Right now I’m looking at the Infocom Gallery full of  box art and feelies.  Feelies are the extra content that used to come with interactive fiction games. They served as copy protection or just as sort of extras to make buying the game more interesting as well as create some of that “culture of the game.”

Some of the feelies are essential to solving the game. I’m seeing a lot of decoders of all kinds, and some of the murder mystery games seem to have evidence files, lab documents, and the like.  Many games come with maps which could be very useful.  A good amount of the feelies are in 2D print form, like folders and papers and maps. The more (visually) interesting feelies to me are the 3D ones. For example, the game Deadline comes with some evidence in a plastic bag that is tagged and labeled.

The game Leather Godess of Phobos (hahaha) comes with 3D glasses. I wonder what those are for? The cover says “with alluring 3D and scent-sational scratch N sniff.” I almost want to play this game just to find out what that entails.

The best feely I have seen thus far is this one from A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I’ve never played this game, but I don’t see this feely being very useful, just funny:

I can kind of see feelies being implemented in video games, serving the same purpose they did in IF games. I suppose you could make a puzzle that required a code or some other information that you could only get from a feely. But it doesn’t seem as necessary to have that kind of copy protection for video games today. Also, feelies served as the sole visual element for IFs, which made them pretty interesting for that genre. Since video games are so visual and can incorporate maps and things into the gameplay itself, feelies might seem unimpressive by comparison. The only way feelies might be effective in the video game world is if they were actual objects that weren’t just action figures or collectibles. Even so, if those objects were necessary to solve the game, the internet would definitely have the answers to whatever puzzles you needed to solve, making the feelies not actually necessary.