Can a game without graphics be better than WoW?

The vocal members of the WoW community are currently looking left and right for someone new to fall in love with as their relationship with WoW is fading away. This has become more and more obvious the last couple of weeks.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Cataclysm. It’s just that those who have been playing WoW for six years straight are pretty much done with it, needing a change of diet, and who can blame them?

A lot of the buzz has been about Rift, which I honestly couldn’t care less about. There will no doubt be a day in the future – yet to be determined - when I too am done with World of Warcraft. However I can’t see why I would want to play something that appears to be pretty much the same thing, with only some smaller adjustments.

My current plan is to stick to the original as long as it can hold my interest, and after that I’ll probably venture for a completely different gaming experience, which not necessarily will be an MMO. But I imagine will be playing some sort of game, which is a change of mind. I guess I’ve finally taken the step to recognize myself as a gamer rather an as a temporary tourist, accidently coming by.

A new game experience
This week I dipped my toe into one candidate to become my future gaming partner.

The game in question didn’t cost me anything; I was given it for free. It didn’t spring out from a huge studio inhabited by professionals. This piece of art was created by a hobby gamer like me, not for greed or for fame, but as an outlet of creativity. A world spawned from the writer's mind and I was invited to share it.

Did it look shiny and fancy? Hardly. There wasn’t a single graphic element to be seen, no eye-candy to dazzle my eyes. If someone passed by my screen, all they would see would be plain black text on a white background. Just like any Word document.

I didn’t dance around restlessly with my mouse and there was no frenetic spamming of key combinations. All I did the entire gaming session was to write text commands. “Talk to man”, “walk east”, “take x”, read the response and then write another command. It sounds a bit quiet, almost dull, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t.

I had ventured into my first piece of interactive fiction (IF) and I can’t remember last time I was this enchanted, thrilled and immersed playing WoW as I was during my session in the text adventure.

Interactive fiction
I’m a little bit late to the party, obviously. This genre isn’t he mother of WoW and other MMOs. It’s rather the grandmother’s grandmother (if you can claim any connection at all) and according to Wikipedia it peaked in the first half of the 80s.

I suppose the more jaded readers of PPI will sigh to themselves, asking what rock Larísa has been dwelling under during all those years in order to miss it out completely. But apparently I did and I’m glad that I finally got out of my ignorance.

The question is: is my fascination and newborn enthusiasm for IF well founded? Could it be just the sensation of novelty and change that I enjoy so much? Perhaps. But thinking about it closer, there are elements in it that I miss in WoW.

I think most of all it's the sensation of exploration, of stepping into an adventure. Playing my first text adventure, I experienced the thrill of folding up a story with an unknown ending, of looking at a puzzle that needed to be solved.

Even if I didn’t see the surroundings on my screen, I had a clear picture of them in my mind, noticing every detail in a way I never would in Azeroth, where I’m just rushing forward to turn in the next 12 trophies to the quest giver.

I walked from room to room, carefully examining every item I saw, talking to every person I met, always looking for clues. I opened doors, I tried out paths, I fumbled in the darkness and sometimes I got stuck and had to go back and rethink, trying another strategy. I guessed and I took chances. One door might lead to success, another one to defeat and if there were pointers, they were well hidden.

It was exactly the opposite of the concept of yellow exclamation and question marks, sparkles, cogwheels and marked areas on the map, showing exactly where to go next.

From autopilot to interaction
After trying out IF, I can’t help thinking that some of the convenience we enjoy in WoW, those handy maximize-the-cool-fun and minimize-the-boring-hassle solutions, also come with negatives.

If I’m completely honest with myself, it sometimes feels as if I’m playing WoW on autopilot. Absentmindedly I push the same nuke button over and over again, thinking about something completely different. And you may rightfully ask: what’s the point?

The text adventure on the other hand required my full attention, without giving away a single sound or light effect. The story was more involving than any boss fight and if I failed to find a puzzle clue I felt more frustrated and more motivated to overcome the challenge than if I had been wiping repeatedly on a raid boss.

I wasn’t only a watcher, I was an actor, a participant, or even a co-writer, since the continuation of the story depended on my choices.

IF may have peaked 30 years ago, but apparently I’m not the only one that is intrigued by it. From what I understand there is a community that is still going strong, making up new adventures that they share generously with each other.

Could this to some extent replace WoW for me in the future? Yes, possibly. And for some reason thinking about it makes me happy. I guess it’s the old punk rocker inside me speaking. I feel the smell of underground.

So to answer the question: yes, how crazy as it sounds, games without graphics, games without million dollar budgets, can compete and even be better than WoW and its clones in some aspects.

There are still enclaves of the world that are ruled by other incentives than money.

And naturally the toast of the week will be dedicated to those enclaves and to the enthusiasts that inhabit them. Here’s to all those who create new worlds or me to explore in the future, beyond Azeroth.

Cheers!