What do you look for in your IF?

Authoring General Design Discussions
13

I look for a couple different things in my games, including IF. Puzzles and challenges th be great, especially when presented with panache or humor. Dual Transform was awesome, and I can enjoy puzzlefests like Raising the Flag on Mount Yo Momma and The People’s Revolutionary Text Adventure Game too.

But I’m not great at puzzles, I don’t find it too rewarding to be flat stuck because I haven’t figured something out, and anyway it seems to me that the real potential of IF lies in story and the like. My favorite kind of puzzle/challenge relies on systems in a way that aren’t best presented in IF (logic puzzley things and roguelikelikes). IF is prose and can play to prose’s strengths. And even in non-IF games I don’t need crazy twitch challenges if there’s an engaging story. Small Worlds is the best thing ever, and making the jumps hard wouldn’t improve it; and Alphaland, Fathom, The Day, and A Single Word in Her Beautiful Calligraphy are all good games that are made by their story, not by challenging gameplay.

I like that in IF too; if the story is engaging and the interaction suits the story, I don’t need to spend fifteen minutes worrying about how to untie myself from this chair. In fact, that tends to detract from my immersion. (Ditto for non-IF games; I still don’t know what the normal ending for Cave Story is like.) And yes, there’s interaction. Photopia has interaction, East Grove Hills has interaction, Rameses has interaction, even Constraints has interaction. An IF without interaction wouldn’t be a failed novel, it’d be a novel. (Or this.)

So, hooray for stories. They should have a reason to be IF – make me move through the stories, and show me how to do it – but no need to get me stuck. Galatea, Best of Three, All Roads, the first half of Rover’s Day Out (before the puzzles that made it seem as though I should’ve been reading the status line the whole time), The Baron, those all worked for me without getting me stuck. I recently went back and played Blue Chairs and The Act of Misdirection, and they were great; and when the About text of Anchorhead said “It isn’t meant to be puzzle-intensive, and what puzzles there are aren’t meant to be difficult,” that made me happy.

(BTW, katz, if you haven’t played Blue Chairs you should.)

14

Although I really enjoyed playing some IFs, I think this kind of games lacks ambition and is mainly grounded in nostalgia. This can be seen in the technology used by inform (the i6 layer, lack of a universal type (kinda like java’s Object class, which makes the writing of some rules a real pain) )as well as in the if-writing style encouraged by the i7 layer.
To me, Interactive fictions are too simplistic, too static and lack content : most of IF games are puzzle-driven, yet nothing is done to prevent the same text from being printed over and over again(like when you type ‘look’ for the 10th time in the same room) ; this is probably because i7 has no “module” for text-generation.
But to me, the worst thing about IFs is the feeling of emptiness they imply : NPCs are very rare, no passer-by, no crowd. Most of them are unable to move.

My ideal game would be a kind of text-based GTA - a vast territory, with generated NPCs, with no main plot but plenty of “miniquests”, and a robust social model that would allow “stories” to be naturally generated through the players actions. For example you could follow some random guy, and figure out he lives in a small house with a wife and two children. You could figure out he is having an affair with another woman and send compromising pics to his wife. All of this being randomly generated.

15

The problem is that people have this now: World of Warcraft, GTA, and so on. I don’t think those audiences would even want that stuff all text-based. You would be giving up most of what makes that stuff entertaining for people: the graphics and audio capabilities that try to fully immerse you in the world. The “naturally generated” and “randomly generated” stuff you mention probably wouldn’t appeal to people who are more readers of books because they want the emotive experience they are used to when they read good fiction.

