I remember the start of having an online way to figure things out, starting with the maps. Stratics was an early source for the current MMORPGs and the solutions. Before then, unless you had a group of people all sharing their discoveries on a BBS, you had pencil and paper by you to figure things out. It does change the game experience when you have to live within its boundary and can’t peek at the bigger solutions. Some games got frustrating because of this, but the Infocom line had their great parser that helped in its own ways by being a bit more accessible. That’s what I’m interested in more than the games themselves, how it was so good at conversational dialogue and understanding your prompt, in the same days where ELIZA was around in the personal computer world and was very limited because it was just IF-THEN clauses.
I remember the start of having an online way to figure things out, starting with the maps. Stratics was an early source for the current MMORPGs and the solutions. Before then, unless you had a group of people all sharing their discoveries on a BBS, you had pencil and paper by you to figure things out. It does change the game experience when you have to live within its boundary and can’t peek at the bigger solutions. Some games got frustrating because of this, but the Infocom line had their great parser that helped in its own ways by being a bit more accessible. That’s what I’m interested in more than the games themselves, how it was so good at conversational dialogue and understanding your prompt, in the same days where ELIZA was around in the personal computer world and was very limited because it was just IF-THEN clauses.
The rise of the Internet guide really ruined video games. MMOs especially are basically unplayable with how people interact with them.