Ask Ryan

Although my favorite thing you’ve ever done is Clash of the Type-Ins, my favorite game of yours is The Ascent of the Gothic Tower.
Are there any differences between the download version (serial number 140831) and the online version (serial number 201110), other than the updated Inform build and library version?

I think that was when I updated the online version with a new version of Quixe. So there shouldn’t be any difference.

Thank you for your question.

Unrelated to this thread, Mark Marino invited me to speak at USC’s Humanities and Critical Code Studies Electronic Literature Reading Group, or USCHaCCSE-LitRG, and he asked me several questions that I unrelatedly had recently answered in this thread. The talk is now on YouTube so you can hear me saying out loud many of the things I’ve said here, as well as a few other things.

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Hey, Ryan! Great thread, and may I just say: the socks you wore the other day were gorgeous. So, quick question: how does one become funnier?

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I guess I’m sort of starting from first principles here, so I apologize if any of this is obvious.

I have this theory that humor is the game we play to practice the very basic and very vague skill of “understanding situations.” “Getting a joke” is the satisfying experience of figuring out what’s going on, ideally fairly quickly, and with a minimum of outside assistance.

Humor is contextual and subjective because the audience has to bring a certain amount of expertise to bear in order to “apprehend” something in a satisfying way. When people enjoy lewd jokes, they’re revelling in the shared understanding of lewd information; if you don’t feel somehow proud of this knowledge then you don’t find the joke very funny. Bertie Wooster says a lot of straightforwardly witty things, but he’s an especially funny character because I know people like him, so I’m able to infer things about him that he doesn’t reveal directly.

A more involved example: When Professor Frink silences an auditorium of rowdy scientists by yelling “Pi is exactly three!”, it’s not enough for us to know that pi is not exactly three. We have to understand how a crowd of scientists would react to such an outburst, and why Frink wants to create that reaction. We have to realize all of this very quickly, and then we laugh.

If we weren’t able to figure all that out in half a second or so, then when we see the scientists’ reaction, we have new information. Maybe now we can put together the whole situation, and then we can laugh. And maybe when Frink says “I’m sorry it had to come to that,” we’ve already figured everything out, and the additional information (the implication of Frink’s reasoning) is no longer helpful/funny. Or maybe we did need the extra help, and only now do we laugh!

Put another way, a joke is an opportunity for your audience to feel clever. If they understand how clever you’re being, that means that they’re just as clever! Or, roughly as clever.

And so I think being funny involves exercising a type of empathy, or at least a type of trust. I try to assume that the reader and I are on the same page. I can leave something unsaid, and you can infer what I’m getting at, and you’ll find it funny, because you got to prove to yourself that you know what I’m talking about. Or I can straightfacedly say something that’s obviously false, and you’ll realize that I can’t possibly be serious, and you’ll find it funny. (Here’s a very good video about chess algorithms.)

There are risks associated with this strategy. Sometimes you’ll say something strange, withholding information that you expect your audience to possess, so that your audience can resolve the strangeness in a flash of satisfying realization, but the information will have slipped your audience’s mind or something, and your audience will wonder: What the heck does this guy mean, “the socks I wore the other day?” That sounds like something a serial killer would say.

As we see in the Simpsons example above, mass-market stuff has a certain level of obligation to explain its jokes, taking some of the figuring-stuff-out work off the audience’s hands, because you have to appeal to a broad audience that includes people who are not as clever as you. And I think some people have learned from this style of writing that the structure of a joke is:

  • An incongruous state of affairs arises
  • Someone points out the way in which the state of affairs is incongruous

(Some of the best gags on 30 Rock are undercut in this way, but I guess it’s just as well that no specific examples are springing to mind.) If you don’t have to appeal to everyone, though, you can write jokes that are more satisfying/funnier, because they rely on more specific shared knowledge. And in particular you can craft material out of your personal experience and worldview.