So, once again, I see text games and IF sitting on the periphery of an area that very few people (relatively speaking) want. Personally, I’ve almost-but-not-quite given up on IF at this point as anything worth pursuing, even as a hobby. Like you mention, I see it very nostalgia-based which I suppose is to be expected to a certain extent. I just don’t think that IF can provide what two core audiences may want (reading experience, gaming experience) to the extent they want it. And, quite frankly, I don’t think the current author-base (as opposed to player-base) of IF is effective enough to change the expectations of those core audiences to make IF fun beyond the self-enclosed community of practice that currently supports IF creation. I sort of feel like it’s a place to stagnate if you don’t really want to be a novelist/short story writer or you don’t want to be a game writer. It’s like this nebulous middle ground where you have the delusion that you can satisfy one or the other urge or audience if you just had a slighty better parser, or slightly more natural way of expressing it, or a slightly better tool, and so on.

Highly opinionated, I realize. I don’t expect people to share that opinion but it’s there for what it’s worth. I guess I’ll also throw in that I grew up on text-based games and fondly remember reading Choose Your Own Adventure and Interplanetary Spy. So I didn’t come in to this predisposed to find problems or be negative. Ultimately I guess I agee with your sentiment (but for a different reason): a feeling of emptiness.

16

Actually there are two quite sucessfull “IF-games”.

Phonatacid describes the gameplay of facebook pretty good.

The other one is google: commandline, quite good parser, each session is like solving a puzzle.

17

I disagree more or less completely with your two propositions. It’s not stagnation if people who aren’t interested in writing novels or short stories don’t write them. It’s a great thing. There are enough good short stories and novels to last modern readers a lifetime, and enough of the bad to line the world’s parrot cages a thousand times over.

Moreover anyone truly interested in writing for games could not ask for a better format than IF. There are a bare handful of commercial games with a distinctive, well-written narrative. It’s not a quality that the industry prizes, to put it mildly. A few companies like Blizzard and Bioware employ a fair number of writers, then set them to work producing flavor text and quips which even the target audience of 13 year old males must find insipid and trite. The AAA titles are unwilling to take risks and the smaller titles don’t bother.

There are only a few notable game writers. Chris Avellone, who peaked with Planescape: Torment and has spent the last decade writing the same game. Sam Lake, whose Max Payne and Alan Wake are deliciously overwritten. Ken Levine, who raised the commercial bar with Bioshock.

There are many more first rate IF writers. Even the run of the mill IF writer fares pretty well against his industry counterpart; each year the top half of the IF Comp contains more original thought and displays more raw talent than the vast bulk of commercial games released in the last twelve months. But the significance of IF is not in the authors but in the audience. Any gamer who genuinely cares about narrative quality should be familiar with IF. That constituency is really the only group we need appeal to, and improvements to the parser and player experience are only useful to the extent that they enhance that appeal.

18

I just went and played through Blue Chairs out of curiosity. I’m afraid it didn’t make me any more a fan of surrealist IF, but I did like the way the opening scenes modeled the experience of being intoxicated.

19

A proposition is a suggestion for something to be considered, accepted, adopted, or done. I didn’t offer any propositions. I offered an opinion. It’s cool to disagree, of course. I didn’t expect people who didn’t share my view to also share my opinions.

I agree. I would imagine it is an interesting ground in which to stake a certain amount of creativity. If that’s all you want, go for it. I wasn’t suggesting people shouldn’t work on IF. (I do notice people get overly defensive in the IF community; I don’t see this same defensiveness in any other gaming community of which I’m a part.)

That’s way too categorical and I know many, many, many game developers who do ask for (and find) better formats than IF. But they are also looking to reach much wider audiences and also bolster some other skill set. I actually could see IF being used to bolster a skill set in being a writer since I imagine many of the same skills in telling a story could apply. I rarely if ever see those discussions here, though.

