Reading the chapter “Interactive Fiction and Other Gamelike Forms” was very familiar to me already. I once was invested in games described in the reading, like Zork and the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, but that was a long time ago. Even though I was familiar with interactive fiction, reading the chapter brought new information, that in turn, posed further questions that came to mind. The big question that came to mind in the reading was, how did interactive fiction games influence the games we see today?
(I first want to say that I am a person that plays some video game genres, and I believe I have enough experience playing video games to help answer this question.)
Today, we don’t see too many text-based adventure games; with computers getting better processing speeds and better graphics, the desire for text-based adventure games shrank, according to Rettberg. He is right because now people want to play games with better graphics and dialogue, but the basis of text-based adventure games hasn’t gone away, and they will not go away for a long time. I believe that everyone that plays video games is experiencing interactive fiction. I want you to think about the most recent game you played for fun, that wasn’t assigned for this class. For me, I recently played NBA 2K20. Now NBA 2K20 is a basketball game that has no text-based interactions on the outside, making it seem like a horrible example for this. The reason it’s a good example is that what we’re looking for isn’t on the outside, it’s on the inside of the game, or the code. That’s the one thing all video games have in common, code. Imagine playing a game like this, and strip away the graphics so that all that is left is code. If you keep playing the game with no graphics, the code will still be running, and it will be looking for what the next command is. If you move forward with the arrow key, the code will send the command to move forward. Now unlike text-based games, there won’t be a text that appears saying what happens, but if you do another action like shoot the ball, the code will receive the instruction to shoot, and then the game keeps running just like games like Zork and Galatea. These games will keep running until you do all the actions necessary to win.
That may be a stretch to some people, but take a look at a game like Galatea. All one needs to do is set arrow keys to send commands for a move to the north, east, south, or west. Add all of the characters, and if you walk up to someone and start interacting with them, then that would be the same thing as typing talk.
This shows that just because computers have better graphics and higher processing speeds, doesn’t mean that interactive fiction games are dying out because those games are seen in most of today’s games. The only difference is there are less text and commands in today’s games, but text-based games and modern games both use the same kind of code. So when Rhettberg says, “the market for text adventures shrank drastically.”(Rhettberg 87) He is correct in the sense of pure text adventure games, but the market for these games, in reality, has been growing for decades.