Even if it’s only 1 sentence per room (it’s not), that’s still 4000 sentences. I’d guess this is at least a few hundred pages of written work (without downloading it and just based on what you’ve shared). That seems pretty substantial to me.

Not sure what the length has to do with handcraftedness though. This comment is handcrafted even if it is short.

Going by the sample rooms above, (27, 21, 24, 28, 27) words multiplied by 4000 rooms divided by 350–450 words per page yields 200–300 pages indeed. But if it's mainly exposition and not interactable I can see how it would become dull reading quickly.

It is boring, there’s minimal interactivity. Quite a long way from the better text adventures out there.

Yes, but "Quantity has a quality all its own". Maybe a massive enough environment can be interesting despite being static.

(This led me down a rabbit hole trying to find a source for that quote. It seems to be mostly, and falsely, attributed to Stalin.)

Presumably it's similar to Soda Drinker Pro, which is 102 rooms, each with terrible MS paint drawings, in which you drink a soda and walk around for a minute or two.

https://youtu.be/C40kq29Emn0

This is so awful it's awesome. Thanks!

I think you're saying what the average person is thinking but is worried about being impolite. You are of course correct: it is the kind of fact about a game that non-gamers might still mistake for quality or depth.

The horseshoe theory of ai generation tells us that handcrafting and content generation extremism end up very close to each other: https://emshort.blog/2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-ge...

The fact that something is generated or hand-crafted is not interesting by itself no matter how much people try to pretend otherwise for social cohesion purposes. Mediocre thing + no AI and Mediocre thing + AI seem to be orthogonal to what people actually care about at the end of the day.

That Emily Short blog post is a good read, but I didn't find that it helped me learn what is "the horseshoe theory of AI generation" nor in what sense handcrafting should end up close to procgen or anything else. Can you elaborate and/or point to something that does?

1) left horseshoe prong (prolific handcrafted quantity is quality): "4000 handcrafted unique rooms made by one person" that are all fundamentally the same in terms of non-consequential interactivity. Ie, the quality is extremely low compared to what you can actually do even with QBasic!

Online, almost nobody is actually going to crack open the interactions.txt file. Instead, the conversation is about the idea of it being interesting or of any special qualities, when it isn't. The thing itself is just a prop for the conversation, and you can see where anyone actually talking about the thing itself is on the margins.

When this is for a free text adventure game, it's harmless fun to hype it. But the other prong is AAA hype and AI hype, which seems like the opposite but is actually the same thing.

2) right horseshoe prong ("infinitely generated quantity is quality"): "100,000,000,000 unique planets made by one generative codebase" was the premise of Endless Space and it had a very rocky launch that took years of bespoke human work and decisions to improve the quality. Because when you're deadset on quantity being your primary quality, you also don't have time for intractable complexity or true differentiation.

And you can see the consequences play out in an adventure game like Starfield where they included infinite random planet generation, except the interactions and space of player decisions remain the exact same, so it's more like an infinite screensaver than gameplay.

On both ends, the media and discussion is aggressively channeled away from the thing itself and towards the narrative of it being something compelling and noteworthy by virtue of how it was created.

The "robot barista" at the SF airport "making" you an espresso by having a servo arm insert a kurig cup and charging you 5 bucks is extremely similar to someone charging you 50 bucks at a craft fair for a "handmade" set of earrings that look suspiciously like someone just wrapped some copper wiring they bought online around a semi-precious stone they bought online.

In one case you are "participating in a spectacle of the future" and living in an aesthetically futuristic moment while paying 500% markup to drink a shitty instant espresso, and in the other you are "participating in a spectacle of the past" and harkening back to the aesthetic of a time where we all came together as a close-knit community at our town market to support our village crafters and artists while... also paying a 500% markup for goods where real or perceptible increase in quality/value-add is often marginal.

The goods which are remarkable speak for themselves, the rest is marketing.

Ah, okay, I buy that theory (especially in its incarnation as handcrafted earrings at craft fairs). I recognize the examples of robot coffee (or pizza) and handmade crafts as "genera" with an unfortunately large number of examples/species in the real world.

But I still fail to recognize the OP's 4000-room game as a species of any recognizable "genus" of similar games/products. I'm not saying it seems good, I'm just saying it seems pretty sui generis to me. Maybe I don't play enough bad handmade games. :)

I think it's more that the 'no ai' moniker is an advertising gimmick - similar to how food/produce being advertised as organic and naturally grown, or a piece of craft being handmade (as opposed to machine made).