This often manifests as stand-up monologues that essentially describe a personal worldview in exhaustive detail, but I think you can use this approach in other contexts—like when an idle thought crosses your mind that you would usually dismiss as too stupid to pursue. Instead, you can pursue it, and write it down, and let someone else notice how stupid it is, or notice that there’s a grain of truth in it, or remember having the same sort of stupid thought.

So maybe it’s a kind of super-trust, or reverse empathy: You can exercise the (kind of ridiculous) confidence that people will find something relatable in something that’s very specific to you. You can give them the chance to realize that they understand you, with the audacity to assume this will be a pleasant experience. And of course this sort of approach isn’t a hit with everyone, but I think when it hits, it hits hard.

Thank you for your question.

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Hello, Mr. Veeder.

Long time fan. Much appreciation for the Infocom follow-up “The Lurking Horror II: The Lurkening.” I have a more speculative question for you, but I’m thinking more than a decade of authoring experience in IF might help you answer.

A parser is open to an infinite variety of input. This can conjure a feeling of infinite choice and player agency. In reality, the limited time and psychic powers of the author behind that parser, as well as various grammatical and guess-the-verb limitations quickly dissuade the player from this assumption. Yet… sometimes the magic is there. Sometimes the author so accurately anticipates the player’s intuition, that they find themselves once again in an infinite magical world, a blinking silent cursor beckoning them to try anything.

My question is how does the mainstream capture that same sense of player agency? How do you allow Mario to eat Yoshi or Master Chief to exchange his armor for Hawaiian shirts and khakis? How do we allow negotiation with Pyramid Head or feed Mr. Resetti his teeth the next time he pesters us to save our game?

Failing that, as the parser itself often does, how do we make the player feel like they just MIGHT be able to do these things?

Thank you.

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This is such a neat question. But I think I have to reframe it a little. I don’t like doing this, but I don’t think I have another answer.

I don’t think this magical feeling is specifically a matter of player agency. I think it’s about discovery, and not being able to see the limitations of the world. In a parser situation, this manifests as the feeling that This thing will respond to anything I type into it! because responding to input is kind of the only thing a parser game can do.

But other formats have other tools. In Super Mario 64, you can put the controller down to get a snack, and come back to find that Mario is now lying on the floor, mumbling in his sleep. You can accidentally brush against a brick wall and notice it rippling like water. And you think They didn’t tell me that could happen. What other tricks are in here?

In Super Mario 3D World, you can notice what looks like a giant golden train off in the distance, and wonder What is that? How do I get there? Can I get there? You can reach the last part of the map, defeat Bowser, and then discover that actually that wasn’t the last part, and there are a bunch more levels to try. You get to think Good grief, how much game is there in this game? What else am I missing?

The magical sense of possibility arises from these moments of discovery, and, this is kind of tautological, but these moments of discovery arise from the game not telling the player everything. It’s very easy for a parser game to give a complete list of all the verbs it recognizes, dismantling the possibility for the player to try a new verb and get a surprising response. Similarly, Super Mario 3D World could give you a list of all its levels and draw out every detail of its structure on its map screen—but it doesn’t. It lies to you.

(I should also mention Red Dead Redemption 2, which produces this never-ending stream of neat details for people to find. I think the fanciful notion that “The world simulation is keeping track of literally everything” is kind of the same thing as “The parser will understand literally anything I type in.”)

And so the answer for creating this magical feeling, in any kind of game, is to add a bunch of cool stuff and let players find it on their own. The more neat things they discover, the more players are forced to wonder Where are the limits of this world? And now the world feels infinite.

I think the problem with creating this feeling in mainstream games might be more cultural than formal. There’s a very powerful impulse for people explain how to get all the endings, record the locations of all the collectibles, and post an exhaustive list of easter eggs. (You can listen to me repeat this one basic idea over and over again for about half an hour on Extrasode 3 of this podcast.) IF also has this problem to some degree, plus the fact that it’s so easy to decompile a game and snap the neck of any mystery it might have contained.

But you can try to preserve this sense of magic for yourself. You just have to be okay with not knowing everything and seeing everything.

Thank you for your question.

