Comment by charcircuit
1 day ago
>As a clear obvious example: interactive fiction / text-adventures use a deterministic natural language interface with low load as an intentional flexible puzzle to solve.
Even though games can technically do this, should they? Do consumers actually find it fun and engaging? Considering there has never been a AAA game of that genre I don't think there is true consumer demand for games with such an interface.
> never been a AAA game
Infocom sold 450k copies of Zork I and 250k copies of The Hitchhiker's Guide among their many other titles.
Beam Software sold over 1M copies of The Hobbit.
Sierra On-Line sold ~400k copies of King’s Quest VI in a week.
Indeed.
"Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold" or "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"
became early memes as a result.
However those memes also come from player frustration of being stuck in repeated patterns. The same can also happen with chat interfaces to LLMs.
However I'm not sure whether that's a function of the chat interface or the nature of LLMs.
If you think the Infocom games were like Zork I-III you don't understand how the ZMachine itself was improved over the years upon creating masterpieces such as Trinity or A Mind Forever Voyaging.
Then Curses!/Jigsaw are something else, and Anchorhead/Spider and Web/Inside Woman/All Things Devour are the king of games with thematics you won't see in 3D AAA games in decades.
And over the years the parser from Zork was so improved that could do chained phrases in English in the 90's on a 16 bit machine with the Z5 version of the Z-Machine with games designed for it. For Z8 machine games, the size of the games was even higher with far more objects and interactivity for puzzles thanks to Inform6 and Inform6lib depending on the build target.
Those games did not have a high enough budget to be considered AAA.
And did the concept of "AAA" truly exist back then? Let alone "AAAA"? It's not really a good benchmark, imo.
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That's just their nature: they are very inexpensive to make. The original question was whether people find them fun and engaging. Clearly they did in the past. Though nowadays their standards have risen a lot. Even graphical adventure games (like Monkey Island) have long fallen out of favor due to a lack of action elements.
>never an AAA game
From the non-Infocom titles:
- Curses!
- Jigsaw
- Anchorhead
- Slouching towards Bedlam
- Spider and Web
and literally dozens more of outstanding quality.
From Infocom, most titles will qualify.