I don’t know if any videos like this exist, but it seems like the kind of resource that would be nice to be able to point new players to.
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I’ve been meaning to make one! Need to bump that up the to-do list…
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As someone who is sick of being flooded with video tutorials whenever he googles “How do I do x” sometimes even after adding -youtube to the query, I have to ask:
Are there any good text tutorials for parser IF not specific to particular games?
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The Brass Lantern Beginner’s Guide to Interactive Fiction is pretty helpful, although it has some outdated links to other websites.
There’s also the How to Play IF Postcard, which is shorter–more of a quick start guide. It’s available in different formats, including PDF and HTML.
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I think one of the obstacles to the creation of “how to play parser IF” videos is simply that videos play at a creator-specified rate, but people read at a wide variety of speeds. Since parser IF is necessarily a textual medium, much of what a viewer is going to be doing is reading the text in the video; but for a certain number of people, the text in the video is going to be moving too fast to read along with; and for another group of people, the text is going to be moving too slow. Decreasing the percentage of people in either group necessarily increases the number of people in the other. This is exacerbated by the fact that there is no good way to change the video play speed with any finesse on a lot of video-presentation sites (though this situation is better than it was five and ten years ago. In particular, YouTube’s UI for this has improved vastly in the last few years).
Personally, it drives me crazy to see text presented at a speed I can’t control, because I usually read faster than that speed, and nothing breaks my immersion in what I’m reading more than having to stop in the middle of a chunk of text and wait for more text to appear. The fact that these micro-interruptions occur over and over and over makes it worse. There are also the standard problems with the presentation of information in a video format: some of these are that you cannot skim through it effectively to get an overview or look for something specific, and cannot find something in a video you’ve seen before with a text-phrase search. The information plods along at the creator-designed speed, and that speed is usually the speed that the creator things they would want if the information were new to them. But I’m rarely on the same page as the creator in that regard, and it’s necessarily true that, whether it is or isn’t right for me personally, there is necessarily a fairly large group of people for whom the presentation speed is wrong.
All of which is to say that video does not seem to me to be an obviously wonderful format for presenting an overview of a purely textual medium. That’s not to say that no one should create such videos: not everything has to be right for me, personally, nor does everything have to be right for everyone else! It just seems to me that there are inherent difficulties in getting video as a medium to work well with a textual medium.
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A lot of “how-to” videos tell people to pause the video while they do whatever the thing is and then press play when they’ve finished that step. So I don’t think it would be too weird for someone to use a game with brief room descriptions and ask people to pause while they read. Not optimal, but when I watch walkthroughs for regular video games I often have to pause to see exactly what they’re doing.
And such a video would be pretty short-- how to navigate, inventory, what kinds of commands can generally be used. I can’t see this being an hourlong lesson.
It would be interesting to see if such a thing got any traction. Especially if everybody here really pushed it.
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I was imagining picking a game with short room descriptions and reading them aloud as I played, pausing to highlight important things. It’ll be interesting to try, at least, and see what people think!
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I really think the way Infocom’s manuals did this—snippet of transcript and map from a fictional game—is pretty good.
And there’s some evidence that it’s a useful pedagogical method, as Infocom was fairly successful and their audience was full of people far with far less experience interacting with computer interfaces (and in general, not just parser game interfaces) than today’s players.
I imagine one of the main arguments against this sort of thing today is that a lot of players are resistant to doing anything other than just playing the game. That is, they expect all documentation and any tutorials to be part of the game itself, and won’t even think to consult anything else even if it’s available, short of things like strategy guides and walkthroughs.
I never thought about the text speed issue, but my main gripe with video tutorials is how often they rely on “show, don’t tell” to the point they are impossible to follow if you can’t see every detail of what the person(s) in the video are doing or can’t read on-screen text, and the absolute worst ar the ones with no narration what-so-ever. Granted, even none video tutorials on the internet have a bad habit of overrelying on diagrams and photos to the point the text instructions sometimes make little or no sense on their own.
And yeah, maybe I’d find infocom’s games slightly less impenetrable if I had access to .txt versions of their manuals(and as I said in the hot takes thread, I miss the days of video games coming with worthwhile manuals).