Genuine question - what is the appeal of a text-based game? Is it that you can play async? Something else? Like why not just play a regular video game with regular controller and graphics?
It's much easier to support off-the-wall interactions and new game systems naturally in a MUD.
By that, I mean... adding a new race (for example) in a graphical game requires art assets, animation rigging, sound design, and ALSO the programming side of it. There may be follow-on work too, like producing equipment models that suit the new race's dimensions.
In a MUD, you just program the new race, and off you go.
This ability to iterate quickly, with a lower barrier to ideas, means that you can try all kinds of things on a very low budget.
"The necromancer managed to raise both a skeleton and a hollow skin, which I'll keep because it makes as much sense as a walking skeleton"
"My adventurer fought through around sixty zombies in the tower, killed the necromancer, learned the secrets of life and death, and then raised various limbs (not my own). Then I talked to one of them, and it told me that it was peasant. It was flattered but had no need of my services. I imagine its little fingers were shaped into the form of a mouth and they flapped back and forth while it spoke with a high-pitched voice. I guess there's still work to do."
"Of course, you might prefer raining "blood", but we don't have generic blood anymore and I don't think it's proper to add it now that we've got real alternatives, though perhaps a slurry of some kind would be appropriate later. It didn't even work out right with the rodent man blood — the indexing was screwed up, and we ended up with "a dusting of rodent man skin"... dandruff snow."
The same thing! Imagine getting new features, new content, and new systems at a far more rapid rate from a far smaller developer.
And most MU*s are free. The paid ones, like GemStone, are even better... though the subscription price might be hard to swallow for people who are used to AAA graphical games not costing anything (at least on the surface).
This seems like a fair enough value proposition i guess.
But, how do people get interested in the first place? Is it just one of those things you see your friends doing and do it for social reasons and then a few weeks later you actually enjoy it for it's own sake and the cycle continues?
I don't know how people discover MUDs these days. I discovered them in the mid 90s because I was bored and happened to find out about them on a Usenet feed.
Not a text-based gamer so maybe others can respond better, but this is probably similar to reading a book and watching a movie. Imagination has no limit.
The keyword / genre here is "Interactive Fiction"; MUDs fall in the same league as text based adventures of old (which later on started to add some graphics until they eventually evolved into e.g. the Monkey Island games), or even the choose-your-own-adventure (comic) books.
It's an older style of games, but honestly, I could have seen myself getting into this back when. It's tech that predates MMO's like WoW or Ultima Online. It's stuff that works everywhere.
And of course it's a different way to experience a game and its story. Dwarf Fortress also comes to mind, weirdly.
It's like the difference between a movie and a book, or photorealistic animation and pixelated ones. It's not that one is better than another, but changing styles is fun.
It is a different genre with different strengths and weaknesses. I think it is best to illustrate through concrete titles:
Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short [1]:
It is a parser based puzzle game. (Parser based means that there is a "command line" where you type in what you want to do.) In the game you play a smuggler who wants to steal some high tech plans from the island of Atlantis. You see, the Atlantans developed cutting edge tools in linguistic manipulation. They have devices which can change one object into an other based on manipulating the written form of their name. For example a d-remover can turn a playing card into a drivable car! During the game you solve a bunch of challenges with different creative application of such tools. If you like puzzles, puns, and word magic you should try this game.
Vain Empires
by Thomas Mack profile and Xavid [2]:
"The memoir of a demonic spy in the Cold War between Heaven and Hell."
Another parser game. Here you are playing a devil, who is trying to prevent a global catastrophe. You cannot directly manipulate the world around you, but you can pluck motivations from the non-player characters head and implant it in others. Thus manipulating you have to steal secrets, negotiate a peace treaty and foil your heavenly counterpart’s plan for world domination.
And just to show that not every text based game is a pure wall of text. This one is a hybrid visual-textual one:
80 days from Inkle [3]:
It is a choose-your-own-adventure style story game. It is based on Jules Verne's 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days. You play as Phileas Fogg's manservant, who has to manage the whole travel. There are two different "screens" to this game. There is a globe interface where you can decide on your travel options. Do you take the Orient Express to Paris, or board a ship sailing southward? And then there are the "text" screens where you have to navigate all the unexpected adventures life throws at you. If you like a globe-trotting steampunk-ish adventure this game is for you.
So why interactive fiction?
These games were generally created by small teams or even by single creators. Such indies can invest their time making games which would be too risky for a big studio. So you will find many strange concepts and weird experiments. You can find many of the interactive fictions are off from the mainstream zeitgeist.
Another point is the economics: A single writer can create a whole word if they want. Text is a very efficient medium that way. The core concepts of the first two game in this list is a perfect fit for the textual medium. Would be very hard to transfer their mechanics into a visual game. The third one in theory could be a fully visual game. It would have just cost a lot more to create. All scenes would have an associated hefty development price tag, which in turn would have meant that the developers would have had to design the game much more economically.
Because of their medium the developers of 80 days can afford to have a crazy branching story structure. You literally can go anywhere on the globe and find different adventures! If each of those "scenes" were fully developed 3d game elements this would be impossible. Not even an AAA studio could afford to do that.
Another hybrid is Fallen London, whose graphics are mainly interactive cards with text, an image and some buttons, but the majority of the game is text. In it, they tell a number of stories set in the worldbuilding efforts done by the creators. This worldbuilding has also been used in other games by the studio, Sunless Seas/Skies.
The medium allows low cost creation. Low cost creation allows lots of experiments. Lots of experiments leads to some weird but wonderful concepts.
Perhaps throw in that humans seem to be good at abstraction and then the lack of graphics doesn't matter sooo much that it can't be overcome with a great concept?
I feel a bit wobbly about your question though. Would you ask someone who is hiking in a forest why they are not surfing on a beach instead? Interactive fiction is not a faulty game where the graphics is somehow missing. It is a different experience. Some days you entertain yourself with this, other days with that.
a thought provoking question: why would you read a novel where you can’t influence what is going to happen? What is the appeal in that? :)
In my mind a graphics based game was strictly better. Your example is more obvious in that it has a choice but no one would say one is strictly better (even a surfer).
So I was wondering what I was missing. Because the graphics based game can't be strictly better if people are playing these text based games. My mental model and the evidence didn't match.
I think I have a better handle on it now, your explanation above was a good one.
To expand on this a bit, even when it comes to graphics, more complex isn't necessarily "better".
Sometimes a simpler presentation helps focus on what matters most. Sometimes leaving things to the audience's imagination is more impactful than showing them explicitly. Relying on "closure" from the audience is a common technique in horror, for example.
Sometimes interactive fiction can express abstract concepts or subtle detail through prose which would be tremendously difficult to convey visually. The IF titles "9:05" and "Spider and Web" do very interesting things with unreliable narrators, for example. Less can be more.
Thank you for asking the questions! It really helped me clarifying my thoughts too.
If you are interested in how these games look like / play, but don’t want to invest too much effort into it you can take a peek at a game play video: https://youtu.be/fFqg5gAbeAw
This one is someone playing Overboard. In this game you play an actress in the roaring twenties who just thrown her husband overboard from a trans-atlantic ship. Your goal is to get away with the murder before the ship docks in New York. (Perhaps by framing someone else.)
By that, I mean... adding a new race (for example) in a graphical game requires art assets, animation rigging, sound design, and ALSO the programming side of it. There may be follow-on work too, like producing equipment models that suit the new race's dimensions.
In a MUD, you just program the new race, and off you go.
This ability to iterate quickly, with a lower barrier to ideas, means that you can try all kinds of things on a very low budget.