I completely agree.
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The verbs aren’t hidden, they’re all freely available in every dictionary. Figuring them out is what makes a puzzle game a puzzle game. It’s no different to figuring out to solve a problem in real life, and that’s kind of the point.
Guessing the verb only becomes a problem when the player has the right idea but the author hasn’t provided enough synonyms. The English language is particularly replete with synonyms. It’s the responsibility of the author, with the help of their playtesters, to ensure they’re all implemented.
Mapping, with a pencil and paper, is also part of the fun of playing a parser game. People used to draw beautifully illustrated maps and send them to computer magazines to be published in the Adventure Games column. Nowadays there’s CASA and the IFDB.
Gruescript eliminates the guess-the-verb problem, but at the cost of some of the puzzle-solving. Having a “held” item as well as an inventory (an innovation that’s in Detectiveland but not in Draculaland) mitigates this problem a bit. It’s a good compromise between “ease of consumption” and retaining the parser game feel.
Why does the phrase “ease of consumption” make me think of whizzing food in a blender and feeding it in with a spoon? Don’t people like to chew?
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Lots of Adventuron parser games do this too, and it was quite common in 8-bit games published on the ZX Spectrum. The disadvantage of clearing the screen is that you can’t refer back to something you did earlier in the game.
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To reiterate: Figuring them out is what makes a puzzle game a puzzle game.
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Absolutely - I’ll amend my post.
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This was something I didn’t expect to be so controversial. I used to do a lot of screen clearing in early versions of I Am Prey, but testers hated it when that happened. So I took note that quite a few players rely on the ability to scroll up (especially in a game where turn counts matter, which I suppose should have been obvious).
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Yeah, in most ZX Spectrum games you can’t scroll back through past text anyway (there’s not the memory to store that information) so the default that we sort of moved to was clearing the screen whenever the player changed location or something major, location changing happened.
The preferred default behaviour when I was producing games back then was to allow the input and response text to scroll underneath the static location description; so players could always see the important location text. That did, however, then limit the amount of “working space” left on the screen for the input & responses.
Old 8-bit tools like the PAW had quite a lot of options in terms of screen display. You could have (one-way) scrolling text with everything in. Or split the screen into two sections with one half scrolling under the other. And you could add things like areas for graphics, or inventory, or status, or compass roses to show exits, or objects.
The more you add, though, the more cluttered the “screen” gets and the more it takes the player away from the actual text side of things. Resolution has increased these days, in terms of desktop machines, but on something like a phone screen, I still think the same problems remain. The more buttons and maps and sections you add, the more it diminishes the text.
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I totally dig the arrow keys. I would probably use these in a game since I struggle with compass directions and it’s so much easier for me with a visual representation of a direction.
The clickable buttons on the side, not so much, because they’re on the side and because they’re still labelled NEWS, which is a thing I think could just get gone altogether for an experiment. I think anyone who struggles with NEWS will be ambivalent to buttons labelled NEWS.
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I agree. If the buttons were in the proper cardinal direction pattern, labelling them might actually enforce how NEWS should be perceived though. We are pattern recognition machines. It is possible to “rewire” our brains with practice.
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Agreed, but one of the things that people constantly complain about is how NEWS breaks mimesis. Most people don’t go north to go to the kitchen. So a lot of my hypothesis/idea is predicated around the notion of arrow buttons completely eliminating NEWS (or any other way of labelling directions with words) and just being arrows.
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I just can’t see how this would work. I get that, in the room description, you might say “You are in the living room. From here you can go to the kitchen, the hall and the downstairs bathroom.” But how would you know which of the four arrow buttons leads to which room?
Cardinal directions might be mimesis breaking in that, in real life you don’t go around carrying a compass, but in real life a sighted person can see which way a particular room is. The cardinal directions stand in for that. They also allow you to build up a mental picture of the environment and, if you need to, draw a map.
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Hopefully relevant to this discussion: the button-based version of Inside the Facility is here:
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I actually prefer locations being labelled and directions not being used at all. I’m not a fan of a world on a grid, unless you can see the map in-game.
On top of the hill is a house.
> go house
You reach the front porch.
> enter house
You are in the living room. There is a hallway and kitchen area around the corner.
> go bathroom (noun, not verb preferably)
You walk down the hall and to the bathroom.
Now, the layout of the house is nebulous. But, that’s also the beauty of it. This is a strength of choice-based games, I feel. I’m sure there are plenty of parser games that do this as well, but I feel the cardinal direction movement is lazy in some cases. It’s a default, catch-all method of navigation. That said, I’m all for making NEWS movement easier, but I question why we need it in the first place, unless you really want a maze-like environment.
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That’s kind of how it works in choice-based games I guess, and I admit it’s more natural. But it’s also a lot of typing compared with N, E, S & W!
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Not necessarily.
On top of the hill is a house.
> go bathroom
Which bathroom? The house or the mental asylum you just escaped from?
> house
You reach the front porch and enter the house. You go down the hallway to the bathroom.
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People’s brains work differently, though, especially when it comes to navigation! There’ve been a bunch of semi-recent threads explicating this, but for every person who finds the current NEWS approach makes for mazelike environments, there’s another person who’d find the approach you outline here to be the one that renders a simple environment maze-like and requires significantly more mental effort to navigate (it’s me, I’m that person).
I suspect it’s impossible to cater equally to all players here, but figuring out ways to at least give a leg up to those who might be most at sea makes sense – IMO though that probably means doing stuff that supports folks for whom NEWS is challenging, rather than going the other direction and jettisoning NEWS. For one thing, I think it’s generally easier to think about how to make it easier for non-NEWS-y folks to navigate a NEWS-y grid than vice versa, and for another at least in the context of trying to make it easier for newcomers to get into parser games, there’s more upside IMO to providing a learning curve that eventually allows them to engage with the overwhelmingly-NEWS-y games written over the last forty years as opposed to one that doesn’t provide any help on that front.
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This is how Emily Short’s Approaches extension works. I’ve included it in several of my games and I think it’s a great idea. Typing “go bathroom” when you’re miles away from the bathroom is less typing, but when you’re just south of the bathroom, it’s more. I don’t see any reason not to include both options, unless you’re going for a particular effect.
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For those who have played Blue Lacuna, the big game map can be traversed with either keywords or compass directions (if you find the in-game compass).
Which did you pick? I think the first time I played I used the compass, and the second time I think I used keywords.
Also @dibianca I tried the button version of Inside the Facility and it looks so good! How did you do the map?
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I’m sure now that some criticism will be drawn on a PC awakening night time in an unknown place and immediately assigning direction to the walls, w/o references… but I think that in RL people can provisionally assign “logical” reference direction until actually getting the bearings…
(an idea I’m toying in my mind is allowing only shipboard directions until the player reaches the bridge and/or the compass platform… aside that the relation between shipboard and geographic direction can be arbitrarily influenced by the player thru that prominent turnable item everyone expects on a ship’s bridge…)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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