Best critical IF blogs?

Playing Game Hints
21

LIkewise. If I wanted innovative subject matter I would read a linear novel or watch an independent film – the very last place I would seek that out is from a game of any kind. I have played a lot of interesting narrative games, but they have all been, without exception as far as I recall, faded retellings of types of stories told better in another medium – if you consider only the story and not the gameplay. [EDIT: Wait! I just recalled an exception – Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die. Ha haaaa awesome.]

All true points, of course, but those things have always been true, haven’t they? So they don’t really have much power to explain why parser experimentation is slowing down in relation to its former self. The only way the relative merits of CYOA vs IF could come into play in the explanation, I think, is if we are losing many of our potential authors to CYOA – it can’t just be that our authors are working slower; we have to be losing them, too. Is that what’s happening here? I was under the impression that CYOA simply attracted different types of authors.

If that isn’t what’s happening here, then we might have to face the fact that we are losing potential authors not because CYOA is easier but because they are being alienated, somehow, either from writing parser games at all, or from innovating too much with them. The other possibility is that the authors exist but there simply aren’t new innovations to be had, and that seems preposterous. The other other explanation is that there is not really less parser innovation; it is just somehow flying under the radar due to a narrowing definition of ‘innovation’ (the corollary to Emily’s ‘too narrow a definition of medium’).

HInt hint. 8) Are there many new huge games fulminating toward release? I am about to return to working in Inform on mine after having worked exclusively on the other adjoining audiovisual elements for a long time. Returning to a game you half-coded after more than six months is pretty weird and it does not seem as innovative as it originally did. There are a number of things in my use of the parser that could possibly be considered new, but I suspect the media-mashup side of my experiment will draw the most notice. Anyway, anything ‘new’ I coded in Inform, I also talked about on here in principle, anyway, knowing it would take too long to see the light of day and I wanted to discuss it; heck, if you cobbled together all of my various championing of new/old interface elements in this forum, you could probably figure out what the text portion of my game will play like.

Paul.

22

I think that innovation is similar to profundity: aim to do either and it will be impossible to succeed!

To be honest, I’m not sure what you’re looking for under the term “innovative”. So many authors are trying new little things all the time. I don’t see how you could classify 90% of the works as re-runs.

23

I stopped adding to this thread when several people started making more interesting and in-depth points than I could, but I have to say Dannii just summed up what I’ve been thinking, in the background, since the beginning.

24

Well I was including the CYOA I have tried in the mix and I did give a range beginning at 80, but perhaps my estimate is still too high and I have merely chosen poorly. After all, I haven’t come close to playing everything. I only have limited time for this. Thus the need for some kind of guide to the most interesting non-standard experiments. Say… a blog, for example! 8)

EDIT: Scott McCloud does something like what I am talking about (or used to anyway – he is pretty busy finishing his graphic novel now I guess). He’d post links to all the webcomics that were doing something interesting and new with the form of comic books, and write a few sentences explaining why he thought they were groundbreaking. He wouldn’t post ALL the comic books that had like, an innovative panel or two, because that would make the blog much less useful.

25

(1) I think there are significant differences in the feel and output of the systems I mentioned. Varytale skews towards more literary-feeling output; StoryNexus towards short writing more procedurally juxtaposed (and it has added a feature recently where the game can send messages to the player when the player is away, I believe, which adds a temporal aspect if you are interested in that); ChoiceScript encourages heavy uses of stats and a lot of character definition by the player; inklewriter facilitates very rapid drafting and an attractive output look. Undum is kind of a special case because there is less of a toolkit under the hood specifying how you use the features, but it’s been used to do some interesting things all the same.

(2) I think there is innovation in the parser area, but that the community has become less insular and uniform, with the result that individual innovative efforts do not always get the kind of focused response they used to.

