I put “other”. Players can play my game the way they want to. I appreciate if they inform me if there’s an unintended way to cheat so I can fix it. And I actually love talking to players who are after the deep secrets and telling them stuff they missed if they are curious. If a player works hard enough to disassemble the game somehow, that probably means they are interested or frustrated, and I’d like the feedback either way!
I chose option 5 (“It isn’t up to me to decide”), although note that I wrote a debugger so I have provided abilities to cheat in this way (although it wasn’t designed for cheating), so I have kind of provided tools to do so although it isn’t a part of the game. However depending on what kind of cheating, in some cases the game may contain features to prevent from cheating although you could still try to use the debugger to bypass them if you want to, or even read the source code or solution of the game. However HanonO makes a reasonable point, if the game contains an unintended way to cheat then the author can fix it, but this would just be for the program of the game itself, and not the interpreter or the computer it runs on or external hints or whatever.
Note that when I answered the poll I got a JSON response; accessing the URL listed in the JSON response displayed the results page. I am not sure why it result JSON but nevertheless it was easy enough to work.
In a way, I’ve probably already thought about this because of Twine, but more in terms or spoiling instead of cheating. When you play a Twine game offline and there are all these helpfully-named files. It’s impossible to dig out the play file (which is probably index.html) without wading through all the files. You’ll see if there are graphics, what they’re called, if there are sounds, what they’re called. It’s a pretty imperfect way to start the game, which I don’t like, even if in real terms it makes little difference.
Certainly I’d dislike it if people had to go through something like that to start off an Inform game I made. They don’t at the moment.
-Wade
Can they be stuck in a resources directory alongside index.html?
It seems that the IF community generally doesn’t mind cheating. I find that commendable; personally, when I started out making my first game, I will admit I was irrationally worried more about cheating than anything else, such as making something of any degree of quality, lol.
I see.
That’s an interesting idea for a game. If I recall correctly, Chrono Trigger actually had something similar; you could skip to the very end, but you would get completely ruined by the final boss if you were ill prepared.
My example was more along the lines of an option that would compile your game’s source and resources into a ready-to-play webapp, with all logic done in JavaScript; presumably, it wouldn’t force you to release your actual project source. JavaScript, in and of itself, isn’t very well suited to obfuscation; minifying your code can work similarly, but it’s still entirely possible to figure out which code does what.
I see. Speaking of which, I’ve recently started playing Counterfeit Monkey - I love the story so far, but my biggest gripe would be the delay between commands and responses, which reaches into multiple seconds per response.
I’m actually quite interested as to the reason it takes so long to parse a string and respond on modern hardware.
Yes, I definitely agree that fixing bugs that allow a player to cheat is within an author/coder’s rights, and I might even go so far as it say that, in this day and age, it’s their responsibility. (within reason, of course)
Also, that’s a very interesting issue on Strawpoll’s side. I haven’t encountered it myself, though.
I agree with that much; I actually have a pet peeve when software of any kind is simply left in a big mess, with the primary application in the root directory with all kinds of files and folders. Presumably, such a feature would be integrated with a ‘play.html’ file and a resources folder, as vlaviano recently commented.
Counterfeit Monkey is now available on github for people to update to 6M62 and bugfix. Perhaps we’ll see some profiling and performance improvements as well. I haven’t investigated, but this post makes reference to a lot of upfront computation when the game begins (responsible for the undo issues with some terps). When I read that, I wondered how much of that computation could be done at compile time.
Then you can do what Infocom did; only put numbers for the name of the sound files (and they have said this is the reason why they did this).
There are several things it’s doing that involve searches across a large number of objects within the world.
– at start of play, caching information about every available game object and its name; then searching through that information during play whenever you try to construct a new object. The caching makes this faster, but not instant.
– routefinding across the map for any behavior where the player is moving multiple steps
– certain automatic behavior for NPCs to do with starting up conversation, and determining which of the implemented conversation is eligible. This affects everything from whether NPCs accost you when you first walk into a room to how a conversation command like ASK ABOUT CAKE is interpreted. (In the latter case, the game has to figure out a certain amount of world state — who is in the room that you might be talking to? What conversation content do they currently have available, out of all the dialogue implemented in the world? — before it can decide what your command is referring to.)
There are also some interpreters that are or were weirdly slow about graphics resizing. I know this was an issue behind slowdowns in a previous game, Alabaster, though I think that should be less of an issue for the map sidebar in CM because a) I believe the most problematic terp has been upgraded in this regard and b) CM has individual images for every single map state rather than attempting to overlay multiple partly transparent PNGs. (This is an obviously less good solution in other respects, such as maintenance and total file size, but was chosen for performance reasons.)
Even with those various factors, though, “multiple seconds” is a delay level I wouldn’t expect to see except on a mobile or browser interpreter, so I do find that somewhat surprising. If the source release of CM leads to performance optimizations, that would be excellent.
I don’t think the term “cheating” is meaningful except in a multiplayer context. If there were a player competition based on “who can finish this IF game first” - then I’d consider it cheating for someone to look up walkthroughs or disassemble the source code. When there are established rules in place, and everyone has agreed to them, then breaking the rules is not cool.
