You Tube is a fas­ci­nat­ing, isn’t it.

May Leop­ard Girl rest in peace.

Yep, a per­son could waste a lot of time look­ing at everyone’s home movies. The vari­a­tion in qual­ity is pretty strik­ing, but I’m impressed what peo­ple do with­out any of the fancy pro­duc­tion stuff that stu­dios have. Well … *gen­er­ally* with­out all that — there are some pro­fes­sional things in there too.

Leop­ard Girl: I think she would’ve wanted to go that way, although she might’ve pre­ferred a warmer cli­mate to go out in.

That was — inter­est­ing. Its been a while since I was addicted to an online game. Some­times its nice to loose one­self in a good game.

My boys used to get major cool points from their friends though. “You mean your MOM likes to play Star­craft??!! — COOOLLL”.

Deb

Well, you cer­tainly don’t want to under­es­ti­mate the value of cool points. I know some peo­ple that have done the online games, and under the right cir­cum­stances, I can imag­ine get­ting into play­ing one of those. I sup­pose I’d have a slightly higher opin­ion of myself — but only SLIGHTLY higher — for spend­ing many hours on some­thing like that, because involv­ing other peo­ple means there’s at least *some* social fac­tor to it. Right?

Reminds me of the night in col­lege when we were get­ting ready for a For­mal, and of course speed­ing things along by play­ing “Adven­ture” — an early main­frame com­puter game (this was the late 1970’s). We got stuck. We were out of time. The guy with the Lear ter­mi­nal run­ning the game wanted to back out care­fully. “No time for that”. Instead, we started throw­ing away all the “stuff” we’d picked up. We killed the canary. And we com­mit­ted sui­cide. It was just quicker. I’m not sure I can remem­ber WHY it was quicker, but com­mands were all entered as text lines, and there was no “pause” but­ton. The stru­ture was lin­ear, and the pro­gram either depended on your char­ac­ter win­ning (not a chance) or dying (most likely). The canary was the test case: “Kill canary”. “With what?” Then some­thing like “Throw axe”. And then fol­lowed this with some­thing like “Kill self”. “With what?” We tried every­thing from the bucket, to the keys.…I don’t remem­ber how we finally got the sui­cide to “take”, but that we did. While the pro­gram did indi­cate puz­zle­ment, it did comply.…to a round of amaze­ment and laugh­ter. Felt we’d actu­ally put one over on the pro­gram­mer — at last! And yes, we did pick up our dates on time. More or less. Okay, per­haps less. And none of this inanity had any­thing to do with a cer­tain pre­vi­ously engaged col­le­giate prac­ticed that might be known as “ice-chilled refresh­ing rehy­dra­tion while show­er­ing”. Nope. Not a bit.

I like your experience.…it does con­firm the all too human prac­tice of ensnare­ment in these absorb­ing things…only to the point of frus­tra­tion and wip­ing out of the whole as the inevitable “I’ve gotta get a life” kicks in. Yours is done beau­ti­fully. Things cer­tainly have improved since the text based games. But hey, my occas­sional whole­sale dele­tion of “book­marks” and “favorites” has noth­ing to do with my sim­i­lar ten­dency to get ensnared in dis­trac­tions. Nope. Not a bit.

Let the record reflect that the server host­ing This Side of Glory con­tains a work­ing ver­sion of the old, main­frame Adven­ture game. Even bet­ter? I have a walk­through and, no, no one was ever going to win that game with­out the walk­through — the pro­gram­mers were just sadistic.

Omigosh. ADVENTURE. That’s some­thing for a whole blog of its own. I think I fig­ured out pretty early on that I was never going to get any­where near suc­cess in that game, but that didn’t keep me from giv­ing away a lot of hours quite hap­pily, only to end up get­ting my stuff stolen by a pirate (“Hey!”) or end­ing up in a @%$!! maze of twisty *&$%!! pas­sages all alike.

Obliv­ion is the first com­puter game I’ve played of this ilk (I usu­ally go with the problem-solver ones that aren’t about cre­at­ing a D&D world, just about get­ting through a series of tasks), and it reminds me more of the text-based games than it does the other games with graph­ics. I think what hap­pened is that the graph­ics have finally caught up with the things that you could sug­gest in text. So Obliv­ion has so many dif­fer­ent ways you can go, and it can be mod­i­fied in so many ways, that it is absorb­ing in the way that Adven­ture was.

but only SLIGHTLY higher — for spend­ing many hours on some­thing like that, because involv­ing other peo­ple means there’s at least *some* social fac­tor to it. Righ

LOL — yeah if it includes lots of expli­tives then yes, there was a “social” fac­tor. I started my addic­tion just play­ing the reg PC ver­sion and dh tempted me into the online world. I was never, ever very good and the few times I was actu­ally win­ning — the kid (?) would throw a tem­per and leave.

All those talks about the old text-based games gets me think­ing about Zork. I think that is only game I wish they would bring back.

Deb

I shoudl clar­ify: The “expli­tives” were com­ing from the OTHER play­ers. I am a mother with small chil­dren — those words NEVER cross my lips

Deb

Phew! Good to know.

Deb, just an FYI: Zork was the com­mer­cial adap­ta­tion of the main­frame game, “Adven­ture.” If you Google around for inter­ac­tive fic­tion you can find ver­sions ported to the PC. Eas­ier: just go to http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgames… and look at the ones start­ing with adv — there are a bunch of dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the game.
(Greg, logged on as Grace)