Since I work in the game industry (and have done so for the last fifteen years), I can tell you this is totally incorrect. It is a qualitly that the industry is coming to prize and respect more and more. Yes, there are many games that don’t display “distinctive, well-written narrative.” But the same applies to IF. Even going back aways, lots of people did respond to the characters and story lines of old Sierra games and certainly games like The Dig, Monkey Island, Broken Sword, Tunguska, Beneath a Steel Sky, and so on. More recently, games like Alpha Protocol, Call of Duty (the modern warfare and black ops variants), Fallout, Longest Journey, Splinter Cell, Culpa Innata, Old Republic, and many others are just some of those trying to incorporate better writing and provide a more diverse experience. You may argue that they don’t succeed by your criterion – but those writers are reaching a much wider audience and having their experiments at writing and telling stories put to much greater test than just about any work of IF. As such, the industry has a wide user base to learn from and it’s a user base that continually experiments with RPG, first-person shooter, and hybrid games, often moving between them, allowing a good interplay of idea and technique.

Way too categorical for me and way too subjective. As a opinion, it’s cool. But you seem to state it as fact and then just expect others to accept that. (Again, a trait I notice in people who seem to feel the need to defend IF.)

You seem to have a lot of opinions – like me – so that’s cool. But you seem to have a categorical view of how much better IF writers are than those in other game venues. Since IF is never put to any real test except within its own isolated community (or forays into the “casual gaming” crowd), I guess for the time being you don’t have to worry about your claims being tested in any sort of overly critical way.

Rather, I would say that any gamer who likes a narrative component to their game play experience should, if they are a well-rounded gamer, be familiar with those IF games that do put a focus on narrative so they can determine if this is yet one more gaming experience they would enjoy. To say it is “narrative quality” begs the question. It’s not “quality” unless the gamer thinks it is.

20

I meant in terms of compensation and respect. It’s easy to pay lip service to the idea of better writing, especially when console graphics have hit a plateau and production costs have stabilized. I have talked to a fair number of industry writers, both in Seattle and Austin, and the impression I get is that they are essentially second class citizens. They get brought on late and kicked off early. Pay is unremarkable and credit protection is non-existent. For every staff writer with a stable job there are a dozen freelancers trying to land gigs writing everything from manuals to boxes to translations. It was rare to find anyone with genuine enthusiasm for the material they’d worked on.

The situation may have changed dramatically since 2008 but what with the recession and the slow recovery I would be surprised if much progress had been made. Last I heard rates were down and less experienced people were having trouble making their quote.

Again I can only offer my perspective, which seems diametrically opposed to yours. I don’t see much experimentation in FPS games. I happen to know that Bungie Studios hired a few game writers during the development of Halo: Reach. They may as well have been locked in a closet and denied essential supplies because I’ve never seen such useless and hackneyed writing.

I don’t mean that as a reflection on their talent; it’s just that there’s only so much you can do with a story whose salient points are know to everyone who sits down to play. I guarantee that it wasn’t the story they wanted to tell, but the word came down from On High that it would be a prequel, and so their hands were tied. (That is why compensation and respect are important; they make it more likely that when you hire a professional to do a job, you will actually let him do it.)

Still, better that than the other routine industry “experiment”: cut out part of the middle and most of the end when faced with budget overruns and deadlines, then have the writers struggle to repair the damage with a few lines of dialogue. Then cut those lines because who wants to see talking heads, right? (See Knights of the Old Republic II for the most egregious example.)

There is some experimentation with gameplay mechanics at the indie / XBLA level, but has there been anything since Braid that even pretended to break new ground in storytelling?

I would say that what you are characterizing as defensiveness is more of a zealous enthusiasm. While both traits are awkward in polite company, as far as I know we are all friends here.

I did not mean to suggest that IF writers are uniformly better than industry writers. However, IF writers have the advantage in that the medium puts writing front and center. Industry games rarely privilege writing to such an extent; the writers I name-checked are perhaps simply fortunate to have worked on titles that did. Perhaps too they are amazingly talented.

I play a lot of IF and I’ve played a good number of commercial games over the years. I try to remember the names of writers who have delivered a compelling interactive narrative. There are many, many more names on the IF side of my mental ledger. I happen to find this persuasive; your mileage will obviously vary.

