Interface Design and Text-Based Games. When Marloes, Dave and myself started to discuss about this Facebook game idea, we quickly agreed that we were more interested in using a text-only environment. It’s faster to develop, the constraint is a great catalyst for creativity, it forces you to approach gaming outside of the popular interface metaphors and, above all, it fits perfectly with the text fueled social media environments we want to describe.
Back in the 70s, early computer games were de facto text-based due to the obvious lack of graphical environment, yet they still survived through several generations of action packed arcade style games. This popularity can be explained partly because many of us are still using terminals to interface with our machines – maintaining and building upon a long and healthy tradition of command-line celebration – but mostly because text remains a very engaging way to build a narrative. Here, your imagination is used instead of a Graphic Processor Unit, in order to construct a particular atmosphere, extrapolating from the couple of words displayed on your screen (shocking concept and heresy I hear some say). more... http://pluto.kuri.mu/2010/09/09/interface-design-and-text-based-games/ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
