Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Games as Environmental Texts

Games as Environmental Texts Fig. 1. A map of the convoluted cave system popularized by the early text game Adventure, drawn by Bruce Beaumont. Reprinted by permission of David Platt. Games as Environmental Texts alenda y. chang It is utterly diff erent in a cave. Within seconds you lose sight of your starting point. The sinuous passages twist and turn. Always you are confi ned by walls, fl oor, and ceiling. The farthest vistas are seldom more than one hundred feet—along a passage, down a pit, up at a ceiling. You are always in a place; you never look out from a point. The route is never in view except as you can imagine it in your mind. Nothing unrolls. There is no progress; there is only a progression of places that change as you go along. And when you reach the end, it is only another place, often a small place, barely large enough to contain your body. It is conceivable that you have missed a tiny hole that goes on. You may not have reached the end at all. The only sign that you have reached the end is that you cannot go on. And there is no view. Roger Brucker http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences University of Nebraska Press

Games as Environmental Texts

Download PDF
29 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/uni-neb/games-as-environmental-texts-xZICrXsBRz

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
ISSN
1938-8020

Abstract

Fig. 1. A map of the convoluted cave system popularized by the early text game Adventure, drawn by Bruce Beaumont. Reprinted by permission of David Platt. Games as Environmental Texts alenda y. chang It is utterly diff erent in a cave. Within seconds you lose sight of your starting point. The sinuous passages twist and turn. Always you are confi ned by walls, fl oor, and ceiling. The farthest vistas are seldom more than one hundred feet—along a passage, down a pit, up at a ceiling. You are always in a place; you never look out from a point. The route is never in view except as you can imagine it in your mind. Nothing unrolls. There is no progress; there is only a progression of places that change as you go along. And when you reach the end, it is only another place, often a small place, barely large enough to contain your body. It is conceivable that you have missed a tiny hole that goes on. You may not have reached the end at all. The only sign that you have reached the end is that you cannot go on. And there is no view. Roger Brucker

Journal

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences – University of Nebraska Press

Published: May 6, 2011

There are no references for this article.