21

I did like Blue Chairs, and I loved Shade! Unfortunately those were the only two really surrealist games I’ve been able to find.

Of course you’re welcome to like whatever sorts of games you like, but for me, “randomly generated” is a huge turn-off. A randomly generated game, to me, seems to have no meaning or purpose–you’re just doing stuff to do stuff. And a game that randomly generates the illusion of purpose (ie, you visit the guy’s house and there’s a “hook” that he’s having an affair) would be an incredibly, practically impossibly complex undertaking.

You could just say you don’t like them, since your thesis boils down to “nobody likes IF except people who like IF.” (I’m a writer/reader/game player myself who found my way into the periphery of the IF community because I quite like doing all of them and enjoy how they work in combination. I think the community is small because, most people don’t know it exists.)

22

This seems like a case for an IFDB poll! I’m not registered on IFDB, though, so I started a thread for people to suggest surrealist games here.

23

People don’t have this. I’ve never played World of Warcraft, but I suppose the heart of the game, what keeps people playing, are player-to-player interactions. I played the last GTA and found it was incredibly empty : you can steal cars, drive around, kill people, buy a hot-dog - and of course conform yourself to the player-character by completing predefined missions. That’s all.
I envisage text as a convenient short-cut. When you can’t afford the means to produce, write and direct a movie, what do you do ? You write a novel. I don’t have the skills nor the time to sculpt 3D models and animate them, nor do I have time to paint textures or build audio and physical engines. But I do think text is as efficient if not superior to images when it comes to transmitting certain mental structures to the audience, all the more so when you have no budget at all.

I don’t think people come to IF because they want to read good literature : personally, I discovered the word “interactive fiction” by looking up “text-based game” in google. Actually, the fact that IFs mostly rely on puzzles (as opposed to “freedom-generating”/exploration-based games, like GTA, WOW, or Minecraft) and that the same piece of text will get printed 5, 10, 50 times during the process in which the player engages in order to find clues/keys/doors and get to the next step of the puzzle, is rather appalling to most of people who come to IF with the hope of finding literary texts.

It’s not really the “randomly generated” bit that matters to me. I’d just like to play a piece of IF that is genuinely oriented towards the feeling-of-freedom side of video games. I’m in my 20s and I stopped playing video-games a few years ago because most of time they don’t satisfy my expectations. The last games I played are : Animal Crossing (it’s all about social interactions), fallout 1 or 2 (again, social interactions), and minecraft. This latter is quite an amazing game to me, since it relies on a very simple atomic concept : blocks. As a consequence, it opens a vast field of possibilities, new traps and mechanisms the game’s inventor hadn’t planned are invented every day. This is the kind of game i’d like to create : as a player, I’d like to be confronted to situations I did not plan when writing the game as an author. I want to be surprised.
I know what I am describing is far from the way IFs are designed nowadays (and 30 years ago), but when I started searching for text-based games, I was surprised by the hidden mechanisms they rely on : mostly, IFs look like [if … else if … else …] static tree structures. Actually, I haven’t found a game that develops its own narrative schemes (there are theories for this).

I know this an ambitious project and that I have like 20 years of development ahead of me, but I also consider it an occasion to learn new theories : of course that spying-the-husband-telling-the-wife-about-it example I picked seems to be extraordinary hard to implement. But it might be easier than you think once you’ve defined a social engine based on theories coming from the field of sociology, and people coming to IF in the hope of finding something similar to literature, might be more interested in playing a sandbox kind of game that offer a (hopefully) wide range of “superficial” social interactions than a game with a strong linear “emotional plot” punctuated with numerous puzzles that force you to read the same never-changing piece of text over and over again.

24

Phonatacid, what do you think about MUDs?

