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Old 08-31-2007, 10:09 AM   #22
nekokami
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf View Post
The original name for this category of games was called Adventure games. People changing the name won't help as it's really still Adventure games. Always has been, always will be. I find the term interactive-fiction to be crud. It's so much nicer to say Adventure game. And it means more too even if the games themselves have evolved (the genre is still the same). The IF such as Colossal Cave and Zork were originally Adventure games. Now why change the genre name and call them something that sounds silly when the name they had (and always will have for those of use who know better) was perfect for them?
According to Wikipedia, the term "Adventure Games" refers to graphical games as well as text-only (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game). I've called the latter "interactive fiction" for the past two decades, and I started with ADVENT on the PDP-11. As far as I knew, "Adventure" was the name of a specific game, and IF was the general category. I can see extending "Adventure Games" to cover this wide range of both text and graphic games like Zork and Myst, but some IF isn't really about "adventure." I think for text games, IF is the standard term these days.

Then again, as a linguist, I'm usually more interested in how people actually use words and phrases than in how they are "supposed to" use them. Maybe a poll would be a good idea.
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