91: Pwned
| Pwned |
 Title text: I'm sure a discussion of the reason for the disappearance of adventure games in favor of RPGs would be fascinating. |
Explanation
First off, three references have to be explained:
- "Counterstrike" is a reference to the Command and Conquer franchise expansion pack Red Alert: Counterstrike (or possibly the Half-Life franchise expansion Counter-Strike). In C&C, players start off the game on a map with limited visibility of their surroundings. Players must move units into "dark" areas of the map(called "Fog of war") to have visibility there. Different units have different ranges of visibility.
- "Pwned" is a typical online gaming term meaning beaten, killed or trapped/tricked.
- The "grue" is a predator in the game franchise Zork. Grues fear light, but love to devour adventurers entering the dark. Therefore, you cannot win the game without owning some light source.
Zork is a typical text-adventure, in which you play turn-based (like chess). The computer spits out some textual context, you enter a command (GO <direction>, TAKE <object>, KILL <person>), and the computer responds by giving the outcome of your command. This scarce context arose from the fact that games in the 1970s and 1980s needed to run on limited memory and microprocessor capacity. During the last 20 years, these barriers were broken down, and games in graphical context, and running in real-time were made possible.
Randall returns Counterstrike to the text-context of Zork, stating thereby that no player used to the real-time, graphical atmosphere of the former would have any appeal to the turn and text-based dynamics of the latter. And yes, that indeed is an initiation to the discussion mentioned in the image text.
add a comment!Discussion
Guest: An alternate way to look at this uses the same three cultural acknowledgements, but with a little more of thoughtful understanding. The grue lies in wait in the dark and devours the player, and likewise a 'camper' player in CS would wait for a player and kill them upon entry. It can be looked at that the blindness of entering the room that the camper kills the player at is comparable to the darkness that the grue eats the player from. All-in-all this amounts to a frustrating experience of dying in a game, and so a correlation is drawn. Because they seem to be similar frustrations, in which the only effective difference is whether you read it or see it, the text thus implies that there is no actual leverage that makes graphical games favored. It may also further extend from this to additionally taunt the relatively basic slang of getting killed in Counter-Strike being immature, brief, and unfulfilling compared to the larger descriptions that try to pull the player into the game that was needed for Zork to accommodate for the lack of graphics. 66.177.70.225 (talk) 03:20, 20 September 2012 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
It's not worth changing the description, as it's not relevant to the context, but Zork was not "typical" because it could understand more complex commands than most other (non-Infocom) text adventures, like "kill the troll with the axe". Mark Hurd (talk) 12:33, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
