Mendel Palace

This is Aaron A. Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games (2023, I love that this came out the same year as Monsters, Aliens and Holes in the Ground). As you might suspect from the title, it is an exhaustive look at text adventures and other similar sorts of interactive fiction. He casts a wide net which often expands my understanding of the games and their descendants. Why do I accept games like Dragon Pass and Dwarf Fortress as text adventures more readily than Hack or Trade Wars 2002 or even dnd on the old Plato computers? There are lots of reasons, perhaps, but the bottom line is that I am grateful for all their inclusions, because they challenge my preconceptions. For the most part, it’s a bracing tour through the annals of what I deem to be an underappreciated (text has always been unsexy when compared to visual art) yet vastly important facet of videogames.

My lone bone of contention is Reed’s appraisal of AI Dungeon. I played that when it first appeared, before I was really cognizant of LLM “a.i.” I assumed the game was procedurally generated and was rather dull rather than revolutionary. None of the developments in the plot were terribly exciting or unexpected and despite playing several times, the action always seemed to curve back to the same loops.

That’s a quibble, though, for a book that is 600+ pages of meaty insight. It’s surprisingly well-illustrated, too, for a book about text. Lots of logos and advertisements and photos of floppy disks. If you’re a fan of text games and you can find a copy of this, you’ll get lost inside for weeks, guaranteed.

3D Mainichi Modern episode 3!

Full vid:

If you read the link the company does of course say they’re replacing the existing forums with new ones, and I’m sure no one would say the old ones didn’t perhaps need a lil bit of a glow up, some tech debt fixing… but there’s a few key notes in there:

They are NOT carrying over any history, data messages etc. from the old forums

They are NOT archiving, retaining or in any way saving the existing forums in any way

They have NOT provided any reasoning past ‘as part of continued efforts to support developers’

As an offhand, moderate read, this sounds to me like a desire for some change in the forums but deciding nuking everything is less expensive than rebuilding and carrying over info.

If I’m cynical, and likely realistic? Probably to increase sales of their latest GameMaker software by making it inherently more difficult for someone getting the older software for cheap pushing it to its limits. The amount of institutional knowledge on those forums is absurd.

And even if it is a benign reason, it’s still terrible because what do you mean you’re doing this with no recourse or potential for change? You sell software that runs on community goodwill? In an era where people are pulling away to open source software?? Crazy.

There are yeeeaaars of answers, plugins, suggestion, community built up on those forums - I’ve used the em to learn and grow my own skillet!!! And soon it won’t exist.

At the very least, they gave a ‘heads up’ - the deletion occurs mid December, so archiving by the community is possible from now. It’s just absurd that it needs to happen in the first place.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/

https://rpgmakerchat.com/

https://github.com/imraf/rpgmakerweb-archive/