Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

I’d played Zork III a lot as a kid. I solved several puzzles in it, but assumed that somehow it was supposed to be impossible. I loved to play it anyway… just to do stuff in it and be in the story. In high school, I picked up a copy of the entire Zork trilogy. I got a lot further in Zork I, but still got stuck. Ten years later I picked up Zork I again and and played the heck out of it. I solved many of the puzzles and finally got aggravated at it. Upon reading the hints to a few remaining unsolved puzzles, I was enraged because of the extreme unfairness of them. To “punish” Infocom, I went through Zork III with a walk-through, but was disappointed with what I found out: I was really much closer to solving the game than I had thought and pretty much wasted it. About that time I spoiled the spaceship entrance puzzle in Starcross and the famous Babelfish puzzle in Hitchhikers… also the locked door and the robot puzzle in Zork II. I did manage to beat Wishbringer without any hints, though.

(Spoiling a puzzle with a hint could really mess up a game– much more than someone ruining a movie. Generally there’s just more puzzles behind the ones that are bugging you. It’s kinda the point of the game.)

Anyways… about Enchanter. I played through it the first parts of it about 8 years ago or so. I solved most of the easy opening puzzles and got stuck. A few years later I started again and solved a hard puzzle that had stumped me before, but still got stuck despite my progress. Last weekend I worked on it again and was surprised at how obvious some of the solutions were. I could just see things and a new light and solved some really hard stuff that I had decided was impossible. I think reading– actually reading– all of the text with a fresh eye was the key. The game is packed with hints and clues, but if you play based on your assumptions, you’ll just stay stuck. You’ve got to let the game help you.

(I did need one little hint to finally complete the game this week, but I don’t feel bad about it because the problem was essentially a hinky sort of guess-the-verb type thing. I think I had actually solved that particular puzzle years ago, but the way I was phrasing the commands just wouldn’t work this time through. Ah well.)

Many critics in the post-Infocom “Interactive Fiction” community criticize the Infocom games for allowing the player to put the game in an unwinable state. Modern games that avoid this are missing some realism, but yeah, avoiding this does reduce some of the tedium. In Enchanter’s case, they are at least fair about it: they give a very clear hint that you’ve screwed things up. It took me a few hours to decipher the hint… and then a few more to set things straight, but this problem was really the most satisfying part of the game. I’m not convinced that a game written according to the modern standards can have quite the same sort of depth that Enchanter has.

I love this game. Enchanter and Wishbringer really are two of the best games ever written. Their text-only format give them a timelessness that other games lack. Text adventures at their worst can be more like debugging a computer program than anything else– especially when your hung up on a finicky noun/verb syntax issue, but these classic Infocom games cause you to engage with the fantasy world in a way that rarely happens in other mediums. I especially like the way that hints for the game were translated into the theme and setting of Enchanter. Nothing breaks mimesis quite like having to type the word “hint” at the prompt or having to go to some “Invisiclues” type screen.

I heartily recommend Wishbringer and Enchanter for those that haven’t done a lot of text games like this. They are entirely fair and manage to simultaneously be great games and great stories at the same time.

Yarukizero has just posted about the differences between Western and Japanese gaming cultures.  It’s extremely fascinating as it highlights exactly what I dislike about modern trends in gaming here in the States.  He makes a very long and detailed post, but here is a summary for those that are in a hurry:

** Quick character generation is often done with the concepts in simple “broad strokes” and lots of powers.  It’s fast and colorful.

** Role Playing Game books are targeted at people that have never played and that don’t necessarily know other gamers.

** Transcripts of games show how the game is supposed to flow.

** Pictures of actual game sessions give an even clearer conception of how these things work.

** Most games are targeted as being single shot scenarios covering a wide variety of settings and characters.  “Campaign play” rates a sidebar and is not the default.

** Much of the text in the game book is dedicated to making the overall intended flow of the game crystal clear.

It’s almost enough to make me want to learn Japanese.  I want these games!

Emily Short has just posted some extensive commentary on Second Person.  It sounds like an interesting book as it contains essays about all sorts of games including computer games, board games, collectible card games, and role playing games.  You just don’t see a lot out there on game design, so this sounds like a real treat.  (As a special bonus, you even get a brief description of Short’s actions in a roleplaying game– and it sounds like a very Whedonesque/comic-book type moment, at that!  I love gaming stories….)

