Video Killed the ASCII Star

It's been twenty years since Infocom ruled the gaming industry and what's now become known as interactive fiction was the pinnacle of the computer gaming field.  I have many fond memories of playing Zork and the other Infocom titles, as well as the MUDs that were their multiplayer offspring.  My first step onto the internet as a whole was actually when I dialed in to the university's modem pool (back when they were wide open and everyone trusted everyone else) and played the old IlliniMUD at speedy.cs.  That, of course, led to MUDding for me as a more general hobby; I was an Armageddon and Harshlands junkie in college, among others.  Some of my fondest roleplaying experiences (and most embarrassing ones too, in retrospect) were on those MUDs.

Now, it's been years since I've played a MUD really, and I admit most of my games that I buy and play now have flashy graphics, and I look down my nose at games with poor ones.  Part of me though, still misses the simplicity of those text based games, and it's mostly due to the way a text interface combines the best of simplicity and depth.  As a writer (at least an amateur one), a text interface gave me so much more power to create a vivid description than I can with any sort of graphical interface, and with unbelievable speed and flexibility.  What brought this to my mind tonight is that I'm trying out Second Life after being prodded by benoc for a few weeks now, and it is far more complicated to create an avatar that matches what I see in my mind's eye than it would be for me to write a description of what I want her to look like.

Now I'm still learning the interface, the terminology (is a skin just the textures on the model, or does it include the body shape?), and how to get around and what's there, but I have a hard time believe that even a talented artist can whip out a good avatar in the same time it would take me to write a good, detailed description of what I want.  Now add on top the difficulty with actions....

Just for example, imagine you wanted to translate the following exchange from a MUD like Armageddon to the same thing happening in something like Second Life or Neverwinter Nights:

The dusky, grey-eyed man brushes cobwebs away from the doorway, peering inside with his torch.

The dusky, grey-eyed man says:
       "It doesn't look like anyone's been here in years."

The alabaster-skinned, auburn-haired woman frowns slightly, nervously rubbing the gold locket around her neck with one hand.

The athletic, raven-haired man says:
       "Then our prize may still be here.  Come!"

The athletic, raven-haired man pushes his way past the dusky, grey-eyed man and strides confidently through the doorway, his torch held out in front of him.

Now, that's not exactly the world's most complicated interaction ever, and none of those emotes required a particularly huge amount of effort on my part to write.  But in order to do something like that in Second Life, aside from the effort involved in creating the avatars and the environments, you'd have to custom scripts for the brushing the cobwebs out of the way or peering inside with his torch, and a custom animation for the other man to walk "confidently" (not exactly an objective description that's easy to translate either), and a custom script for the woman to rub her locket.  I'm pretty sure all that would take longer than the 5 minutes it took me to come up with that scene and write it out.  I'm not even sure you could do something like that with an even less flexible environment like Neverwinter Nights.  Furthermore, when you make those custom scripts, you can't be sure how someone is going to take it, whereas when another person reads that description instead, their mind shows them exactly what you want to convey.

For that reason, as much as I'd really like to, I don't think it's going to be possible to translate the tabletop gaming experience (or even the MUDding experience) to the computer anytime soon.  It's also my big frustration with Second Life at the moment (all three hours of it I've messed with).  When text was king, I felt pretty happy with the way I presented myself and it was infinitely customizable.  When graphics are king, I'm just another peasant thanks to my complete lack of artistic ability.