Other people have pointed out several interesting projects – Calm, Kerkerkruip (community-developed roguelike), Flexible Survival. Here’s what I’d add from the past year or few, myself, in both CYOA and parser land:

maybe make some change. Parser IF but backed with sound, images, and video, using a very constrained set of verbs in order to convey a point about what people in a difficult wartime situation perceive to be their set of available options.

howling dogs. Highly evocative Twine piece demonstrating several modes of CYOAishness: sometimes the choices suggest a consistent world model, sometimes they don’t, and one passage arguably counts as a CYOA puzzle. Also – I know you said you weren’t expecting “innovative content”, but I would say that howling dogs demonstrates one major feature of the Twine revolution: interactive story being used to persent highly personal narratives about oppressive systems or emotional experiences. See also Depression Quest. (And I think “there’s a lot of CYOA” doesn’t cover what has happened here; what’s happened is that there’s a lot of CYOA about new topics, by authors not previously part of the scene.)

The Colder Light. Inform used to produce a choice-based system in which all valid commands are made visible in buttons. Also, as it happens, a rather attractive game with some neat puzzles.

Living Will. A formal experiment in Undum in which the choices you make affect how the estate is ultimately left; the conceit of developing a document into its final form sets it apart from most CYOA.

Ex Nihilo. Mostly choice-based, but has a text entry passage in which input from previous players is used to flesh out the character of the main NPC.

inklewriter’s Frankenstein (on iOS). Full length novel which uses the choice-based content to position the reader as the conscience of the major characters. Worthy of note both for content and for the tactile appeal of the interface.

Guilded Youth is the first full game with a Vorple interface: parser IF augmented with in-browser images and sounds that contribute very extensively to the experience.

Home Sweetiebot Home allows voice input; it’s not otherwise immensely surprising, but that aspect is kind of cool.

Olivia’s Orphanorium is a sort of resource management game executed in text, with a lot of entertaining flavor text that could only happen in text-IF form.

Zero Summer is probably the most substantial non-Fallen London StoryNexus game, with memorable writing and substantial amounts of content; it uses the StoryNexus platform to create a stronger sense of specific place than most CYOA-esque works offer, while including more developed characters. I found the decision at the end of their paid content segment Fifty Miles South of Lexington pretty striking.

Pale Blue Light incorporates both free-keyword and standard parser input to create a sort of meditative piece about the relationship between creator and reader; not flawless, but evocative.

Brace I haven’t played, but I gather it’s a two-player Twine game where the players trade off making choices.

I’m sure that misses out quite a lot, as I’ve been too busy to play as much as I used to; so possibly other people will jump in with their own thoughts.

26

Some of these I’ve seen. It’s notable that all of these features you mention have already been in parsered IF. If the new wrinkle is replicating them in CYOA, well not that it means great IF can’t be done in those systems, but I am a bit underwhelmed by the importance to the medium of the feature set. (Meaning for these you’ve just mentioned, not for Versu, which sounds very intriguing. I think it’s a smart and interesting experiment to try to control complexity by selecting a subset of the literary world to concentrate on modelling with a system, e.g. Jane Austen. I had never even considered that a system might take that kind of approach.)

Wow I really need to check this one out.

Could be artistically interesting in effect… if they managed to avoid making it feel sloppy/accidental.

I’m sure that’s not as boring a story as it sounds. Formally it does sound neat.

Hmm I begin to see why this is oft-mentioned. That sounds very neat.

Also something I need to track – I really need to know when people are juxtaposing the parser window with something else, because that (perhaps budding) tradition is where my WIP is going to fit.

This stuff sounds pretty cool, too. I haven’t played anything from late last year yet. Thanks so much for typing all this out for me, you’re the best! 8)

Paul.

27

Thinking about this more, I feel that some of the change I described has been a natural extension of things that people were trying to do in the pure parser space. There were a number of types of gameplay interaction – social rather than physical action, large-scale action (e.g. things done over the course of days or weeks rather than OPEN BOX tasks taking just a minute), etc. – that we had talked about and in some cases prototyped for years, without reaching a point where they ever felt good or viable in standard parser IF.