There are several nifty things to mull over in her post, but I’ll just pick out my favorites:

“The problems of linear, nonlinear, and multilinear storytelling” are pretty much a dead horse amoung the more critical folk of the interactive fiction community.  She points out several works that explore each of a half dozen major issues of this theme.  It’s interesting how these issues don’t seem to come up in role playing games as much.  I do like the Classic Traveller “Patron” approach to working around it: provide a good collections of situations and/or people that need assistance from the player characters.  Then present about five or six interpretations of the events.  The Referee can then pick the ones he likes and then improvise the events of the session based on the players’ reactions, the needs of his campaign, and on his decisions about what’s really going on.

“In general, it’s possible to let the player make meaningful choices and discover creative solutions in IF, but only within the predefined interaction domain of the game; it’s not possible to let the player invent whole new thematic content or add character nuance.”  It is this observation that highlights why MMORPGs will never be able to replace role playing games.

“Light source puzzles are much less common, but also, in general, IF authors have moved somewhat away from the idea that a single standard world model is appropriate for most or all works.”  This is an interesting remark.  Aside from the fact that I felt like an absolute genius when I first solved the main light source puzzle in Zork I, we’ve seen a similar development in the architecture of role playing games during the same time period.  Third edition GURPS was geared primarily towards “realistic” gaming… while fourth edition rules were rebuilt from the ground up to make things even more generic than they already were.  One component of the learning curve for GM’s new to GURPS 4e is that they now have to delineate the specifications of their world model before they can begin playing.  Even though this mostly amounts to deciding what rules to ignore, this can still be a daunting task.  As tool-kits evolve, they are decoupled from any game-world and genre assumptions.

Short quotes Eric Lang as saying that “collectible card games are at their root combinatorial exercises; players fall in love with possibilities as much as they do with strategies, and no other type of game offers more options.”  I personally would have to disagree with him: Car Wars offers even more possibilities.  Not only do you get to design your car, but all of the combinatorial possibilities are available without having to purchase “rare” cards and so forth.  Also, the number of scenarios and maps that can be devised yields even more possibilities.  Finally, Car Wars retains the possibility of linking scenarios together to form a running campaign and ongoing story.  Car Warstrounces the CCG’s in terms of raw possiblity.

Short also quotes Greg Costikyan as saying that “adventure games tend to be ‘beads-on-a-string’: small areas where there is some freedom of action until some event occurs, at which point a transition to the next bead is opened.”  This is probably my favorite part of good adventure game design, although I see the structure to be one more like the layers of an onion than beads-on-a-string.  The game tends to open with a small area with only a limited number of items… and each puzzle solved results in a steady expansion of the scope of the game.  I’m really daunted by games that open with a huge area to explore: I just dread having to figure out where to begin!  I especially like it when you face a puzzle in a newly discovered area late in the game and you immediately see a use for an object that seemed useless at the very beginning of the game.

Finally, Short asks, “is there anything cool we can do with social negotiations in interactive fiction?”  This is an area that distresses me most about game development over the past twenty years.  I remember as a child [T]alking to the characters of Ultima IV and asking them if they’d like to [J]oin my party.  Also you could ask them about something by typing in the name of a place or a person.  As an adult a friend showed be the new Morrowind game that he though was totally kewl.  You talk to the character by clicking on the hyperlinked text of their speech.  Grrr….  I’d really like to see something more substantial than that.  I must be disappointed because Eliza made us think that this would be so easy….

I’ve been concerned lately that I’ve had 90% of my blog focus on Car Wars and hardly anything about Star Fleet Battles or Battletech.  It looks like the next several game sessions will be more autodueling madness, so to tide you over until I can play those other games, here’s a link for you.

 This other Jeff blogger/gamer has had similar thoughts as me, but he probably describes them as good or better.  Enjoy!

Google Directory listed my blog in the top 5 Car Wars web pages.  (Woo-hoo!  Party!)  Also, some kind soul once described my blog as “well-written” and “featuring regularly posted articles and vehicle designs.”  Now this description has since been resused by other folk that link to the site.  Cool.  Thanks, whoever you are. 

I’ve got one of those nifty new gmail accounts.  If you’d like to reply to something on the blog, but don’t want to get an account here, just send your comments to:

autoduelist AT gmail DOT com

(You of course know how to fix that to turn it into an address!!)

Gmail rocks.  It’s ten times as good as the second best free webmail program.  It groups related emails together and hides copied text so that it is a cinch to sift through conversations.  You get 1000 megabytes of storage and you don’t have to click through as much garbage as Hotmail.

Recommended!

http://perso.club-internet.fr/flandres-meca/GT4/pv_gt4_e3.wmv