Re: Starving your players (was Re: Instant Death)


17 Mar 95 02:39:17 GMT

neilg@malibu.sfu.ca (Neil K. Guy) writes:

> I've sort of wondered if this starve-the-player thing is also
>something approximating historical momentum. The first major IF game I
>can think of to implement sleeping, drinking and eating using various
>timers was Enchanter. And I sort of got the sense that they might have
>been thinking "hey - this is a cool feature!" and then really
>overdoing it by having the player expire miserably if s/he doesn't get
>something to eat or drink within a certain period of time, etc. And
>then hundreds of other games followed suit out of habit.

I remember the first time I encountered it: in Planetfall.
And, indeed, I did think "hey - this is a cool feature!"
Planetfall had a lot of cool features like that. At the time,
they added up to an unprecedented level of realism. Nowadays,
we see them as unnecessary and annoying. But they really did serve
to draw me into the game, years and years ago.

Strange association: Ever see any old musicals? I mean, really old.
George M. Cohan is what I'm getting at. Basically, they would take
a bunch of songs and a play and put them together. The mechanism was
basically: have people perform the play for a while, then find some
excuse for someone to say something that leads into one of the songs.
Only when we started getting musicals like Oklahoma did the songs turn
into integral parts of the play. Planetfall was the Oklahoma of I-F.

-- 
Carl Muckenhoupt | Is it true that Kibo habitually autogreps all of Usenet
baf@tiac.net     | for his name?  If so:  Hi, Kibo.  Like the sig?