Why text adventures aren't commercially viable

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1 June 2004

by Mike Rozak

Recently I've been pondering the following question: Why aren't text adventures commercially viable? The obvious answer is that they use outdated technology, have no graphics, and hence are like watching a black-and-white 50's TV show on a high-definition TV with surround sound. This is true to an extent, but it isn't the whole answer... Many people still watch 50's TV shows despite their colourlessness. Not nearly as many people play old text adventure games.

This paper discusses some of the reasons why text adventures are no longer commercially viable, and what lessons can be learned.

History of adventure games

First, let me provide a very brief history of adventure games:

So why do text adventures matter at all? Aren't they the deceased ancestors of modern graphical adventure games.

Yes.

And, no.

While graphics have greatly improved over the last two decades, adventure games have lost some important properties as a result of losing language (text being the means to convey the language):

• More than a game - In the mid 1980's, before text adventures disappeared from commercial viability, they began evolving into something that was more than a game. They began experimenting with ideas, actually expressing a few deep thoughts and trying to get the reader to ponder them. They (almost) became "literature". Graphical adventures abandoned trying to be more than a game, even though non-commercial text adventures (now called Interactive Fiction) have run with the concept.
  
  The reason why text adventures have headed towards literature and graphical adventures have not, is the same reason why books express ideas and Hollywood succeeds in special effects blockbusters. The more money needed to produce content (either adventure game or movie), the more that the developer caters to the mass-market and lowest-common denominator.
  
  
• Loss of language - The loss of language has limited where graphical adventure games can go thematically. Language allows for "hyper-reality", allowing the user to be "told" about more than just the visual and audio happenings. For example, it's trivial to slip a few lines into a text adventure describing how the character feels, or what happened in the past. Media without a narrator, such as graphical adventure games or movies, cannot easily convey such ideas.
  
  
• Less sophisticated mechanics - Adventure game graphics became more impressive over the decades, so impressive that Myst III took 2.5 years of development, peaking at 25 developers. Most of that work obviously went into graphics and sound, because the underlying mechanics have gotten simpler. If Myst III were written as a text adventure game, it would be easier to write than most of the Infocom text games. The world of Myst III (and other graphical adventure games) allows for only very simple actions (mouse clicks), and relatively little interaction. Myst III only included a handful of objects, most of them being scraps of paper. A standard Infocom text adventure included 50+ objects, many of which had multiple and complex uses.

This loss of capabilities bothers me. Stunning graphics are certainly a good thing, but I get the uneasy feeling that the genre has gone backwards. (It's not just adventure games. Other computer-game genres have followed a similar path. The fundamentals of CRPGs haven't changed much since Wizardry, also from the early 1980's.) I wonder if this is how the Romans felt as their empire crumbled and civilisation decayed into the dark ages.

A fresh look at text adventures

While I was pondering these thoughts, I decided to take a look at old (1980's) text adventures and new text IF to see if my memory of them wasn't overly rosy. I hadn't played a text adventure game for 15 years.

I downloaded and installed a few of these games only a few minutes. (I remember when 150 KB took hours to download at 300 baud.) I excitedly ran the game and was...

Well, I was bored.

My memory of text adventure games was a bit distorted, and I had gotten used to all the snazzy graphics and sounds of modern adventures. The sophistication of the parser, and the "depth" of the text adventures did impress me though.

Here's a summary of my thoughts about text adventures as seen through my 2004 eyes:

1. I have become used to graphics and sound, just as I am used to colour on my television. Going back to mere text and utter silence felt like a step backwards; maybe my attention span has shortened and I'm addicted to the stimulation.
   
   
2. Reading text off a computer monitor is difficult. As I recall, it was easier in the early 1980's because I used a green-screen monitor (as did most people). Green (or orange) screen monitors use a slower phosphor than televisions, which means that there's no flicker. (They sucked for fast-moving games though because the image would stay ghosted for half a second after it had moved on.) Modern monitors flicker at 60-80 Hz, which still makes text difficult to read. Even with a slower flat-panel display some flicker is noticeable.
   
   The other (minor) issue is that the text adventures I tried defaulted to small type and only occupied a small portion of my 1024x768 screen. Text adventures in the 1980's used larger type and occupied the entire screen, but that was all they had. Large type is easier to read, and it seems silly for text IF to default to a small font.
   
   
3. I expected to be able to use my mouse. The older games didn't allow this, but surprisingly many new IF titles do.
   
   
4. Early text adventure games required that the user create a paper map of the environment. Creating a map, in my opinion, is drudgery. Early games couldn't create a map because they didn't have graphics, but I expected the modern IF titles to have automatic mapping features. I didn't find any.
   
   
5. As a said earlier, the parser and depth of the worlds impressed me, although I still ran into "guess the verb" problems that my memory had neglected to recall with its nostalgia.
   