To some extent that is because the parser IF vocabulary had become traditionally focused on a specific set of actions and so there was a weight of expectation at work; but in some cases it was just non-trivially challenging to represent the desired mechanics with a standard command line and world model pairing. So experimenting with other structures was perhaps necessary to get around that roadblock and address the kinds of interaction in question. StoryNexus actions, for instance, often describe interactions at the level of “go to this person’s ball” or “stand up to that villain’s blackmail” or whatever, rather than SAY NO TO VILLAIN; and this produces a different texture of play, even when the essential story elements are similar or identical to those in standard IF.

For instance, in Zero Summer, I decided I wanted to cultivate the friendship of the rather frightening woman who controls the mission in town. I knew she needed some supplies, so sought those out and gave them to her. This is in one sense a bog-standard fetch quest equivalent to getting a coin for a troll or hunting five rats to hand to the town mayor. On the other hand, actually getting the supplies to her involved a few action clicks, corresponding to a time frame of hours or perhaps even days in the story. That changed relationship between game effort and narrative time meant that my little fetch task felt like part of a long montage sequence in which I was gradually making friends with this woman; less grindy, more narrative than such quests usually are. (This is not to say that StoryNexus games never have their grindy aspect, but ZS balances these features comparatively well, and in a way that makes good use of the StoryNexus action structure.)

Likewise, in Zero Summer, place is important but again represented on a larger scale than in traditional parser IF; an area might be a whole neighborhood of town. The scale of space and the scale of time are linked intimately. Because time units in ZS are generally longer, it makes sense to skip modeling walking from street to street and instead elide any short walks into the main action.

None of this is impossible with parsed interactive fiction, and there have been experiments with the same ideas (as well as a few experiments that moved the granularity the other way – as in the room sub-modeling in Stone Cell or Shade). But some of these paradigms feel more natural when presented via something other than the command line, especially if they involve throwing away most of the standard IF vocabulary and replacing it with a totally other verb set.

To speak just for myself, here, I find that it is freeing to ask when I’m working on a new project, “does this actually need the parser? does it make use of it in an important way? would a different way of presenting player choice be preferable? which of the available tools best suits this story?”

Sometimes I come up with something that really does need the parser – Counterfeit Monkey could not have been a choice-based piece – but conversely Bee or First Draft could not have been parser pieces, and much of what Versu does would be prohibitively fiddly with a parser interface.

28

Though as ZS tells you that it’s still the morning of the first day, I just couldn’t buy it having a cohesive sense of time…

Similarly with space, though I could move around, the action cards often seemed to work everywhere.

I don’t understand StoryNexus. :wink:

29

Yeah, even if I somehow guessed that the longer version is precisely what I’m supposed to type, I still wouldn’t really want to type it all out, so I see what you’re getting at – an integration of the command line into the tone of the piece itself. If that weren’t the goal, then it wouldn’t be necessary to expand the command line. Even a one-letter command could immediately be followed with ‘So you stand up to that villain’s blackmail…’ so it’s not that the sentiment isn’t expressible: you just want it expressed in the actual command line rather than immediately preceding or following. And that strikes me as more of an issue of smoothing out the wrinkles in the tone of the piece. In other words, the limits of the parsered command line that are being escaped by the above techniques are rhetorical limits, not functional ones.

I feel that this desire is heightened by the fact that the grammar of combining imperative commands with a second person narrative, has never made any sense. It just feels wrong to me and has always felt wrong. I have my own ways of trying to solve this and trying to achieve more evenness of tone; one of them involves going to first or third person, where throwing imperatives at the narrative as a spectator makes more rhetorical sense (and they have side benefits, like trading the emotionally empty act of ‘immersion’ for an actually contentful act of emotional identification). And there are some other tricks I am doing like rewriting all of the error messages to mimick an internal monologue, et cetera. The sort of thing that has been done in IF before to smooth what really is a grammatical eyesore. BUt it’s not the parser’s fault, IMO. The original decisions could have gone an entirely different way so that everyone associated the parser with third person narratives from the start; then things would have gone very differently and I think very different kinds of stories would have necessarily been told from the start – perhaps more like are told in CYOA.