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Hi Ryan,

On your recommendation, I’ve cast my rod into Jewel Pond / Lake? and am having a great time… I’ve probably been fishing around for five hours+ now over a week or so! I’ve just posted a review on IFDB as this seems a bit of an undiscovered gem (haha)…

This game plays through your website and has some really funky auto-save features. I love this as it helps to offset the task focus that can take over in IF. What I mean is that the reminders about playing in chunks help the player to chill out a bit in terms of trying to solve everything as quickly as humanly possible.

My first question is:

  1. As an author, can you keep adding to the game? So, could you add extra episodes / areas etc and then just recompile the game?

That seemed like a cool possibility if 'twere so…

My second question is connected with the badges:

  1. I’ve now found seven badges - including the Mako badge – roughly how many badges are there? I realize that this question may run counter to the reply you’ve just given about possibility so feel free not to answer!

  2. If you can discuss this abstractly (or with light spoiler tags etc), how do the time sensitive features work? Is there an amount of time IRL that a player has to keep coming back before certain events trigger?

Thanks so much again!

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I’m not Ryan, but your question made me search around a little, so I’ll plop this here: Savegame backwards compatibility - #11 by zarf

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I am very very very very glad that you’ve been enjoying Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing and that you took the time to post such a nice review. Thank you.

1. As an author, can you keep adding to the game? So, could you add extra episodes / areas etc and then just recompile the game?

Yes. This is complicated.

Save files of the type generated by the built-in state-saving function of Inform 7 games are not compatible between versions, because the game’s underlying data structure isn’t necessarily the same between versions, because it all gets assembled from the ground up at compilation.

Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing doesn’t use that save game format. (The usual SAVE/RESTORE verbs are forbidden, because allowing players to use both save formats at once would be a huge mess.) Instead, the auto-save functionality uses a much less robust but much more “reliable” format, which is, I essentially laid out my own personal data structure that doesn’t change when I recompile.

This is accomplished with a bunch of external files containing tables. There’s a table for which items you possess; there’s a table for how things are arranged in your cabin; there’s a sort of “miscellaneous” table that keeps track of what color your jacket is etc. I think there are at least five different tables.

This means that the autosave function only saves what I bother to make it save, unlike the native save function that saves the entire game state. RVAFF doesn’t save something as basic as your current location, but that’s because I wanted you to always start out in your cabin.

This technique will be revolutionary, as soon as everyone else starts using it. I wrote a bunch of blog posts that explain it in more detail. Here is the first one.

ANYWAY, all this makes it “very simple” to add content to this game, while preserving every players’ progress, in a way that’s normally impossible. If you’ve found the baseball cap, that was added a few days after the game was released, because I think @DougOrleans noticed there wasn’t any headwear available for when it was raining. I’ve also been able to fix some bugs and make some quality of life changes.

It would be fun to add some more substantial content, but when I made an attempt at this I found myself overwhelmed. It’s not a technical issue, it’s just that the game is SO HUGE. I did do some design work for an additional area, though. Maybe someday I’ll get the brainpower together to implement it. What a fun treat that would be!

2. Roughly how many badges are there?

I will decline to answer this. There was a lot of discussion on this forum about collecting badges a few years ago, though. I would recommend that, after you’ve run out of stuff to explore and ideas to try on your own, you seek out one of those old threads. But maybe don’t read it all at once.

3. How do the time sensitive features work? Is there an amount of time IRL that a player has to keep coming back before certain events trigger?

The basic time mechanic simply confirms that today’s date is not the same as the previously saved date. I don’t think anything in the game actually notices how many days it’s been since you last visited.

A couple things will only progress if you return over multiple days, such as if you’re waiting for something wet to dry out. Even when it would make sense for such a thing to progress in your absence, you have to actually show up in order for time to pass.

Certain things that seem may seem random, like the weather and the appearance of wildlife, are determined by the real-world date. So if you manage to see a bald eagle at the gazebo on May 3rd, you can tell your friends, and they can check it out for themselves.

