Text is absolutely not the highest bandwidth medium for imagination. Think about what a textured polygon can convey about a character in just one glance: color, clothing, dimensions, facial expression, posture. It'd take paragraphs to convey all this information in text, but with graphics it takes but a glance.

If what this quote is referring to is the fact that text based mediums force us to use our own imaginations, it's actually because of the opposite: text is exceeding low bandwidth for communicating imagination, and because of that low bandwidth users need to fill in the gaps with their own.

Isn't "fill in the gaps" the point? What exactly does a polygon character make a person imagine? Text like "He was a nefarious looking character dressed all in red" takes a very small amount of bytes but the resulting payload in someone's mind can be huge. I guess you could argue that images might be a better mechanism to transmit someone else's imagination but text is better to activate your own and I think that is what the quote was about.

There's undoubtedly an appeal to exercising one's own imagination. But any text based interface locks off a huge amount of options for interaction. You'll never have a racing Game, a shooter, a flight simulator, any kind of visual puzzles, etc. in a text based game. The constraints are enormous and there's little question as to why there are so few text based games today. And those few that do exist and are popular like Dwarf Fortress, Tales of Maj'Eyal, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, etc. all support graphical tiles.

> You'll never have a racing game, a shooter

We had a variant of each genre in uni, designed for checkered paper.

And how did you aim the reticule against your opponents in this checkered paper game? Gameplay ran in realtime? I'm sure you mean to say that you created a pen and paper game that had shooting as an element, but backed by some kind of dice roll. This is conforms to what I said were the constraints of text based games: graph or grid based worlds with turn based or pseudo turn based simulation. Shooters in these kinds of games do exist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/722730/Cogmind/ but they exhibit the same constraints I mentioned

Of course it was not real time. You just picked a shooting direction along one of the two axis.

Imagination is our mind's output about things that are not conveyed. Please watch the video as Bartle explains it so elaborately. Text -> low input, high output.

Right, text is the lowest bandwidth form of communicating imagination. And to make up for that low bandwidth users have to exercise their own imagination. It's like storing actual vertices of a sphere, vs. having the client execute code to generate the vertices given a position and radius. This is as opposed to graphics where the creator has enough bandwidth to actually portray their imagination on the screen.

While there's undoubtedly an appeal to exercising one's own imagination, it introduces two key shortcomings. One, the users imagination doesn't always produce the expected output, and two by locking the interface into a text based interface a whole host of gameplay options are off the table. You're never going to have a text based racing game, or anything involving physics. There's a reason why almost all text based MUDs have a graph or grid based world and turn based gameplay: because that's all you can really do with a text based interface. You could build a racing minigame in a text based MUD but it's probably just be rolling checks against some kind of character stats rather than having the player actually guide a car around a track.

> the users imagination doesn't always produce the expected output

That's not a bug, it's a feature that literature uses quite a lot.

> You're never going to have a text based racing game

Actually thinking and typing fast in some MUDs can be vital.

> There's a reason why almost all text based MUDs have a graph or grid based world and turn based gameplay: because that's all you can really do with a text based interface

Roguelikes are turn-based, but MUDs are semi-real time (sort of turn based with short time limit).

The grid layout is essentially historical in the sense that users have certain expectations. Probably one could use GPS coordinates and Logo-style commands, nowadays even a rusted Raspi could handle that.

But builders and makers are, I believe, more interested in world-, story- and character- building than in technical feats like this. And so are the players.

i made a text based horse-racing game. it's just different. a different medium and experience. i remember an old DOS professional wrestling game that was text and i found it more fun than the wrestling arcade game. my memories of it have better graphics even.

You commonly hear that "the book is better than the movie."

I think there are many reasons for this (one being omitting details for the sake of time), but the main reason is probably that text leaves more to the imagination.

I both built and played MUDs from 1994 - 2003. From your comments is seems like you didn't read the article.

Of course Roblox is not a text-based MUD. Not even the author is arguing that. Mechanically, it's incredibly similar in social dynamics, creativity and difference of worlds, and the fact that you can design your own world/mechnaics so easily.

> Roboblox could not be farther from MUDs

This statement is a bit extreme no? That's what I was addressing.

I suppose you could say so. But also depends on the perspective, I am very passionate about MUDs obviously :)

Having heard this sentiment a lot during my gaming days (and as well in the context of books vs. movies), I've always felt a certain amount of shame for not being able to get into text games. Is there something wrong with my imagination? I don't think so, I'm a total daydreamer type whose head is always filled with random thoughts and ideas.

I like to think there's an axis orthogonal to "imaginative capability" that factors into why some people prefer text and some (ok, most) prefer graphics.

An interesting part of this is EVE Online, which has plenty of pretty graphics, but I've never been able to get into that (or any spaceship-based game for that matter), despite being a style of game (sandbox/world-building) that I otherwise really like.

Seeing the screenshots of UO and SWG in the article gives me the chills. I was fully immersed in those games (particularly SWG). It seems that running around a world as an individual humanoid character is the most deeply engaging experience to me.

thank you for saying that and for the game link. i think MUD should stay as meaning a multiplayer text adventure. you and this whole thread gets me inspired into making a MUD.