Starcross

     Man, for a guy that loves science fiction, I have no idea what I'm doing here.  as seen in the screencast, I barely managed to turn off the alarm.  Every other move I tried to do was not understood.  The game I chose was another Infocom game, Starcross.  Like I mentioned in my last post, it is really hard to play a game with no visuals for me.  Maybe that's due to me being more accustomed to reading comics than books, I don't know for sure, but I tend to give up easily with these games.  Kind of like the Halo games, no control scheme is the same.  There is always something different that throws me off.  Sometimes the game would say there is a small screen, and when I type "look at small screen", it tells me no such thing exists.  I've had this happen multiple times in multiple Infocom games so far, hopefully I get smarter when it comes to playing them.

Zork

     This wasn't my first time interacting with a text-based adventure game.  My interactive fiction class already had a few for me to try out.  But i will admit this is the first time I tried.  I did not get very far though.  In my screencast of Zork I clearly hit a wall that my mind couldn't get over.  I think what helps for me in pieces of interactive fiction are visuals, set choices, or a mix of both.  Dropping someone like me in a fictional world and given no direction to get started just ends with me getting lost (very quickly I might add).

     Games like MNOG have visuals to go by, and they help the player start exploring without directly telling them where to go.  It's the player's curiosity that leads the way.  I'm considering doing five minute screencasts of this and posting them weekly, or filming multiple parts and releasing two or three parts at a time.  Hopefully I can find some way to stitch the videos together, if not I'll just label the videos in parts.

     Set choices are also a great part for me at least to use interactive fiction.  Many works found on inklewriter have this aspect.  Mostly with no visual element to go off of, they give players choices on what to do. There is a set story, one that the player needs to pay attention to.  Text-based adventure games seem to just have a start and a finish, and it takes work to get there, but they feel like a puzzle more than a story.