Of course, you know all about perspective shifts, so this isn’t news, and even all that being said, parsered input is still not nearly as tone-even and rhetorically flexible as multiple choice, so I can see where you’re coming from. I think we all perceive certain problems but we name them differently, in the course of coming up with widely varying solutions. I hadn’t thought of CYOA before as addressing the same incongruity as does a perspective shift, but it makes sense.

As for Zero Summer, I can think of ways to do that kind of time compression in a parser (it’s a topic very important to me right now actually); in fact that is part of the cool challenge for me. One thing I find is important to remember for a parser: just tell people the damn commands. Don’t play coy as if part of the joy is in guessing the right verbs. The joy is in knowing all the verbs but not knowing in what rooms they are relevant. Having a master list of universally applicable actions with nonspecific referents is ideal; having a separate list for each object/room is what stomps on that illusion of open-endedness. It may all be smoke & mirrors, but I don’t care. Fiction itself is just a trick of the light falling on paper. I want to make decisions and not choose choices, if that makes any sense. I want that open-ended feeling, and that’s why I love the parser. Of course, underneath it all, everytihng is multiple choice in the end, narratively. I just don’t normally prefer to be baldly confronted with that on the front end, so CYOA too has its own disadvantage to overcome. There are things I dislike about the conventional presentation of both forms. I believe those things can be overcome in parsered IF but I’m not as sure in CYOA – probably because I have given it a lot less thought.

Thanks for your additional commentary on this!

30

(emphasis mine)

I have very similar concerns and interests here, but my experience from testing Orphanorium is that it isn’t enough to tell people the damn commands: if they’re not part of the standard verb set that they’re accustomed to, most players will forget all of them even if they’ve been told. (The classic example of this is games that introduce THINK ABOUT or REMEMBER; usually the player discovers that said verb is of zero or marginal use most of the time, forgets about it, and gets stuck later on when the verb becomes crucial). If you’re introducing a bunch of new verbs, you have to make them ready-to-hand: introduce them one or two at a time, make the player use them often, make them central to the basic texture of playing the game.

31

This is funny. I just realised yesterday there was a ClubFloyd of my one-move game from last year and finally read it. When you’ve seen all the endings, the game says ‘YOU CAN’T WIN’ (it being a one-move game, I felt awarding a win for completing multiple iterations would break the rules) but after reading the transcript I realised I should have added, ‘NO REALLY. YOU REALLY CAN’T WIN. AT ALL.’

I’ve just been doing it so’s I feed them directly to the player as needed. Even repeated reminders later at useful moments, because whenever a playtester walks away from my game because they don’t even know what sorts of things to TRY (and hoo boy, have they ever), I figure I deserve it.

32

Hmm, I haven’t played ZS, but the use of “grindy” is interesting to me here. Because when I think of “grind” I think of what every StoryNexus/Failbetter game I’ve played has, and IF usually doesn’t – repeated actions (in this case generally literally repeated; the same card or choice options many times) that give you gradual progress through stat boosts. The closest thing I can think of that parser IF usually has here is when you have to traipse across a map repeatedly, but even there it seems like it’s increasingly best practice to give you a “go to” command if you’re going to have to go to lots of different places on a large map. There’s also the grind of trying every object in a something until you find one that works, but that generally doesn’t give you gradual progress (and you can avoid the grind if you can figure out the right action the first time).

But parser IF doesn’t usually stretch its temporal and spatial boundaries like this anyway. A New Life did a good job of conveying a sense of great space in one of its transitions without making you type lots of commands, and so did The Guardian, but I can’t think of much that compresses time like this without cut scenes. (Hoist Sail for the Heliopause, maybe, but that’s compressing the time it takes to travel.)

Paul, I can think of some cases where figuring out a new verb provided a great moment of discovery, in Photopia and The Ebb and Flow of the Tide, and in both of them it represented a liberation for the PC as well as the player.

Same verb, as it happens.

