You might be interested in the interview with Dave Lebling:

http://www.adventurecollective.com/articles/interview-davelebling.htm

He talks quite a bit about the limits of text adventures, both in the
past and today.

He also has some comments on the early work and object oriented coding.

It's interesting that even Infocom has some remote influence from Spacewar.
:)


On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 11:33:40AM -0400, Roger Kenyon wrote:
> No question. I was pointing out the limits of current IF authoring
> environments in favor of something, as you say, entirely Squeak-based.
> 
> > More interesting would be an entirely Squeak-based IF system that
> > could offer something new (which couldn't really be said for a z-code
> > implementation in Squeak or compiling Squeak to z-code).  An etoy-like
> > or etoy-based graphical adventure construction kit could fit the bill,
> > as I think it would be the first widely cross-platform compatible such
> > system, and one of the few providing access to a complete and flexible
> > underlying system.
> 
> On the other hand, my reference to Game Maker
> (http://www.cs.ruu.nl/people/markov/gmaker/index.html) was to suggest not
> limiting the tool to text-based adventures. Take a look at the Game Maker
> documentation (that's about all us Mac folk can do with it). Now imagine
> something like this for the omniuser -- a step up from eToy tiles; a set
> down from actuall Smalltalk code.
> 
> Frankly, I think kids would eat it up. Judging from how active the Game
> Maker forum is, I am sure they would.
> 
> --
> 
> R. Kenyon
> 
> |T|h|i|n|k|L|i|n|k: http://www.riverwoodpub.com/educatio.htm
> Not everything is black & white: some things have to be read.
> 
> 
>