{"id":180,"date":"2002-03-01T15:20:04","date_gmt":"2002-03-01T20:20:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2002\/03\/01\/\/"},"modified":"2005-10-22T16:46:25","modified_gmt":"2005-10-22T20:46:25","slug":"games-for-book-geeks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2002\/03\/01\/games-for-book-geeks\/","title":{"rendered":"Games for Book Geeks"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It’s Friday. I’m at work. So what am I doing? Spamming the HPOP admin list, of course.<\/p>\n

I don’t really have anything to blog about, except the fact that I’m really glad it’s the weekend and that I hope I can manage to be productive. I was minorly productive.. Tuesday. I cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom, because I’d so been looking forward to having those clean while I got the apartment to myself. But I haven’t really bothered to cook dinner or anything since then. It’s been very bad. Tonight will be different though!<\/p>\n

So, something to talk about.<\/p>\n

Text-based games of the Infocom sort are at this point about 20 years old. At the time they were written they were extremely innovative, and I really think they still are today. No console RPG can hold a candle to the real problem solving that has to go on to beat one of these things. The only thing I can think of which compares are lateral thinking problems, of which they sell books. (I will put one of those up here tonight if I remember.) You’re given very little information, no visual, and only very skimpy instructions. Once you get the hang of the commands, you can probably guess how to input things, but overall you’re presented with a bewildering variety of situations and puzzles to solve. And, what’s better, no random battles, no levelling — just an interactive text adventure written in a surprisingly literate manner.<\/p>\n

There are limitations, of course. Because of the primitive state of technology at the time, the games are pretty linear. There’s no way to go back and fix bits you may have messed up on. There usually aren’t too many optional sidequests. But they force you to think more while you do them. There haven’t been too many recent games of which I can say that.<\/p>\n

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It’s Friday. I’m at work. So what am I doing? Spamming the HPOP admin list, of course. I don’t really have anything to blog about, except the fact that I’m really glad it’s the weekend and that I hope I can manage to be productive. I was minorly productive.. Tuesday. I cleaned the kitchen and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}