Depends on the design, I think; as Sam says the trick for me as a player is to lead me to the new verbs. This is usually true in non-parser games as well, at least ones not named nethack. Feeding them directly to the player is a good idea.

33

It does make sense, and this is a concern to me as well; it describes a reason I have historically often not found choice-based work as compelling as parser IF. But I hypothesize that this sensation of making decisions is not dependent only or even chiefly on the interface. It’s also dependent on the world model, and that means that it can be partly or wholly replicated by a choice-based interface laid over a sophisticated model. The point here being that the player can learn how the modeled world works; can make plans that run several steps ahead of the choices she’s being currently offered; can anticipate and set up.

This, at least, is the design premise of Versu; it’s not up to me to say whether that succeeds or not. But the idea is that the social model is detailed enough to allow the player to think, “I will flatter this character and see if I can get us to become friends and perhaps then she’ll confide in me about the secret I think she knows.” Or: “I will pour myself a drink, then spill it on this character, and she will get angry and leave the room.” (Whether the result feels like a difficult puzzle or like a wide-open improv experience then depends on how many outcome states there are, how many possible routes to achieve them, and how tightly the story is gated on achieving a particular outcome.)

The player’s degree of control over the situation will depend on how well she has come to understand the model, and that understanding is a product of both player experience and authorial skill. But that’s true in parser IF as well.

34

Because they all, almost universally, use the object-and-room model to represent objects-and-rooms, which tends to necessitate frozen time. However there is no mandate that one MUST use the object-and-room model to represent exclusively objects and locations, nor is there any mandate that one must stick to the model exclusively and not ever abstract the player character from the model – realising this, and how many different ways there are of doing this, very few of them significantly explored, is the key to breaking the unities of time and space in IF, IMO.

Ironically, Emily is talking about improving CYOA by adding a world model, when too pedestrian and literal a use of the world model, may be what’s holding IF back. I feel parsered IF is currently facing a different challenge than CYOA: it is too hidebound by its world models.

You have to type a lot of commands to move time because unless you do precisely the right thing, it’s at a standstill. If you want to make a game in which time passes at different rates, then the best way to achieve that gracefully would be to start by making a game in which time passes naturally at the usual rate. Which it normally doesn’t in IF – that’s why it’s hard to vary the rate. Can’t elegantly modulate something that usually isn’t there, because then you have to introduce it as an element while modulating it at the same time – doesn’t really work.

Well, OK the clock ticks and story often passes when the player solves something or takes too long, but these are exceptional circumstances. What if time passed and often raised new story events every single turn regardless of what the player does, not as a sequence of ‘triggered events’ but as part of the normal default play loop – it naturally moves through descriptions representing time. A temporal partner for the spatial model, if you will. As a dev, you have to create it yourself, currently – or coopt the spatial model for it – but when that’s done, you should be able to vary the rate of its passing as much as you desire. It works even more smoothly if you aren’t always using room objects to represent every actual room, because room titles and descriptions sometimes just get in the way, y’know? 87

Good point! It can work for special narrative situations — in fact I can’t claim to have entirely avoided that sort of exceptionalism, myself. It’s just not a great routine discovery mechanism, because as such, it makes people quit. Hard.

I’m presuming that the setup you’re describing can only work with multiple nested selection lists, so that I don’t just choose from a list of actions, I also choose from a list of nouns to associate with those actions. I don’t think it would work for me otherwise, if I were tipped off in any way which action the system expects to see associated with which person/object in the room, so I expect that’s not how it works.

Of course, I should just try it rather than make the creator explain all of how it works, and as I mentioned Versu right now tops the list. Sounds more intriguing all the time. 8)

35

Well, note I didn’t say that the world model had to be (primarily, or at all) a model of nested rooms and containers, or anything so closely tied to the IF-standard world model. It just needs to be a model, something the player can learn and on the basis of which she can make predictions about the results of her actions.