Apart from that - I put games into the world to create a good player experience. If reading a walkthrough or disassembling my source code will enhance a player’s experience of my game, then I see nothing wrong with it.
I see art as an act of communication through which the sender creates an “uncompressible” experience for the receiver. By uncompressible, I mean that any summary of the work of art (“Oh yeah, Moby Dick. This guy is obsessed with chasing down this whale. And the whale, like, represents stuff.”), or shortcut through it, would degrade or destroy the intended communication; it’s an ineffable thing that must be experienced. In that context, I see walkthroughs, hints, and dissassembling code as destructive to the art of IF.
I wouldn’t argue that the creator has any right to dictate what people do once the art’s been sent out into the world, any more than a speaker has a right to force people to listen to him or to agree with him.
One thing to consider is that some games will never be experience able without hints. I don’t know if there is a human alive that has beaten Lydia’s Heart of Finding Martin without a large number of hints, because these games are huge and hard.
Beyond these, as I’ve played through the IF canon I’ve seen so many games that have good writing but are essentially unplayable due to bad puzzle design. These games will never be enjoyed without a walkthrough, hints, or decompiling.
In a perfect world, all games would be playable without hints, but in a world of imperfect games, it’s only fair to allow users to find workarounds.
For me, it sometimes comes down to a question of, do I want to (A) experience this game imperfectly, or (B) not finish it at all? Because I don’t feel I can justify spending lots of time fruitlessly experimenting on something that I’m playing for recreation, especially since there’s always a chance the difficulty is related to a bug or spotty implementation. If it’s a game I’m interested enough in, I will almost certainly choose A over B.
As a game author, I put the hints and walkthrough there because I want people to feel free to use them (though I have also tried to clue things well enough in-game that hints aren’t necessary). My games are not high art, and life is short. I don’t want to waste people’s time.
I agree with all of this. But due to my genes and environment, using lots of hints generally takes me out of the game and thwarts my experience with it. If I reach that stage where I just need a pile of consecutive hints from the walkthrough, it pretty much coincides with me feeling so grumpy that I’ve lost all interest in typing them in. And I view this as some kind of failure on the game’s part. It happened to me with Anchorhead. That’s why I’m unlikely to play games where I know they have this reputation of: ‘You’re gonna be glued to the walkthrough for this one.’
A lot of those are from way back in the day, and back in that day, the games had fewer resources at their disposal to create an experience that would help you avoid super brickwalling. Small parsers, short descriptions, memory restrictions, etc. That’s why the older the game is, the less I experience my problem, or care. Sometimes I played it in its day in the first place.
I feel like if someone makes a difficult parser game today, they do have the power to round it out to vastly enhance its finishability ™ in-game. And I want them to do that, and I tend be pretty unforgiving of new games that don’t, or at least verbosely critical of that aspect while still liking other stuff.
eg
A Killer Headache - ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=14qjb3ersoyn4efx
Changes - ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=3q8lfs4x52le1vu0
But not many people are writing parser games that are both long and difficult, now. Even compared to a few years ago. D’oh!
-Wade
In a separate observation on cheating in IF in general, one IF system had an actual culture of cheating and cheat wars between authors and players: Eamon.
If that idea interests you, my first two Eamon reviews on this page offer something of a summary of what was going on:
ifdb.tads.org/allreviews?id=pnol … &tag=Eamon
-Wade
I don’t even take this attitude toward fiction–is it destructive to the art of W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants if someone who wouldn’t have got the other reference
reads an article about [url=Gone to Ithaca with the Butterfly Man | The Ambiguities]where Vladimir Nabokov appears in the novel?
Or if someone looks at the notes that explain some of the diction and references in Shakespeare? A supporting apparatus can make a work more accessible.
In IF, I suppose, the experience of figuring the thing out may be more of the intended experience–but then again, that experience will vary widely for different players in ways the author may not have intended, and as bg points out, a player who doesn’t solve it often won’t get to see the rest of the game. (Still in the market for a hint for Sparrow’s Song, by the way!) It’s not as though the second half of the Emigrants is glued shut if you don’t discover the fact I spoilered above. So I do think that if you aim to communicate something incompressible in IF that would be ruined by the use of a hint or walkthrough, and your target audience winds up needing a hint or walkthrough to complete your game, then you have failed at your goal.
Solving puzzles is part of the core experience of puzzle-based IF, and walkthroughs short-circuit that experience. It seems different to me than missing an allusion in traditional literature. The aha experience of “yes, I got that reference!” is similar to solving a puzzle, but an explained allusion isn’t as wrecked for future enjoyment as an explained puzzle. If someone misses enough of them, then, yes, there’s a significant degradation, but perhaps that person isn’t yet part of the target audience for that work.
Why does a player who doesn’t meet a game’s challenges feel entitled to the rewards for doing so? What if the experience being communicated is (ripping off Labyrinth) “Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle”?
This I agree with, although “target audience” is a key point, and “needing” should be interpreted with respect to a target timeframe and level of effort. If one wants to create a game with wide appeal, then one has to select a target audience accordingly. I’d advise authors to ease players into the challenge of solving puzzles and gradually ratchet up the difficulty over the course of the game so that they’re already deeply engaged when it’s time to bang their heads against the more difficult puzzles.
