as a kid. I did not know about the MI2 ending until this thread, and a friend told me about the Thimbleweed ending before… now I’m ALMOST convinced to actually play the game and see if I can’t derive “deeper meaning” about adventure games, or video games in general, or life or whatever, from it. I’ve always had a soft spot for LucasArts adventure games—I was obsessed with The Dig especially back in the day, and even bought and read its novelization—but it feels like I’m failing to see what Gilbert’s trying to say about it all with Thimbleweed Park (but again, I haven’t actually played it). A lot of people online accuse the ending of being a “oh shit we’re out of time and Kickstarter money” asspull, but that seems too easy of an explanation, plus there’s some sort of vague throughline with the MI2 ending.
Or maybe the Steam forum kids are right and this really was just a “lol let’s huck a ton of LucasArts and adventure game and 90s culture references into a thing and then just kill it off with a dumb twist at the end instead of resolving anything haha”-type thing, who knows