It’s kind of weirdly fascinating to me that someone would go to the trouble of playing the protagonist as a violent racist (speciesist?) just to see what happens, but still couldn’t follow through with it all the way because it seemed so wrong.

Animal Crossing offers another example of this. You live in a little village populated by animals who end their sentences with customizable catch phrases like “meow meow.” The game has no real point or ending, as far as I know. Maybe there’s a difference, though, between wandering around and exploring and digging up fossils just for the sake of fooling around, and altering an NPC’s catch phrase so they end every single sentence with the words “blue balls” (as my friends did).

As for how you did on that text adventure: I think that anybody still making text adventures probably doesn’t feel entirely beholden to the “you must win or lose” convention common elsewhere in the industry. I mean, they’re certainly not beholden to the “you must have graphics” convention.

And I’m with you on Riven; that’s the only game I ever bought a strategy guide for (because I just wanted to see the end of the damn thing).

More semi-random thoughts: Where do Sim games fit in? I’d think they’re largely under Tomfoolery, but part of me rebels against that because I’m usually frustrated by their lack of transparency (I read rule books as entertainment, so I may be an outlier here. (A good friend of mine plays them exclusively and enjoys teasing out what the unspoken rules are.))

The linear vs. branching story games are interesting for similar reasons. I tend to like both at various times, and am frustrated by both as well. Too linear (Myst 2 comes to mind) can get you bogged down at one point, while too much branching can leave you wondering if you’ve done well or not (depending on the feedback.) I’m thinking particularly of a text adventure game I played a bit ago (yeah, they’re still around) that had a very weird ending. I’m still not sure if I ‘won’ or ‘lost’ that game, or if I had merely reached the end.

… But anyway, reading up on the “simulationist” approach a bit, I realize that this does probably represent another sort of appeal that might not necessarily be equivalent to wanting a narrative. What really drove this home was idly browsing through the Mass Effect forums and stumbling upon a conversation about whether one of the potential love interests in the game is really what guys want women to be like.

Some comments indicate that people’s response to the character was very personal—they liked or disliked her based on what they’d want in a partner themselves. In contrast, my own reaction to that character depended very much on the type of protagonist I was trying to construct—one got along with her quite well, another kind of detested her. It was much more like characters into a story than like putting myself in a character.

The former, I suppose, is sort of a “simulationist” perspective, as opposed to a “narrativist” concern for plot, theme, and character coherence. (If I must be a stickler about my semi-rhyming terminology, I might make a distinction between “fantasy” and “story.”)