Editing 91: Pwned

{{comic
| number    = 91
| date      = April 19, 2006
| title     = Pwned
| image     = pwned.png
| titletext = I'm sure a discussion of the reason for the disappearance of adventure games in favor of RPGs would be fascinating.
}}

==Explanation==

In the days of early computing, before personal computers, when mainframes were the only option for computing, such as the DEC PDP-10, or IBM SYSTEM/360, games were largely text-based {{w|Adventure game|adventure games}} distributed over ARPANET. The first of these games was Colossal Cave Adventure, or ADVENT. This was proceeded, however, by the vastly popular ZORK trilogy, originally on the PDP-10, but later ported to DOS and other systems, allowing it to reach a much wider audience. These games were based on an interactive story, and the player had to solve a puzzle on this by communicating to the application using only a keyboard. Play proceeded as such: the computer displayed some textual context, you entered a command (GO <direction>, TAKE <object>, KILL <person>, LOOK AT <object>, etc.), and the computer responded by giving the outcome of your command. This sparse context arose from the fact that games in the 1970s and 1980s needed to run on limited memory and microprocessor capacity, and on basic displays.

Over the following 20 years, technical advances allowed games to run in a real-time graphical context. Adventure games were largely displaced by other genres, including {{w|Role-playing video game|Role Playing Games (RPG)}}, where the player navigates a character through a graphical environment to achieve goals or gain in abilities, often involving a combat component. While the broad structure of these has a lot of similarity to adventure games, the experience is very different.

In {{w|Zork}}, specifically, players have to evade predators known as grues, which fear light, but love to devour adventurers entering the dark. Because the game is text based, it therefor does not offer any way to know that a grue is approaching, meaning that the phrase "You have been devoured by a grue." put an end to many runs.

"Counterstrike" is a reference to the {{w|Half-Life (series)|Half-Life}} mod {{w|Counter-Strike}} and its subsequent sequel. In the Counter-Strike series, you are either a terrorist or a counter-terrorist operative, and your goal is to stop the other from completing their objective. On a dark map, players would generally use night vision goggles, which don't produce light that would give away their position to the enemy.

Randall imagines a version of Counterstrike played in the text-context of Zork. Ironically, the outcome is not so different to what might be a typical experience of Counterstrike gameplay, particularly for inexperienced players: on starting the game, the player moves to another room and is immediately "{{Wiktionary|pwned}}" (a typical online gaming term meaning beaten, killed, or trapped/tricked, originating as a typo of "owned") by an enemy.

In the title text, Randall suggests that a comparison of the genres, analyzing the reasons why RPGs have proved more popular, would make an interesting study. His imagined example suggests that what has been gained in immersive environments may have been lost in complexity of story and gameplay.

==Transcript==
:Welcome to text-only Counterstrike.
:You are in a dark, outdoor map.
:> GO NORTH
:You have been pwned by a grue.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Video games]]
[[Category:Comics with lowercase text]]