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I would go so far as to say if you get rid of the graphics completely and have text descriptions (think Dwarf Fortress which has many things that are not represented in its graphics at all, just in the textual descriptions) you fully free the imagination of the player.
Some things are just not representable graphically at all, my go to example is “the most beautiful woman he had ever seen”, easy to write in text, impossible to portray on screen in a way that every viewer will feel the same.
Idk, I really suck at imagining things like in DF, but I really enjoy the gameplay. I don’t need a good representation of what I’m interacting with, but I do need something.
Yeah, same. The game where that screenshot is from (DCSS) also has an ASCII mode, where that skeleton dragon would probably look like this: D
The text log would say that a skeleton dragon appeared, and I could even imagine a skeleton dragon by itself quite easily, but when it comes to a whole room full of monsters, then it’s just a lot of info to keep track of. The small textures are almost like icons, in that they’re a compact way of telling me where which monster is.
Sounds just like Dwarf Fortress, which had been ASCII for decades before the Steam version added graphics (you could get icon packs before that point though). And honestly, I love DF and played quite a bit in the ASCII-only mode (I used to SSH into my server and run in actual ASCII mode), because the gameplay was worth it. Now that DF has a proper GUI, I’ll just use that, and I don’t mind that it looks like a game from the 90s.
On the flipside, you give real intelligence 32 pixels and it infers photorealistic images:
(The textures are 32x32 pixels. Yes, that’s technically 1024 pixels, but shhh. 🙃)
I would go so far as to say if you get rid of the graphics completely and have text descriptions (think Dwarf Fortress which has many things that are not represented in its graphics at all, just in the textual descriptions) you fully free the imagination of the player.
Some things are just not representable graphically at all, my go to example is “the most beautiful woman he had ever seen”, easy to write in text, impossible to portray on screen in a way that every viewer will feel the same.
Idk, I really suck at imagining things like in DF, but I really enjoy the gameplay. I don’t need a good representation of what I’m interacting with, but I do need something.
Yeah, same. The game where that screenshot is from (DCSS) also has an ASCII mode, where that skeleton dragon would probably look like this:
DThe text log would say that a skeleton dragon appeared, and I could even imagine a skeleton dragon by itself quite easily, but when it comes to a whole room full of monsters, then it’s just a lot of info to keep track of. The small textures are almost like icons, in that they’re a compact way of telling me where which monster is.
Sounds just like Dwarf Fortress, which had been ASCII for decades before the Steam version added graphics (you could get icon packs before that point though). And honestly, I love DF and played quite a bit in the ASCII-only mode (I used to SSH into my server and run in actual ASCII mode), because the gameplay was worth it. Now that DF has a proper GUI, I’ll just use that, and I don’t mind that it looks like a game from the 90s.
“You are in a blue room. There’s a fountain. There are doors north and east. What do you do?”
DCSS <3