All right:
REAL LIFE: can differ greatly, of course, depending on who you are. But
since you're the sort of person who plays text adventures, we have a pretty
good guess.
Real Life, version 1: Undergrad. Sit in your room. Play text
adventures. Go to class when it's not too inconvenient, smoke a little
dope, drink a lot of beer. Maybe woo and win a boy/girlfriend. More
likely, strike out and crawl back into the bottle. The problem with
this one is that the plots tend to suck, and anyway, most of us are
kind of into I-F as escapism, and who wants to escape into the same old
place. _Busted_ comes fairly close to this genre, actually, although
few of us ever have the opportunity to be forewarned before the Men In
Blue come charging through the door to sieze our paraphernalia. The
various games set at college want to do this, except that they usually
end up in the "collect a lot of shit and drop it off somewhere"
category. Of course, *real* R.L.1 is usually like that: collect enough
reasonably good grades and get a diploma and a boot out into the hard
cold world.
Real Life, version 2: Dweeb. Sit around your smelly apartment in your
underwear, drinking beer, playing text adventures, and hoping that
_today's_ mail will have an offer for a job interview in it. Every so
often, snarl at the framed diploma on the wall and wonder why you
couldn't get a job after finishing college. This is even more plotless
and depressing--I tried a game in this genre, and had to give up,
although Arnold, the talking slime mold in the sink, was funny. Part
of it will be eventually recycled into the alt.tasteless game that I'm
never actually going to write.
Real Life, version 3: Graduate Student. Drink heavily. Smoke
cigarettes. Look bitter. Act bitter. _Be_ bitter. Drink some more.
Use big impressive words like "epistemological", "Foucauldian",
"imperialist rhetoric of hegemony", and "discursive". Drink some more.
This actually has potential for a plot: finish your dissertation before
your advisor dies or is snatched away by a school offering him/her a
better deal. The big con is that it's so unbearably depressing that I
need a drink. But implementing the cigarette pack is a nice exercise
under either TADS or Inform.
Hope this helps.
Adam
-- adam@io.com | adam@phoenix.princeton.edu | Viva HEGGA! | Save the choad! "Double integral is also the shape of lovers curled asleep" : Pynchon 64,928 | TEAM OS/2 | "Ich habe einen Bierbauch!" | Linux | Fnord You can have my PGP passphrase when you pry it from my cold, dead brain.