I’d say part of the reason it’s hard to get away from the standard world model in traditional parser IF is that, as soon as one does so, it becomes necessary to teach the player a whole new verb set – not just list once, but teach systematically, until those new verbs become as comfortable and familiar as the old bunch. In my experience, it takes at least two or three puzzles (or, if not puzzles, successful interactions) to cement a new verb for a player. That means you could wind up spending a whole comp-game-length design on introducing a set of five verbs.

But five is a very minimal set – for rich-feeling parser IF you want to have enough verbs that they don’t feel like part of a menu. Enough that the player is not holding the whole set in her head, but is instead naturally and freshly thinking of the action she wishes to command in the moment she wants to command it. (Compare: LOOK, EXAMINE, GO, TAKE, INVENTORY, DROP, WEAR, TAKE OFF, OPEN, CLOSE, LOCK, UNLOCK, EAT, SMELL, LISTEN TO, TURN ON, TURN OFF, SEARCH, LOOK UP, ENTER, EXIT, ASK, ATTACK… that’s already two dozen, not counting individual directions, rarities, or meta commands like QUIT.)

In other words: teaching a robust set of brand-new verbs, with enough variety to rival the standard model, could take many hours of gameplay.

That’s challenging enough, but if the revised world model includes acting on any abstractions – talking about topics of conversation, say, or reviewing childhood memories, or changing the price of commodities – then one also needs to find a way to tell the player about those objects that can no longer be found as part of the room description. Parser IF has many ways to try to deal with this: topic lists; inventories that include abstract as well as concrete objects; actions that trigger augmenting menu systems; highlighted or hyperlinked keywords in the body text; ASCII or graphical add-on displays; hint text of various types; making the player use magic, a tool, or a computer to manipulate the abstraction; and so on.

But these solutions can feel clumsy, and as a rule, the more thoroughly you’re changing the world model the more you need to rely on them, until the positive aspects of the parser (a certain directness and precision for those players who are used to the parser at all, together with the pleasure of unhinted agency) have been lost. Instead you often wind up with a screen cluttered with too many extra helps, or a long verb list supplied in help output, or a bunch of key information relegated to an enclosed feelie, or some other unfortunate crime against user experience. Once that happens, some form of multiple choice is preferable.

All this is not exclusively an issue with the technology of the parser. It’s also partly to do with culture and player training. In some alternate universe where Crowther’s seminal text adventure was a story of intrigue in the court of Justinian, we might all be used to an interpersonally focused world model with a social verb set and, perhaps, a standard set of conceptual abstractions. Maybe.

I think the abstract-objects problem might remain a problem, even so.

36

This all makes perfect sense to me as long as I keep in mind that your primary objection to the standard model is its inability to capture social action, so naturally discarding that model means, for you, also discarding physical verbs and replacing them with more abstract equivalents. That’s not what it means to me. We all live in the physical world and nearly every social action is accompanied by a physical action that makes that social interaction possible, or modulates it. I can discard the standard use of rooms and room descriptions and move to a system where time passes by default, without discarding any of the standard verbs or even inventing new ones. But I don’t have the same goals you do, to simulate a social world. I would only want to explore the particular emotions and social interactions specific to the concentrated physical scene I am depicting – a scene in which you aren’t necessarily in any specific ‘room’ at every moment, but can still manipulate any objects that cross your path.

You know, more like ordinary walking-around life. In ordinary life, I don’t walk into a field and think, ‘Now I am at Center of Field. I can kick that soccer ball, but first I would have to move to the Left of Field, and then kick the ball.’ No, I should be able to type just KICK BALL from anywhere on the field, as long as I can see it. The field shouldn’t be five separate locations, just because the author of the game wants it to take me 5 turns to move through it. He or she should be able to manipulate my timing in crossing the field independently of modelling the field spatially, as a standard part of the game design. Then we wouldn’t get all of this weird compartmentalisation and distortion.

But ‘room descriptions’ don’t have to consist of actual ldescriptions of actual physical rooms. That is just a internal abstraction of the game – one does not have to take it as a requirement that ‘room’ text be representational and geographically simulative. Each ‘room’ could represent a state of mind, or a dream scene in the PC’s head; none of it actually exists, but put it in the world model and you can do all sorts of stuff to it with the standard verbs, because even a totally abstract dream sequence is full of at least metaphorical physical actions. And if you’ve got a temporal model that is separate from the spatial model, you can still use it to give the game a setting while hijacking much of the world model for something else.

