Re: Feverish thoughts on posting

["Todd Gemmell"]

Ack! the talk beings and I am sporting a new body temperature (102f)
...Yipeee

forgive the editing below but I can think better with blocks of characters
swiming across the screen instead of a continous stream.....



>Ben Schaffer (whataguy@el*REMOVE*.net) wrote:
>
>> What I wanted to ask about was: why no more IF on the front page? I know,
>> graphics are important now. I know, other companies are in charge. But
>> today's games are not MORE than Infocom's.
>
>Why are there pages and pages of movie ads in every newspaper, and only a
>couple of mentions of best-seller novels, and nothing about poetry?
>
>Because most people don't care.
>

This may be true but "most" people don't care about fine art or well written
books. I certainly hope this does not coerce them into writting "Bay Watch"
scripts or painting "Starbucks" walls because "most" people care about that.


>> In 1982, people were pretty excited about video games. By 1985, they were
>> no longer excited. Why did video games fizzle? According to Douglas
>> Crockford, it was because nothing had really improved about them except
>> graphics. The games weren't any better. Consumers said, "That's it?
That's
>> all we can expect?" and they moved on. Graphics weren't enough to hold
>> them indefinitely.
>
>That's absurd. Nothing improved about books either. Hell, nothing improved
>more than fractionally about *cars*, but people still get excited over
>those.
>


This implys that cars and entertainment are consumed in the same way and of
course they are not, despite attempts by marketing departments to sell us
the new model and the sexy extras, a car remains a tool. Disney continues to
suffer from diminishing returns from it's feature animation films because
the audience has become numb to the Disney formula.

>In 1982, computer users were a tiny, self-selected group -- economically
>upscale, neophilic, and smart. In 1985, this was less true. In 1990,
>forget it; that same group was a tiny minority of the computer-user world.
>The trend continues exponentially.
>
>> But in the current computer game world, people DO wait anxiously for the
>> same games with better graphics. Can this be a temporary resurgance of
>> this phenomenon?
>
>No. Different people.
>
>> Would it be possible, in other words, to successfully market a game with
>> the requisite status-quo fancy graphics which nonetheless takes as its
>> core the Infocom-derived game of discovery?
>

GAWD! I hope so.

>I think many -- even most -- graphical adventure games have tried. Some
>have succeeded more than others. You can't look at the Tomb Raider genre;
>it's the Myst clones that are taking the most interesting steps.
>

I wish I could take some of the drugs he is on. I am not feeling very well
right now and I think they might help..

>But most of them wind up fluff, for the same reason that most movies are
>fluff. It's economically infeasible to spend two years and hundreds of
>thousands of dollars on any product which won't be a smash popular hit.
>Therefore, everything must be targetted to idiots. The exceptions
>generally fail. (Look at _The Last Express_.)
>
Well I dissagree. I think the product needs to deliever at the industry
expectations of graphics, sound cinematics etc etc but if you have a
compelling story engine underneath... ya just might have a hit....

>As the cost of graphics declines, we'll start to see independent works --
>stuff written by hobbyists in their basements -- that are experimental,
>literate, interesting, and also visually stunning. But they'll never make
>headlines, just as text IF will never make headlines.
>

We'll see. I remember hearing that about garage digital pictures too and
they are still not there yet. I think there will need to be more tools to
flatten the curve for hobbyist before IF can be made by the masses. I do
have hope though, I am in my garage (well not literally) tinkering away.

going back to my Nyquil coma now :)

-T