Re: One- or no- object games.

[badanoj@bright.net (Jonadab the Unsightly One)]

"Chad Schultz" <chadschultz@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Then there is the possibility of a game with *no* objects. This game would
> have to have social puzzles for the most part, although there could be some
> standard puzzles.

Hmmm...  depends how "object" is defined.  Are rooms objects?  The
PC?  NPCs?  Only takeable stuff?  Inanimate, whether takeable or not?
How you define it is going to have an effect on the ease with which a
game could do without.  If you want a game with no objects at all, of
any kind, you're going to have...  nothing.  I mean, even Freefall,
Robots, and the like have objects of a sort...

> And would it be possible to have absolutely no PC? 

Depends how you define PC.  There's going to be a player (unless you
never release the game...), but whether you give the player
*character*...  Hmmm....  I don't know if you could have IF without
charactarizing the player at all.  You can avoid direct
characterization, but there's going to be indirect characterization.
Then again, maybe not.  I guess Freefall pretty much escapes this, at
least if you exclude the intro.  Of course, we've now left the realm
of traditional IF, but you knew that when you proposed "no PC".  But
I bet you could get closer to traditional IF than Freefall does
without a real PC.  I imagine puzzles are likely possible, and
storyline too.  

Someone else has already suggested the all-NPCs approach (Suspended,
wasn't it?)  But this is almost a semantic issue; it's really a
third-person form of multiple PCs.  Which brings up another point.
If you've got several PCs that interact with one another, say by
using ChangePlayer a lot, with the other players acting as NPCs
whenever you're not them, but with them being characters that you
have controlled in the past and will again in the future... you could
muddy the water a lot, but I don't think you'd escape having PCs,
you'd just mix them up with the NPCs a bit more than usual.  

The more I think about it, I'm not sure a PC-less game would usually
make for good IF.  Granted, it may be possible, but I am thinking it
would be a lot easier to write good IF if you do allow yourself at
least one PC.  

I'll toss out one more wild notion:  what about a game that builds
from an existing game but switches the protagonists and antagonists?
Maybe a game played from the perspective of the Pirate in Adventure?
This has already been tossed about in the Dungeon/Maze scenario
(which I'd really like to see done well...), but that was more in the
sense of reversing a generic typical situation, rather than a
specific situation.  I'm thinking of taking two actual characters and
reversing their roles, say having the player play the Pirate,
desperately seeking to protect his treasures from the marauding
kleptomaniac adventurer, or whatever.  Might be even more interesting
with, say, Krill protecting his castle from the invading meddling
apprentice wizard or somesuch.  Actually, that one probably wouldn't
work because Krill in the original doesn't do much except at the
climax.  How about the theif from Zork?  For the moment, I'm only
thinking about how this would work as IF, not what hoops you'd have
to jump through to get permission.  Let's assume for the moment you
*had* permission -- could you make it work?



 -- jonadab

Username in email address is dyslexic; correct to jonadab