@vlaviano I feel like it comes down to different interpretations: author-centric, or player-centric.
As you said, “Why does a player who doesn’t meet a game’s challenges feel entitled to the rewards for doing so?”. This view is author-centric. It implies that the author has produced a work of art that is meant to be experienced in a certain way, and that there is great artistic benefit in doing so. The burden is on the player.
However, having seen the game creation process through beta testing and writing, I feel like most games end up as only a clouded version of their original vision. Many authors are unable to create the game that they hoped, and after several years of neglect, it seems that most authors just wish that someone would play their game at all. In this view, the burden is on the author to demonstrate that their game is worth playing at all, let alone in their intended way.
I played a few games as originally intended; I played Adventure without a walkthrough over a month, for instance, and that was a wonderful experience. But that game was written by a genius, and is exceptionally good. For most games, what’s the worth in realizing that the author wants me to “push ladder under fire escape” instead of “drop ladder” or “put ladder under fire escape” or “open ladder”? How is the player supposed to know that they need to search the fifteenth gravel pit they’ve seen instead of the fourteenth or sixteenth? If the aliens are allergic to peanut butter, why can’t I just put it on them instead of eating it and letting them eat me? A flawed game is no fun, and in general will only be played by walkthroughs or decompiling or not at all.
And I’m not talking about hard puzzles, I’m talking about under-implemented puzzles, padding with mazes/hidden exits/tons of searchable containers, or bad coding, which, due to the amateur nature of IF, constitutes 90% of all parser games in IFDB. In a world of perfect authors or great beta-testing, the sanctity of artistic vision should be preserved, but in the reality of amateur IF, it’s open season.
I’d also add, puzzles that don’t conform to a present-day player’s expectations. I’ve gotten brickwalled in several classic late-90s games because they didn’t explicitly say what the exits were. (In a couple of places this was a puzzle, but that type of puzzle works very differently in today’s games, and I also think it’s very anti-mimetic.)
I wouldn’t call my view author-centric; I’d call it game-centric.
It’s not that the game must be experienced in a rigid way because of the sanctity of an artistic vision. It’s that a game is a challenge, and the meaning in a game comes from the process of facing and overcoming that challenge. The player is offered entrance to the arena, not certain victory. I reject the notion that, if a game’s not worth playing, the solution is to cheat at it. The solution is to go play a better game.
Rules of Play defines a game as “a system in which players engage in artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.”
In puzzle-oriented IF games, the kind to which a conversation about cheating applies, the conflict is solving puzzles set by the author. The rules of a game typically prohibit outside assistance, and I’d argue that this is true of puzzle solving challenges. Unfortunately, unlike the referee of a traditional game, a computer program can’t enforce this.
If the core of a game is conflict defined by rules, and a person is bypassing the conflict by breaking the rules, how can we even say that he’s playing the game?
If we care about the art of a game, we can go on to ask: if he’s not playing the game, how can he participate in the artistic communication embodied in the process of playing it?
The art that is threatened is not the overt communication of pretty prose, but the subtle communication inherent in the dynamic process of interacting with a game world to solve its puzzles. Imagine a clichéd puzzle that involves searching a long hallway hung with family portraits for a secret door. Beyond the room descriptions and the family history in the portrait descriptions, there is the underlying vibe of inhabiting the hallway and carrying out the search: the length of the hallway; the tedium of examining, turning, pushing, pulling, looking behind each portrait; the grandfather clock that breaks the monotony; the scouring of familiar room descriptions as the player retreads the hallway looking for a clue.
Contrast that with “N. N. N. PUSH BARON’S NOSE. E” from a walkthrough. The experience is gone, because the deep interaction and attention to detail that arise from the frustrated pursuit of a goal are gone.
I don’t think of puzzle-solving challenges (without any players competing against you) as having implied rules against outside assistance. For example, it’s almost a cliche for people to work on crossword puzzles together, or at least for someone to ask someone walking by if they can think of a word that’s n letters long that means whatever. Crossword puzzle books come with answer keys. As for IF, it often comes with a hint system, put there by the author–I think it’s safe to say that if an author puts a resource there, the author is open to people using it. Infocom had InvisiClues, so there’s even an IF-specific tradition of clues.
When I think of referees, I think of teams competing against each other. I can’t think of a non-competitive game that involves a referee.
To me, the word cheating suggests that there’s some kind of ethical violation involved–but using clues to solve a puzzle in a single-player computer game doesn’t strike me as an ethical issue at all, unless you’re somehow harming someone or doing something that violates the software license. And if you own a copy of the game, the author has presumably received whatever payment they’re owed. Can using a walkthrough possibly spoil the fun? Sure. But I don’t see it as morally wrong.
Generally speaking, yes, it’s more satisfying to solve a puzzle unassisted than to use a walkthrough or hints. But if I solve the majority of a game without help, but use hints for, say, one puzzle, I can still have the satisfaction of solving the other puzzles. For me it’s not an all or nothing deal. Obviously you feel differently.