Hamlet - the Text Adventure

Stumbled across this while following links from IF blogs around the internets: Shakespeare's Hamlet adapted as IF, by Robin Johnson*. It's pretty solid as a game; the puzzles are almost all (with exception of a Macbeth-related one, which is the most I'll say about it) deductible with a bit of logic, and the parser is - pleasantly - intelligent. The interweaving of actual events in Shakespeare's play(s) with the puzzles is very neat, as well. The only complaint I have is that as a story, it was mediocre: the only highlight was recognising the references to the plays, and anything and everything else seemed to exist for the sole purpose of holding the puzzles together. Not that that's entirely a bad thing, but because the gameplay was so solid, the one-dimensionality (does text have dimension?) of the characters and clear unrealisitc absurdity of the world (Bosworth Field is a few steps away from Dunsinane) stood out all the more. It's pretty much obvious "Hamlet" was intended as a sort of pastiche of Shakespeare's work rather than an adaptation, but I still felt that the characters could have had a little more substance to them. Almost every NPC occupies only one room and speaks a limited number of lines in the game; they don't enter, nor leave the room, and barely react to the PCs actions.

Still; an interesting work, and at least good entertainment for a while.



*Note: not the same Robin Johnson as the Robin Johnson who wrote the Alice in Wonderland text game. I might talk about that Alice game some day, actually. It was my very first text-based adventure game, and it took me a good seven years to finish - because of one puzzle that by the Cruelty Scale is very definitely rated "cruel", i.e. "can get stuck by doing something which isn't obviously irrevocable (even after the act)."

SPAG 'zine, and immersion

The latest issue of the SPAG (The Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games) newsletter is out. My experience with SPAG only covers early issues where content consisted entirely of game reviews - this one on the other hand has interviews with the top three IFComp 2008 finishers, several articles about a new game, and a handful of other reviews. What caught my fleeting eye (and it was fleeting, because the bibliography for the Thesis is due tomorrow) was the Editorial section, which briefly covers a few interesting points about the current state of IF. I certainly agree that IF is in its infancy - there's a lot that can be developed and explored in terms of new IF stories/games, although that's not to say the current library of IF work is inadequate in any particular sense. I suppose what I'm doing with the Thesis is pretty much what SPAG stands for - the promotion of text-based adventure games as more than merely an outdated mode of geeky entertainment. As ambitious as it all sounds, I'm certainly am hoping to see text games viewed as serious literature, and if there are arguably no Nabokovs or Prousts or Woolfs of the IF world, existing works show the _potential_ of what IF can do and can become... and also its limits. Which is all really good for the Thesis: limits can be almost as interesting to consider as anything else.

The idea of IF being "immersive" is also something I'd like to explore, when I get the time to sit down and have a think about it. The immersive aspect may very well extend beyond the single-player text experience - perhaps it's directly related to the reading experience, much like how easy it can be to find oneself utterly absorbed in a book and be reading until well past midnight. It would certainly explain my experience with certain MUDs (multi-user dungeons, or text-based MMOs).

Something involving the "limits of the text" or the "borders of the word", to be pretentiously fancy about it, is coming to mind. Does IF, with its empty spaces and command-line/caret feature, remove the frame that holds the reader in the narrative world when he or she reads a book? Or is the frame still there, just made invisible? How much is the interactivity in IF a mirage?