Why did the Interactive Fiction genre fade into obscurity? There used to be at least two or three best-sellers in this genre every year up until the mid-1990s.
>>729421057Same reason linux adoption is low.Nobody wants to use the command line.But seriously commands are always vague and unintuitive...like a command line. Text itself is fine and infact can be better than an image at times. But inputting commands is always a bitch
as much as I generally despise AIsloppa, it has been surprisingly fun to tinker with Claude for "choose-your-own-adventure" type games mostly with sexual elements but heyone of the few perfect usecases for LLMs imo
Because adventure games were superior in every aspect.>b-but muh imaginationGo read a book.
>>729421057Displaying graphics on home screens became easier than ever.
>>729421057
>>729421057Text adventures are a little too high IQ for the modern audience. You can still find plenty of indie ones if you go looking, they're the easiest games in the world to make.
Ye can't get ye flask
they evolved into adventure gamesnot only inputting commands was unintuitive, but there was always a lame feeling that some command should have worked and simply wasn't designed forhttps://youtu.be/WQA6NsgQJZE?t=338
>>729421057>Grab Ye flask>You can't grab Ye Flask
>>729421057They got replaced by adventure games. Zork was written to be played on a teletype. As CGA and better graphics came along, Sierra and Lucasarts took over with a surprising amount of quality releases. Eventually, the FPS came along and everything had to be a FPS for at least a decade (even converting franchises like Commandos and SWAT), killing the adventure genre and others. There were a few last gasps like the awful Syberia and TLJ games, and the decent Still Life and Broken Sword series, but they weren't generating the money necessary to keep them going. Some of the big names tried to make other games, like Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, but they couldn't recapture the lightning in a bottle they had.TL;DR Games got dumber, and so did the players.
>>729421057Text parcers were kind of shit. The idea was pretty novel at the time, with the whole idea of "type anything in for a reply," but it never really worked very well in practice. You ended up with just a keyword entry method (only a handful of keywords are even recognized) or an overly restrictive sentence structure required.There's a reason that adventure games eventually just took over the whole interactive fiction genre. Even ignoring the text/graphics difference, adventure games took the whole "noun the verb" structure of interactive fiction and just standardized the verbs, then presented then into a user interface. There was no longer a question of how to enter a specific action when the verbs you could use was a limited list and the noun was an object on the screen.
They divorced themselves from puzzles and found a new audience as walking simulators.
>>729423689Parser adventures had the main issue of figuring out what that 3 pixel blob is on the screen.>get wallet>get bag>get glove>get calculatorIt got tiring. Text adventures let you know what the nouns were.
>>729424145True, but the point-and-click games were a lot more accessable for new players. Most players starting Zork for the first time are going to struggle to even get out of the house and start wandering around, much less figure out goals. By contrast, most players starting Secret of Monkey Island can start moving around and doing things almost immediately, thanks to the visual interface and the list of verbs right at the bottom of the screen.I tend to prefer text adventures to point-and-click these days, since they're a lot more descriptive and you can have a lot more and a lot more interesting content. But it's easy to see why most people moved away from the more text-heavy games, especially the ones that used the text parser for their main method of interaction.