25

I suspect that novel may not be as satisfying to its audience or its author as one written by someone who writes a novel because they want to write a novel. (Love of the written word and so on…) I can’t see treating one medium as a cheaper alternative to another as a good way to look at things. Yes, IF is easier for one person to make than most kinds of games, and IF can even be used to prototype another game (unless my memory is playing tricks on me, the developers of one of the graphical Zork games did that), but to think of a novel as a poor man’s movie or IF as a poor man’s computer game is missing the point. Each medium has its unique strengths and weaknesses (even if we discount production costs).

I realise (or at least hope) that your intention wasn’t to value novels less than movies, but that’s how it read to me and that kind of statement rubs me the wrong way. I’ll stop my rant now. “kthxbye”, as the kids say.

26

To echo Trumgottist, there are actual good solid reasons for choosing the text medium other than budget constraints. As I said way back in my original response in this thread, I particularly like IF that uses the medium as part of its message. The Gostak: The Graphical Adventure would simply not be interesting or fun, and For a Change with 3D graphics and music might be okay (it would probably be basically a Myst knockoff) but wouldn’t have much to recommend it. Similarly, games such as Delightful Wallpaper and Shrapnel work precisely because of the very peculiar spatial paradigm IF has developed, and Shade and Rover’s Day Out play merry havoc with tropes that other genres just don’t have. I could imagine an illustrated Pacian game, but his prose is so fun that honestly I’d be a little sad to be pinned down to any particular visual interpretation of it.

Sure, some people use the text medium as a way of prototyping a game (and I say “prototype” when the envisioned gamed could well encompass more expensive assets, even if, as a necessarily time-limited hobbyist, the author has no intent to ever make the “real thing”), much as people may write scripts or create storyboards for movies that will never be produced. And that is great and noble. But text (and the specific medium of parser IF, with all its shorthands and quirks) can be more than just a short-cut.

27

I’m not even sure this is true anymore, with the rise of cheap/free game-making systems like Flixel, Unity, and GameMaker. (Though you might be able to say better than I have, as you’ve actually made games with graphics.)

One difference I can think of is in level of polish; it costs money to make graphics like Shadow of the Colossus, but it doesn’t cost any more money to write prose that’s as polished as that found in any professional game; you just have to be able to write it. OTOH, I’ve seen a lot of absolutely gorgeous games made with free tools; they just didn’t have the kind of 3d graphics that basically every big-studio game has, as far as I can tell (don’t play them).

28

All that said, I would really like to play Phonatacid’s game (and even share some of the concerns about the general design of IF; not that I think it’s fatal that you have to reread text sometimes, it’s just part of the medium, but I think IF could do more to exploit different ways of playing. Part of the reason gravel’s game seems so cool.)

29

It’s easier in the sense that fewer different skills are needed. To make IF, you need to be a writer, a designer and a programmer. To make a graphical adventure game, you need the same and a musician and a visual artist. And possibly voice actors.

30

You’re right about adventure games; I was thinking about platformers and other such things, which can get along without writing. (Though if they don’t, there needs to be a good writer involved.) Music is still an issue, I guess, though you can get some nice stuff from Kevin MacLeod.

IF should definitely be easier for me, because I have absolutely no hope as a visual artist; but some of the games I play seem to have better art than writing.

(Maybe roguelikes should be the easiest? You can do without writing or graphics. Design is pretty hard though.)

31

Do you really think there is a link between the size of your userbase and the amount of learning you can do as a writer? Yourself and two or three insightful critics – wouldn’t that be enough to learn what can be learned, and move on to the next attempt? I am certain that several thousand user reviews on Metacritic will not help, and my opinion of professional game journalism is not much higher. (Or maybe I am expressing that too negatively: many professional and non-professional game journalists do a good job reviewing games, but there is little worthwhile criticism going on.)

Also, as far as I can see most industry writers are (a) working on a team, and (b) not the creative director of the game they are making. This is surely a formula for failure, since ruthless solipsism is the hallmark of all good writing. Art is, I wouldn’t say the expression, but certainly the product of a unique consciousness.

32

There’s so much about this thread that pisses me off…