I am going to take the liberty of saying that both of these viewpoints
are silly.
The potential for text IF is not explosive. Neither is it dying. (I'll
get back to non-text IF later.)
I agree that there are a few hundred hard-core fans left that we are
in contact with here -- that will hear of a new TADS or Inform game
and grab it from ftp.gmd.de. Probably there are thousands more --
tens of thousands -- which have bought the LTOI collections, or will
buy the Infocom genre collections. They all think the genre is dead.
(This thought actually revitalizes my interest in a text IF CD.
Activision thinks there's a market, right?)
On the other hand, we're not going away. There are more games now than
there were two years ago. I'm more interested in finding and playing
them than I was two years ago. I wrote one. I intend to write another.
> Ask Dave Baggett. Two years ago I was arguing your viewpoint. Text
> adventures, like the Mexican peso, have been devalued. They are no
> longer economically feasible in any form.
The guy sitting next to me in the office does live-action role-playing
as a hobby. He spends much time, money, and effort on it. Hobbies are
like that.
I think it's been pretty much a hobbyist field for much more than two
years. It will not make a significant amount of money for anyone. It
may make you a little something. That's *gravy*. I agree that doing it
for money no longer is sensible. Do you have no enthusiasm at all for
*communicating* with people? If not, why did you pick a hobby which
was art, rather than selling drugs or going to law school?
> I hope to just recoup my
> investment on Avalon and flee the genre, skin intact. 2 years. 2 lousy
> stinking years I been writing that game. And I'll be THRILLED, ECSTATIC
> to sell 15 frigging copies.
I suspect you'll be surprised. I don't expect you'll be able to quit
your day job.
I shall now trot out my own shareware experience. I spent a year
writing a Mac puzzle game. I even tried to make it IF, although not
text-based. That's a year, of perhaps two to three hours a day. Call
it a thousand hours of work. This is, mind you, nothing fancy.
Graphical, but no 3D; no fancy ray-traced sprites; no music; all the
sound effects were done by me making funky mouth-sounds into a
microphone.
I have made, to date, perhaps $5000. That's a hell of a lot, for
shareware. I was lucky. And it works out to, what? Five bucks an hour.
I've barely broken minimum wage.
But it keeps me in paperbacks.
(Footnote: It would have been considerably less if I hadn't made a
deal with a company that accepts credit-card orders via a 1-800
number.)
> That's a sum profit of jack nothing.
The net profit may suck, but the gross will at least lift your
spirits. Trust me.
> Basically, the well of enthusiasm within me on the topic of text
> adventures has nothing but dirt in it anymore. My current ambition is to
> move to New Zealand and herd sheep. At least that way I'll never have to
> see another one of those godforsaken DOOM/SF2 clones. No more Ultima
> 8s. No more nothing.
This I can do nothing about.
But I dislike the cliche that "Doom killed text adventures." Many game
genres have carved themselves out vast gaping cathedrals of public
interest and hot hard cash. That doesn't mean Infocom's little niche
has been paved over. Property values are down, but we're still sitting
here. (Here's the footnote I promised earlier. Some of the new game
genres are IF. There have been some good CD-ROM based adventure games.
End footnote.)
Anyway, self-pity is pretty indulgent. Some of my friends write
*poetry* for a hobby. Talk about being marginalized!
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."