I can see that for the stories you want to tell, something like that conclusion would hold, but those aren’t the stories I want to tell, so I see an escape clause in there for my kinds of stories, focused on particular temporally-enclosed situations and predicaments and their emotional consequences for the protagonist. You may solve toward an emotion, or make decisions based on how you want to feel, but you don’t actually try to manipulate other people directly with social verbs. You just try to change the circumstances in which things happen so that certain elements (physical or emotional) that are meaningful to the participatns are present or absent, having a different effect on what people say to the protagonist, or what the protagonist feels comfortable saying to them. Among these circumstances is the protagonist’s state of mind, based on the physical actions he (in my case it’s a he) has been forced to perform. Epiphenomenalism FTW? At least, I hope.

Paul.

37

Emily, how does what your saying fit with what could be the most substantial non-physical model yet: your threaded conversation system? If a standard set of actions isn’t required there, is it really required for a physical world model?

I think the hard problem in IF is essentially Inception: to put an appropriate response in the mind of the player without them being overly conscious of that. Whether it’s poorly hinted physical puzzles, or obtrusive topic suggestions in a conversation, it can be very hard to hit that balance perfectly, but when it is balanced, the result is beautiful.

I’m hoping to add a Spaced Repetition hint system to Kerkerkruip. The hints will be presented somewhat obtrusively, but I hope that the modelling of skill acquisition might enable us to avoid the awkwardness where the player has progressed further along a work’s learning curve than where it thinks the player is at.

38

I don’t think I’ve contradicted myself. Threaded Conversation works because it gives explicit hints to the player on a regular basis, thus blending what are effectively menu choices into the parser system. And there is effectively one major standard action – SAY, which happens to apply to a rotating collection of available nouns depending on what exactly is going on at the moment – and a couple of minor standard actions, TOPICS and ASK ABOUT/TELL ABOUT, which discover other parts of the currently-speakable domain. TC is thus not providing a fully-rich system for a parser in the sense I’ve described above, but it’s intended to be used in combination with games that are also using other standard parsed commands. This is true even of, say, Alabaster. Physical actions may be few relative to spoken actions, but they’re present and significant.

Kerkerkruip I didn’t mention because the previous post was already getting pretty rambly, but I think that is a good example of a parser game incorporating substantial systematic changes to the model – and also where there’s a substantial learning curve as a result. The spaced repetition hints are an interesting idea.

39

It’s true that’s what I’m most interested in, so it’s the example I most often use to think with, but there are other examples that people have talked about over the years, models that were about different scales and types of action: what if you were, or controlled, an enzyme, a microbe, a city-state? if you were a drama manager-like figure who set the stage for the experience of AI NPCs? if you were a creator or artist who could bring new objects into being, or an empath who could change the mood states of other characters and then watch what happened? what if each of your actions consumed a day, a season or a century? But very few such games have made an appearance, even though the parser technically allows for the creation of entire new verb sets.

This specific kind of argument – “what if IF were more like real life?”, especially with a phrasing that suggests the particular solution in question is obvious – sets off my alarm bells, mostly because I’ve heard it so many times applied to so many different game features. There’s always a translation between reality and model; there are always points of greater and weaker fidelity.

But okay. Moving on:

That’s territory that’s been a bit explored in the past, both in Inform and TADS; there’s a sample about this (“Stately Gardens”) in the Inform manual that’s present because there was a bit of an interest in this modeling style back in 2005 or so when I was writing the bulk of the examples. As I recall, the ConSpace library for TADS 3 does something fairly similar. The idea is that the player’s vicinity is described automatically with reference to small local objects and also larger adjacent monuments; anything visible can be acted on; the player is automatically moved to touching distance of anything his action requires him to touch. And there are a handful of examples that go the other way, by dividing up a small area that would normally be modeled as a single room into multiple subdivisions.

