Text adventures online: games with your girlfriend
Here’s a scenario that may sound a bit close to home; your girlfriend doesn’t like first-person shooters, she mysteriously forgets how to use an Xbox controller when you pick the game, and paying for two MMO subscriptions is a bit silly when you alternate between the game and FarmVille while being attacked by ogres AND for gamers on PC, who can afford to build two gaming rigs?
Yes, I have been there. And trust me, she’ll never appreciate seeing that bad guy’s head explode into millions of gorgeously rendered, gory pixels as much as you do.
My girlfriend loves games she calls “clickity-clickity,” which range from age of mythology a Plants versus Zombies. we had fun playing Spore together, or rather, taking turns adding naughty bits to our creatures. But eventually I get bored because I like to jump between games, often. A one hour gaming session for me consists of 20 minutes of Grand Theft Autoa couple of rounds in Battlefield and something Tony Hawk.
Luckily, we both like to read and watch Netflix. We like to find a movie and then count “3..2..1..play!” while trying to get both computers to play the same movie at the same time. Which really works, because we both love playing online text games, so we can watch the movie while we raid some villages in the text game world (if you’ve never played an online text game and watched Netflix, is something I highly recommend). should make any pair, as it eliminates the ‘games or TV’ dilemma entirely).
Online text games are exactly that: they are just MMOs with no graphics. Some people say they’re like those choose-your-adventure books where you turned to page 76 if you wanted to go up the stairs or page 45 for the elevator, but that description hardly does text games justice. You might be thinking “text games sound so dumb, why don’t they have graphics blah blah?”.
No, friend, listen to me for a second. They are addictive as you would not believe. It’s like, imagine if the different cities in world of warcraft they were actually run by the players. All the stores you buy from are owned by the players. The shirt and pants you bought were designed by another player. All those houses along the street, the players bought them and live in them. We’re talking about a fully functioning persistent world with choices made by players, a real economy that fluctuates based on the actions of players and developers who actually care about and interact with their product.
A $300 graphics card, an i7 processor and 8gb of ram…never mind, my imagination blows any graphics out of the water. And text game developers know this, so they can take advantage of it and implement mechanics that graphics game engines couldn’t handle. Imagine how much your frame rate would drop if you had 200 people on screen with explosions and magic spells and bodies flying everywhere. I think your game would probably fail, brother. But text games can handle those kinds of scenarios… and beheading someone is much more satisfying in a text game because it’s not the same animation you’ve seen over and over again.
So the next time you don’t know what game to play with your girl, try text games. He’ll have fun designing clothes, gossiping with his girls, and influencing city politics while you’re mercilessly slaying enemies on the battlefield, and then when you return from raiding another city, the two of you can sail together to seek out and explore distant islands. . .
