I was recently interviewed for an article on interactive fiction (text adventure games) in an Australian IT publication. Here are some relevant quotes that might be of interest to KairosNewsies.
...interactive fiction scratches a particular itch among some players.
"An IF game requires the player to combine the textual analysis skills of a literary critic with the problem-solving drive of a hacker," he says..... "My writing students find it a challenge to think of writing as populating a database. You have to write the words that describe a physical setting in one place, then put in a different place the words that describe an action that may occur in that room." -- "Harking back to good old texts."
When players were also programmers
The point in this article that the players of these games were quite often programmers struck a chord with me. I imagine that most of us who enjoyed text adventures probably thought it was possible to create our own; I know everytime I read a novel, somewhere in the back of my mind I'm thinking of ways to write my own. I never consider it an impossibility to create such a thing; really, it just amounts to how much time I'm willing to put into something.
It must have been a good time to be alive...Just imagine creating a text adventure in your spare time and having it explode into the digital public sphere. The story behind the first Ultima game is one of those stories that makes you yearn for a time machine. :-)
It's sad to think that videogames have "evolved" to the point where only big-budget multinationals have a chance of getting a game on the shelves.