I’ve noticed that the effort that goes into a game and even its overall quality doesn’t directly relate to its popularity or amount of comments on it. I’ve been replaying all the games on IFDB with 100 ratings or more for fun, and tons of the “big ones” (in terms of literal size) aren’t on there: Muldoon Legacy, Finding Martin, Cragne Manor, Worldsmith, 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery, Worlds Apart. And complex games like Endless Nameless aren’t on there either. Something Adam Cadre said reminds me of what you said:
I was recently startled to discover that I’d been given a shout-out on the blog of the London School of Economics by a researcher who’d studied the IF world. In the absence of a commercial market, he argued, IF writers produce work pretty much exclusively in order to create “cultural value.” This may be as good a descriptor as any for why writing Endless, Nameless now strikes me as probably a waste of time. Back in the day I might work for weeks or months on an IF piece, and maybe it would get a hundred downloads — but fifty of the people who downloaded it would post about it. And those fifty people had all gotten to know each other a little bit, if only through the newsgroups, and so those posts tended to lead to actual conversations about the work — and therein lay its cultural value. I could look at those conversations and feel like I had accomplished something. Endless, Nameless may have garnered exponentially more downloads immediately upon its release… but if only four of the people who downloaded it actually say anything about it, and if those posts don’t end up inspiring much discussion, that doesn’t give me a whole lot of motivation to do another one.
So at some point it feels to me like putting more and more energy and work into a game just gets released into the void. I think the individual players often enjoy it more, but I don’t think making a game 40x longer makes it get discussed 40x more even 4x more; and often it gets discussed even less.
Emily Short said this too:
Should I write parser IF? To which my answer would be almost always no. Let me inflect that a little, though.
If you want to write a game that you have a reasonable prospect to sell for money, you should not write parser IF. There is a commercial IF scene that makes money, but essentially none of it is parser-based.
If you want to write something quickly and easily, you should not write parser IF.
If you want to create something that will have a large built-in audience, you should not write parser IF. Likewise if you’re hoping to get a lot of feedback on your work. This is an area I’m sad about. When I came up, in the late 90’s/early 2000s, the parser IF critical community was still very active, and a game submitted to IF Comp could look forward to dozens of responses from people very experienced in the form. Now admittedly those responses could be extremely curt or harsh if a game was perceived as not-up-to-snuff, and the definition of IF was a lot narrower than now. But an ambitious and experimental game could get a lot of really thoughtful engagement, too. That is less true now.
If you want your parents to play what you build, you should not write parser IF. (My mom plays parser IF. She introduced me to it. But lots of people find it challenging to get into, even when created by loved ones.)
If you want something to put on your portfolio that will look snappy to potential employers, or that they will even know how to play, again, do not go to parser IF.
If you’re curious about natural language processing, parser IF is still not for you. What you can learn from parser interactive fiction is how to wield tools from the 1970s for a very particular craft purpose. That’s fine. I like old things. But what you learn here doesn’t always completely translate to the modern version of that domain. (It’s not totally useless either, as I’ve found — but if this is your goal, there are more direct ways to go.)
You should write parser IF only if you have goals outside those categories. Perhaps you are nostalgic for Infocom; perhaps you think parser is just so cool; perhaps you have a game concept that really fits parser and there’s just no better place to do it. Possibly you are tickled by a medium where you can spend half your time writing responses to commands like LICK PARROT. Maybe there’s something you aspire to learn about game design that you think parser IF could teach you.
Sorry for adding so much to an ‘ask ryan’ thread, especially since you already know this stuff, I just thought it might provide context for others.
Here’s my question for you: what was the main driving concept behind ‘little match girl’? Was it, ‘the juxtaposition of a sweet orphan girl and her gun-wielding death job’ or ‘visiting different dimensions through fire’ or something else that got you hooked on the idea?