GET LAMP - Chris Forman [english]

Get Lamp is a documentary about interactive fiction (a genre that includes text adventures) filmed by computer historian Jason Scott of textfiles.com. Scott conducted the interviews between February 2006 and February 2008, and the documentary was released in July 2010. The documentary and its hours of bonus episodes and footage contain material from about 80 interviews with developers, designers, and players of interactive fiction. The bonus film includes a nearly 50-minute documentary on Infocom, the best-known commercial publisher of interactive fiction.

Source: Wikipédia

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C.E Forman is a writer of interactive fiction that can be found, as usual, on the IFDB, but he is also and almost above all (and this is the reason why he is featured in Get Lamp) a collector, very active in the small community of buyers and dealers of old rarities.

– Chris Forman starts by talking about the evolution of Infocom game packaging: at the beginning, they were simply sold in blister packs, but gradually they were presented in packages that were more and more extravagant in size, content and shape (to the point of being difficult to stock on the shelves of retailers, who for this reason, according to Forman, were reluctant to sell them). Houses like Origin (publishing Ultima) also offered elaborate packaging and games with lots of feelies, but it was Infocom that went the furthest in this area.

– The main charm of props and trinkets, a term Forman prefers to feelies, is their ability to both help the player visualize or better understand certain aspects of the adventure and the world in which it takes place, and to allow the player to live "in" the game, or at least with elements of the game in view and at hand, even when the program is not running.

– He insists that such packaging in editions that were not collector's editions, and that such a level of quality no longer exists and probably never will again. He also points out that even so, at the time, no one would have thought that such packaging would become so valuable to collectors over time. He speculates that eBay has accentuated the culture of collecting, and has ended up artificially inflating prices.

– Forman briefly cites the games of Adventure International (founded by Scott Adams), which he is quite critical of, citing in particular the limitations of the two-word parser, the lack of description, and the illogicality of the puzzles.

– For Chris Forman, the decline of Infocom can be explained by the growing importance of graphics in games, but also by the fact that its interactive fictions were sold as games, a term that had a connotation of immaturity for a literary public that could, with a different marketing approach, have been interested in this genre.