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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Most people don’t go north to go to the kitchen.
Not indoors, but outdoors I think a lot of people will use NEWS, or a local equivalent like uptown/downtown.
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Ideally, you’d have a little text box next to each arrow with a place for title or description for that direction, like “Kitchen” or “a dark, dirty hole”. That way you wouldn’t have to include any text about locations in your room description, and all the directional information would be with your arrow rose. Also ideally, the directions you could go would be highlighted or green while those directions you couldn’t go would be grayed out or red, or something like that.
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John Ziegler’s How Prince Quisborne the Feckless Shook His Title solves this problem quite elegantly I think. With the GO TO command, you can go to the large cities or other important locations on the map, either by entering the location name from memory or by selecting one from a list (somewhere around 12-15 locations). From there, you’re only a few NESW commands from the smaller destinations in the vicinity of these central locations.
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Personally, I only use NEWS when I’m looking at a map. When I’m driving I navigate by streets and intersections (if I know them, otherwise I’ll like at a map). When I’m in nature I follow the paths that are there, so I also just go by paths and intersections. If I#d leave the paths, I’d look at a map again.
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My preferred way of navigation in games would be a list of adjacent locations to choose from and a labeled map you can open and zoom and pan around.
I admit I haven’t played parser games at all, they were apparently much before my time mostly. I’m a programmer so I should be able to play parser games well, but at that point I might as well solve real programming puzzles in my hobby projects.
Kind of off-topic: My connection to IF
I learned about Twine by playing some games made with it on Itch.io. I’ve gotten a bit into Twine for writing games/stories with some choices and I’m now writing my own framework for these games in Typescript because I just can’t live without the editor completion and other features for project that require anything more than than simple math one a handful of variables.
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Just to be clear, what I’m proposing here is not an idea for changing the general conventions of parser games, which despite my directional problems I like very well as they are. I’m proposing ideas for how to modify some existing parsers a little bit in order to see if we can attract more players into the fold by meeting modern game expectations partway (but not getting rid of the original games).
If I were in charge of everything and were a coding whiz, I’d pick a good candidate game, the author would agree, I’d do some UX/UI modifications to make it very pretty with some minor graphical/text effect elements, get rid of NEWS entirely and have an easy navigation system, otherwise keep all the text intact although prettified, put that puppy on the app store for $1, promote/advertise the crap out of it, and get feedback. Either it’s appealing to some of the readers/puzzle solvers who don’t/won’t currently play parsers, or it isn’t.
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