Well I just finished Photopia… I think I got it? I suppose since I haven’t read much lately so I don’t read that well? I mean I can read Engadget and Autoblog posts, but this is a different kind of reading. Throw in the chopped up nature of Photopia’s story and the fact that I’ve never played an IF before… I had to play it again to get a better gist of the story.
For those of you wanting to play the game, know that the game is VERY short. It’s more fiction than interactive (I can’t take credit for that), so it’s not even really that much of a game (virtually no puzzles).
From the reviews that I’ve read, this is a gem in the genre of interactive fiction. As this is the first piece of IF I’ve read, I don’t have any basis for comparison. It’s sort of like Memento (the movie) in terms of choppiness, except perhaps more so, because you are different characters throughout the story… so… maybe take notes?
I think that if you’re an avid reader, this story probably won’t be lost on you, even if it is your first IF. To a certain extent I kind of wish that I had more IF’s under my belt because I might have enjoyed it more. At any rate, it’s very short, but there’s a LOT to it. It doesn’t have the reputation it has for no reason.
Inspired by the film Get Lamp: The Text Adventure Documentary (watch), I decided I wanted to play one of these games. As I mentioned in a previous post, I have started playing Photopia. However, I thought I would post some links that may be useful to someone wishing to know more about the genre of interactive fiction and text based adventures.
All of these sites have a wealth of information about interactive fiction. As I’m so new to the scene, I’m still getting a feel for what’s where and such. The beginners guides that I have read so far are on Brass Lantern.
I’ve watched a couple of documentaries recently by a guy named Jason Scott. The first one, Get Lamp: The Text Adventure Documentary, I had seen before. Its about text-based adventures, which is a form of interactive fiction. The genre was largely killed off with the proliferation of graphical video games, but, as you can tell from the documentary, text based adventure games are no less immersive. In fact, I’ve actually started playing one called Photopia. It was written by Adam Cadre, an IF author interviewed in the documentary. I’ll post more about that as I progress further in the game.
Prior to making Get Lamp, Jason Scott made a multi-part documentary about BBSs called BBS: The Documentary. It’s kind of long, but very very good. I have embedded part 1 in this post, to view the other parts, click here.
BBSs were popular before the World Wide Web became the de facto means of communication between computers (and between the people who used them). BBSs enabled people to communicate with other people using their computer, a modem, a telephone line, and a BBS on the other end. Since users connected to BBSs by dialing into it, and long distance phone calls were expensive, most users of a particular BBS tended to reside in a small geographic area around the BBS (the size of an area code for example, or even smaller). This created a strong sense of community among users of a BBS.
We take computer-computer communication for granted nowadays with the internet and world wide web, but there was a time when that was not the case. There were a multitude of computer companies vying for supremacy, those computers were very expensive, and their functionality was limited. Despite this, people did buy them, and they did all sorts of amazing things with them. We don’t really think about it nowadays, but at the time, the future of computers wasn’t a given; nobody was exactly sure where this whole computer thing was going to go, and you can absolutely get the sense that it was a VERY exciting time to be alive and active in that community.
I wont ruin it, but the documentary portrays a very unique culture. This culture and these communities grew out of cutting edge technology and met its demise before it reached fruition. Almost as soon as the internet came out and was accessible by the majority of the public, BBS activity plummeted. There are very few BBSs that still exist today, and had it not been for the documentary that Jason Scott made, the history of BBS culture and the communities that grew out of BBSs would be lost.
The focus of the documentary is less about the technology, and more about the people and communities that grew out of it.