Creatures Caves

I'm not sure I agree - I've always found Creatures very interactive and suspension of disbelief is a huge part of my involvement. I've said before in other threads that when I interact with Creatures I feel like I'm interacting with an actual life-form whose reality just happens to be digital. They turn and look at 'you' all the time - that is, toward the 'fourth wall' and even when I was a kid I interpreted that as the Norns (or Grendels or Ettins) looking right at -me-. The hand was merely the interface for my ability to respond to their attention if that makes any sense. It never limited my sense that I was "right there" with them, interacting, guiding. And it still gets me right in the feely places when they say stuff like 'get yes' or 'love hand' - their emotions are far more real than anything in the Sims et cetera precisely because I know it's not a precoded reaction to me simply playing the game properly as it would be in something like Petz. I really earned that.

Then again I've always been a person whose grasp of reality is a bit... not nebulous, since the difference between reality and fantasy is clear enough, but let's instead say malleable? The idea that my sense of reality is not absolute and could easily be wrong or incomplete has always been a dominant aspect of my psychology and therefore it's very easy for me to accept 'alternate world propositions', if that makes any sense. In short, I find it extremely easy to suspend disbelief given the slightest justification. So I may just need a lot less feedback from a game to feel involved by it than most people do.

I'm also not sure if it's complexity per se or just failure to pitch the game to the right people. Nobody I've shown it to has had a real problem with either the complexity of it or the open-endedness. In fact that's part of what interests people - rather than just hearing another fanboy ramble about some game he's interested in and they aren't, they become intrigued in spite of themselves by the sheer amount of stuff I'm able to do with the program. I've gotten people who haven't touched the game since childhood to get back into it and at least one person who had never played it before actually bought Exodus from GOG.com solely because of how enthusiastic I was about the games and the curiosity I created by describing my ongoing projects.

But of course, in those exchanges, I'm talking to fellow adults who are also fans of fantasy, sci-fi, and video games. In short, the exact people who have the intellectual orientation and mindset to appreciate Creatures even if they aren't as impressed as I am by the computing achievements involved. I think if Creatures had been specifically pitched to an older audience, and especially to the same audiences that read hard sci fi novels or watch hard sci fi movies/TV, it would have gotten a much more enthusiastic reception with a lot more understanding of how groundbreaking it really is. My father was impressed with it way back in the day when he bought it for me when I was a kid, but again, he's a semiconductor expert who lives and breathes computers so he knows precisely how remarkable what the game can do is.

Alternatively, we could just try to educate the public better about computing and AI, but... >.>