   
6. The new IF was much more experimental (and intellectually interesting) than the older commercial work. I suspect this is because IF has been taken over by intellectual hobbyists who don't cater to the masses.

These are just my observations. Many people enjoy playing text IF.

The larger question remains... Why aren't text adventures commercially viable? Here are some hypothesis:

Reason: Shrinking market for adventure games

While the number of computer users has increased by several orders of magnitude since the early 1980's (when text adventures were popular), the market share for adventure games has gone down. They are now a minor genre (only 1%-2% of the market), and are dwarfed by the market for first-person shooters, sports games, role playing games, and the sims. Occasional successes, like Myst, do arise, but the category does not dominate like it used to.

Why is this?

1. Only certain personality types are attracted to adventure games, namely those people that like to solve problems and "explore" new ideas. In the early 1980's, people that purchased computers were oddballs, spending a thousand (or more) dollars on very expensive calculator. I suspect that the same personality traits that attracted the early-adopter computer users were also the same traits that attract people to adventure games.
   
   Nowadays half the population owns the computers. While the "oddballs" still exist, they're a smaller percentage of the computing population.
   
   
2. In the early 1980's, there were half a dozen major operating systems and no standardisation for graphics (if the computer even had graphics). Text adventure games had the advantage in this environment because they were easy to port to different operating systems; graphics-based software, on the other hand, was difficult to impossible to port. A text adventure therefore worked on more platforms and had a much larger market share, making them more profitable.
   
   
3. Many computers did not have graphics capabilities at all. Game players were left will little other choice than text adventure games.

Because adventure games only appeal to a small segment of the overall population, they will only ever be a niche market. First-person shooters, sports games, and others less intellectual games will dominate.

Reason: Old technology

As I said earlier, running a text adventure on a computer that's capable of fancy 3D graphics, sound, and Internet communications feels like a waste. Having said that, I still occasionally watch black-and-white movies on my colour television. User's feeling like they're wasting technology is probably only a small part of the text-adventure's demise.

I suspect that a lot of what drives games sales is new technology. People like games that use the latest and greatest technology. If you look at the history of games you'll see that those games that use the latest technology at the knee of the technology adoption curve are major successes. If a game uses a technology before it's widely available, such as Ultima IX's use of 3D, it will fail. If it waits until the technology is established, another game will have become wildly successful instead.

Here are some examples:

• Text adventure games were big hits in the early 1980's, partly because computers themselves were a new technology, and anything that showed off the computer was potentially a hit. The text adventure games relied on two new technologies though: The floppy disk and natural language parsers. While text adventure games could be run off tape, they didn't take off until the floppy disks provided rapid access to over 100 KB of data. The natural language parser was also impressive... just think, being able to "talk" to your computer. (Since then, natural language has been forgotten by the public; I suspect it will be revived when people become interested in speech recognition.)
  
  
• Doom, the classic first-person shooter from 1993, was wildly successful because it was one of the first games to provide high-framerate 3D. It also included some sound, although sound cards were not yet ubiquitous. Doom couldn't have succeeded a year earlier because computers weren't fast enough.
  
  
• Myst was a huge hit in 1995. It was the first adventure game to take advantage of the latest computers with cool new CD-ROMs, 8+ bit colour, audio, and mice. Two years earlier, 4-bit colour was the norm, and CD-ROMs, audio, and mice were rare.
  
  
• Everquest is a hugely successful MMORPG from 1999. It came out just as 3D accelerators and 56 KBaud modems became common. Meridian 59, a 3D MMORPG that came out a few years earlier, when only software 3D graphics and 14 KBaud modems were common, failed.

Text adventures are not commercially viable any more not just because they fail to use 3D graphics, sound, and CD-ROMs, but because they don't use the latest and greatest technology. (This is also a strength, because using the latest technology increases development costs, which would change the nature of text IF.)

Following this line of thought though, one can predict that the next big gaming hits will use the next big technologies:

• DVDs - No game uses a DVD yet because the drives aren't common enough. I suspect the first DVD success will be an adventure game that uses multiple DVDs, just like current adventure games use multiple CD-ROMs.
  
  
• 3D accelerators with bump maps, shadows, etc. - They provide much more impressive graphics than current 3D games. MMORPGs and first-person shooters are already racing towards this goal. Expect to see the first batch at the end of 2004.
  
  
• High speed internet connections - At some point more than a fraction of the population will use broadband, potentially changing the nature of gaming.
  
  
• Speech recognition - This one has been predicted for quite some time but failed to materialise. One reason that speech recognition in games hasn't taken off is that headset microphones aren't common. High speed internet connection will allow for voice-chat instead of text-chat, radically improving multiuser games. Speech recognition may come along for the ride.
  
  
• 3D monitors - I've read reviews about these. They sound like they work passably, but they still cost a lot of money.
  