Then there are a couple things that depend on the day of the week.

Please don’t feel compelled to find everything, though. Fly fishing isn’t supposed to be a chore.

Thank you very much for your questions.

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Wasn’t me, haven’t played it (sorry!). But I endorse keeping your head dry.

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Oh heck, sorry. It must have been @David_Welbourn. I get the names confused because they are anagrams of each other.

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Yes, I confirm that a comment of mine about wanting to keep my head dry in the rain prompted the creation of the hat. So very cool. Thank you again, Ryan!

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Not to derail Ryan’s thread, but this has been great to read, and it made me wish other accomplished IF authors would occasionally make threads like this, where folks can ask questions. Maybe a couple of times a year? For a week or two? An “Ask Emily” thread or an “Ask Plotkin” thread would be wonderful to see. Because of course all accomplished IF writers have the time and inclination to answer questions as thoroughly as Ryan has done. Anyway, thanks for doing this, Ryan!

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Ryan is very nice to have done this. It’s similar to an AMA on Reddit, but it would only work for people who spend a lot of time here, or would volunteer to spend a period of time answering. I know Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin are very busy people. Emily does have her own blog and mailbag responses that she publishes on her own schedule.

What might work better for more elusive IF luminaries is if someone could serve as a liaison for a pre-agreed upon Q&A offline. Questions could be gathered beforehand in a thread, then edited so it’s not the same 20 questions about “what’s your favorite color?” the person has to respond to, and then published as an article in the Essays category.

So who volunteers to be the intrepid Barbara Walters of intfiction? :smiley:

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I’d love to see if Steve Meretzky would entertain the notion. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’d love to pick his brain and he can’t be too busy anymore, right?

(Edited to add: Also, isn’t there a way to split these last three derailment posts into their own topic and leave Ryan’s thread thoroughly railed?)

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Thanks again! This game has me totally hooked and has so many cool surprises.

I totally understand your answer for 2 - the game is so much bigger than it first appears… I think if I knew there were, say, 12 or 24 badges (Ryan, WHICH is it?), it wouldn’t have quite the same mystique…

I’m with you on 1 and 3. I do think this is an appealing way to handle saving - it wouldn’t work for every kind of game, but it’s pleasant as a player to be able to bookmark a website and just turn up. Novice question: would clearing the cache on my browser affect this? Do you get data on when and where the players are playing from?

The time controls chill out a player in the early stages knowing that they can pick things up the next day and something helpful might have turned up. Deep into the game now, I’m now maddeningly hooked knowing that I might get an extra opportunity tomorrow, or tomorrow, or tomorrow… This is fly fishing as slot machine - variable reward is going to keep me casting my line - nicely done!

Have any other games followed this route of having different days / different events linked to real world data etc?

This seems a great way to create more of a live event around a game - for example, a game that had to be played over a week with different stages unlocking each day…

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Would clearing the cache on my browser affect this?

Clearing your cache won’t affect your save data. The data goes to Local Storage, which, I probably shouldn’t speak too much on this because I will end up being wrong about something.

Anyway, you don’t have to worry about your save data going away unless you delete it yourself, or something drastic happens to your browser. My ancient save data, untouched for maybe a year, is still there. Let’s see how many badges I have…

…Wow! That’s a lot of badges!

Do you get data on when and where the players are playing from?

Just a little. I try not to worry about it too much (to make up for past time I spent worrying about it too much).

Have any other games followed this route of having different days / different events linked to real world data etc?

Not that I know of in the IF space, but of course outside that space there is Animal Crossing, which Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing is essentially a huge ripoff of.

This seems a great way to create more of a live event around a game - for example, a game that had to be played over a week with different stages unlocking each day…

This is an excellent idea, and one that I am working on even right at this very moment. I hope you will look forward to Ryan Veeder’s Bram Stoker’s The Dracula Files, which will take place later this year if all goes well.

dracula files cover

Thank you for your questions.

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(cries in Zoolander)

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Exciting news - thanks for moving forward on my idea so quickly! :wink:

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