Shade is probably the most famous and successful case of this, though part of its success comes from the fact that if you’re not thinking about IF modeling conventions explicitly, you might not notice what was going on.

As far as time, I feel like that’s in similar territory: people have experimented with both real-time gameplay and features where different amounts of elapsed time can be attached to different actions. Real-time makes an enormous difference in the feel of play, but introduces significant design and play challenges as well. (What if you outrun the reader’s reading speed? What does it mean to undo a turn in a real-time environment? etc.) Variable-elapsed-time actions feel more pedestrian, I think because I’ve mostly seen this sort of thing in contexts where the amount of time in question looks like “no time for examining or looking, one unit for most actions, two units for walking” (or the like). Aside from making examining into a free action – which can be very important in games with timed sequences – most of the other refinements on this I’ve experienced felt fancy but not enormously important to the overall experience.

Anyway, I’d be intrigued to see a compelling game or narrative application, rather than just a tech demo, of continuous space or variable-duration actions. I feel like I haven’t really yet, with maybe the exception of Shade. It’s not that no one has dabbled in those areas, but maybe no one’s combined the tech with the right design concept yet.

No, of course. IF has been doing surreal dreamscapes and metaphysical landscapes for a very long time. I think of this method not as replacing the standard world model, but as mapping the existing standard world model to a new set of meanings. It works well for some things, but it also imposes a distance between the player and what’s “really” going on, and there are lots of types of story for which it seems like a poor fit.

But I think I’m failing to envision the combination of features you have in mind. I’m sort of picturing a real-time story with a realistic set of events playing out in a complex real-world space, but which the player manipulated by moving/taking/destroying surreal abstractions inside the protagonist’s head…? Which could be totally wrong, so probably the most cunning plan would be to wait until you have made the thing to comment further.

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These are some cool ideas!

Point taken. I didn’t mean to make grandiose claims, but I do tend to get carried way when talking about the things I think are possible that I haven’t really seen.

Yeah I realise that visible scope has often been made to cross rooms, but actionable scope typically doesn’t. It’s a lot rarer. Anyway I have played Shade but thanks for those other references. What I am getting at is more about doing away with geographical ‘rooms’ for great swaths of the narrative, only without doing away with geography, which only incidentally solves the scope problem. Despite this, I am positive that however idiosyncratic my solution, somebody somewhere has tried it already. 8)

I wasn’t really talking about real-time at all. Everything I said was aimed toward turn-based play. ‘Pedestrian’ is an interesting choice of words there, for that’s exactly what it is. Most games assume that the player’s default setting is standing still, and that player commands are needed to set the character in motion. I have not seen one that assumes otherwise. Heliopause came close. That’s the whole point of having a temporal model – to make the game ‘walk’.

Well for what it’s worth I plan to release my source code so if anyone likes the way I’ve done it, they can more easily copy it and replace with their own text. I guess I’ll know whether it actually narratively works and is fun by how many people feel the need to replicate it.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, that depends. I mean, you can put anything in there besides a room description. Anything. Surely you can imagine something non-geographical that wouldn’t impose a distance? 87

Yes, I feel that way, like I am failing to communicate the combination, and you are right that the various components have each been done before. I am sure it seems like a very sensible thing to be skeptical of this magic fairy dust, and I am not so sure about it myself. My first playtesting round with private friends went pretty awfully, too, but I believe that was due to extrinsic factors regarding my puzzles, and confusion about my narrative and win conditions. I’ll find out in round 2.

Yeah you’re sort of right but you have included lots of extraneous information on the assumption that all of the examples I proposed referred directly to my WIP, when actually they don’t. Some of the things I said were just alternate things that you could do with the general approach I’ve taken. I was trying to describe why I think my arrangement of technology works, without giving away story elements that I wish to be experienced for the first time as they happen. It’s really difficult.

But I’ve really enjoyed this exchange and found it very valuable to help clarify my thinking about this next round of improvements. Thanks for indulging me!

Paul.