Images Required?

Some people seem to think that images are quickly becoming a requirement, but an interesting thing happened. Mr. Flibble, author of Magician's Nephew, announced he was going for a second round of beta tests. There was a showering of requests. As far as I know, Magician's Nephew contains no images.

It's obvious why. Magician's Nephew is a really good game, with a cool premise and interesting choices. It also created a bit of a splash in the Shark's Lagoon (honestly, no pun intended) which generally is a more image-focused community anyway.

My personal feeling is that there is plenty of room for text-only games. What I think is true is that games with images don't need to be as good to get noticed. Now, whether we've set the bar for quality too high is a debate worth having, but I think it's evident the death of text is greatly exaggerated.

I'm eager to get my hands on the final version of Magician's Nephew. But I've got some work to do on my own game, first.