  
• Virtual reality headset - Although potentially revolutionary, VR headsets will first need to get cheap enough and stop causing headaches.
  
  
• Data gloves - Yet another technology waiting to happen.
  
  
• Video cameras that detect facial queues - When this works it will radically alter online chat.

Adventure games could take advantage of most of these future technologies. Luckily, only the 3D modelling aspects are development syncs. Some technologies, such as DVDs and speech recognition, are particularly useful to an adventure game genre. (Interestingly, speech recognition is less useful for other genres, although one first-person shooter has tried to incorporate it.)

Reason: People aren't willing to pay for text adventures

Even if people are willing to play a text adventure, they aren't wiling to pay for it. There are a few reasons for this:

1. Text adventures are obviously old technology, so they're not worth as much to people. DVDs of black-and-white classics sell for less than modern blockbusters. Even the distribution medium matters: A DVD movie sells more than a video tape of the movie (old technology), which sells for more than the paperback book of the movie (older technology). Interestingly, the DVD is the cheapest media to manufacture.
   
   
2. People often value objects by size. Have you ever noticed how software is sold in large boxes that contain nothing but air, a registration card, and a CD-case? Text adventures are "small". Thousands of them can be fit onto a single CD-ROM. Contemporary graphical adventure games take at least four CD-ROMs. One that required four DVDs would be even more "valuable". Because text adventures are so small they must not be worth as much money as a graphical adventure that requires four CD-ROMs.
   
   
3. Because of their small size, text adventures are distributed on the Internet. When someone "buys" software over the Internet, they hand over their credit card number (which people don't like doing over the Internet) and receives a E-mail with a password. That's it. No box, no CD-ROM, no map, no peril sensitive sunglasses, nothing. People like to receive tangible objects for their purchases.
   
   
4. Why pay money for a text adventure when so many free ones (many of them good) can be downloaded from the web?

Reason: Others

Some other factors also hurt text adventures:

• The computer market has changed from a primarily American market in the early 1980's to an international market today. For a game to be a success, it must be localised into a number of different languages. While the strings in adventure games can be easily localised, the natural language parts are more difficult.
  
  The text adventure parser needs to be customised for every language, taking into account word order (such as Japanese), word forms (every non-English language), and non-Roman character sets. Sentence concatenation code also need to be re-written. English makes it relatively easy to insert "you" and "the lantern" into the string "%s pick up %s." Most languages have declensions that turn this into a very difficult task.
  
  Inevitably this leads to coding. Not only are programmers more expensive than localisers, but they introduce more bugs, further increasing expenses.
  
  Graphical adventure games have no parser and never concatenate text. They only need to localise a few strings (such as the text that appears in Myst's journals) and do some voice dubbing, none of which require changes to the code.
  
  
• Piracy is another problem. Text adventures are no more than a few megabytes and can easily be downloaded off the Internet. If anyone tried to sell a text adventure, and it became widely popular, pirates would crack it and provide downloadable copies on the Internet. Pirates can similarly provide cracked versions of modern graphical adventure games, but most people don't want to download four CD-ROMs (2.4 GB) of data, even with broadband.

Conclusion

As you already knew at the beginning, text adventure games are not commercially viable. My examination of the problem merely enforces the conviction.

However, that doesn't mean that that interactive fiction isn't viable. It does need to change, however, if it's going to be anything more than freeware:

• Graphics and sound are required to make it commercially viable. Bleeding edge technology would help, but may not be necessary if a smaller market is acceptable. (Then again, the IF market will never be large, even with spectacular graphics.) While graphics and sound are incompatible with text, they do not necessarily eliminate language; either voice recordings or text-to-speech can be used.
  
• Online content and high speed internet connections are useful, not only because they are new technologies, but because they allow the IF title to be distributed over the Internet, avoiding the mass-market retail channel. A clever client could even download portions of the IF title on demand, hiding the download times.
  
  Online content also prevents piracy since if part of the content, such as the game's logic, resides on a safe server then the game cannot be pirated. Players will not be able to play the full game without first paying the author and receiving a limited-duration (such as 6 months) registration code. Only one client can use the registration code at a time. Pirates can crack the client software all they want, but if they can't log onto the server they can't play the game.
  
  Finally, online IF lets the author see how users interact with their world, allowing for fine tuning.
  
  
• DVD distribution won't work well because it'll be impossible to get a niche-market IF title into the retail channel (unless it's wildly popular). Mail-order DVD distribution might though, but users are unlikely to pay unless they can download at least a sample of the IF first. If they can download a sample, why can't they download the entire IF?
  
  
• Speech recognition and other new technologies can be used to improve the experience and marketability of the IF, so long as they don't make authoring too difficult.
  
  
• Localisation will be an issue. More emphasis on mouse clicks may reduce the problem, but some NLP parsing will be needed for any IF, especially if speech recognition is used.