A dream of mine was always to write text adventures. I have always loved the genre, but I found few worth playing since I always felt either confused or cheated by the experience. The sense of wonder and experimentation is what I always came back to again and again.
The timed puzzles or the ones you need to solve something in
a specific order don't interest me. What I loved were the ones that gave me
that sense of experimentation and discovery, where it wasn't totally on the
nose in what you were supposed to do, but you could pick things up, experiment,
try things, dress up (or down), and see what happens next. Playing with all
sorts of fiddly pieces and having that experimentation pay off and reward me in
that I followed the writer's mind into some strange place where putting the puzzle
pieces together and trying things got me somewhere I wasn't supposed to be.
But now I am, and the writer knew I would be here, so I am
afforded a special reward with a new set of toys and actions.
The mental sandbox. The box is full of toys. The piecing
them together and discovering new things.
But alas, the days of DOS and the command line are dead. I
know people who, when you say 'computer,' all they ever knew was a phone. They need
to learn how to move a file in Windows or get into Control Panel. The era of
text adventures was a short time before the advent of computer graphics, and I
can remember the days when the text adventure went the way of the bundles of
300 games sold in the bargain bin.
I still love the genre and its throwback nature because I
love to read, write, and figure things out for myself.
If I had a dream job, it would be to write erotic text
adventures. But pictures! But images! But 3d graphics and all sorts of immersive
technology with animations of sex positions and couplings never really line up
correctly to insert the required tab into the correct slot. I don't care. My
words are more potent than any of those technologies; better yet, all the
graphics they create are inside my reader's heads.
Why? Why not a visual novel?
You don't have the same hidden wonder and experimentation
level in the visual novel as in pure text. And you are still limited to all the
censorship that visual media are subject to. In the written word, I am much freer.
Nobody cares about words.
Nobody reads anymore.
With AI and Chat-GPT, the only people left reading will be
bots. We will have a civilization of bots writing and reading, and nobody alive
is left to appreciate anything. And since I "experimented" with AI
text generation, I can spot it from a mile away. It sounds like a Wikipedia
article talking to you, heavy with facts and dates and with no coherent
narrative flow. You can tell this diatribe was written by someone real because
it rambles, but it has a logical flow and progression of ideas.
AI text generators are impressive, but they are nothing
anyone living would sound like.
But text adventures are my secret love. They are also my hate
since so many of them devolve into puzzle games that I give up on, or I end up
banging my head into imaginary walls trying to figure my way out of the room
that does not involve a 300-step process that hinges upon getting a butterfly
to carry a paperclip with a piece of string attached.
I don't care about the room puzzles. I don't care about
scoring points. I don't care about the game of Mousetrap. I don’t care about
playing one way to "win" the adventure.
I want to be surprised again. I want my creativity to be
rewarded. I want to find hidden things and find ways to do new things. I like
the story to be completed in one method in a completely logical sense and then,
if I am silly or crazy enough, finished in an entirely different way based on
my choices.
Oh, and I want there to be sex in there.
Lots of sex.
I get bored quickly and want to discover all the sexy parts
too.
Why?
Because I like discovering things, I want to seduce the
NPCs. I want to undress and live out my exhibitionist fantasies. I want to
touch myself in locations where I need to exert caution and discreetness. I
want to secretly remove those panties and take care when sitting in a skirt,
lest no one knows. But all that needs to be discovered. None of that is told to
you or some visual novel option that can be clicked.
I want to find that secret path through this story that
should never be told, only imagined; only in the book I dream of…it can happen.
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