I’ve never used the standard one just because it seemed longer and more detailed than I imagined the average player would be willing to read. But there’s something to be said for extensions that can be dropped in without spending a lot of time on them. I’d favor a similar extension with more concise help.
I don’t see how the existence of games that are beginner-unfriendly precludes the existence of games that are beginner-friendly. Yes, the platform (if you’re talking about Inform 7) has bad defaults (From distribution all the way to interface), but trying to point people to games that are designed to open up the parser interface to people is probably more productive than hoping every single game implement those features. Though a lot of resistance to those kinds of things comes from what I think are fairly misguided ideas about parser gameplay.
Then again: MOBAs are clearly very successful even though they are horribly arcane and most lack even the semblance of a tutorial (I understand Heroes of the Storm is basically “here’s how to move a character, here’s how to attack” then drops you into an online match with no further instruction). So I don’t think parser games are unique in that they demand some degree of learning genre conventions.
The easy thing to do is to start the game by asking, “Have you played interactive fiction before? y/n” if they say “no” then say something. Link to Zarf’s card. Say “try examining stuff.” Anything!
Even if you think a few words of documentation wouldn’t “solve the problem,” I think everyone would agree that it’s easy, and it would help a teeny tiny little bit.
And so, I charge, if you’re not even doing that, yes, it’s because you don’t care very much, and that’s sad.
(But I’m still not “demanding” that you change your ways. A lot of people donate nothing to charity, don’t volunteer for anything, etc. even though they could. That’s sad, but I’m not “demanding” that they change.)
A plug-and-play solution would be really nice, but it’s also hard. Emily Short had a Tutorial Mode extension that could just be dropped in and that would automatically introduce a bunch of stuff… but I don’t think I’ve ever played a game that used it, which I suspect is not because of apathy but because in practice it takes a lot of tweaking. Though maybe it’d be worth trying on something.
It also might be nice to package Dan’s suggestions into something that could be plug-and-played. Having “[thing]” be understood as examining is simple (though it does create a bunch of edge cases, since the parser isn’t really set up to handle noun-only commands), having everything get printed as a highlighted thing unless the author tells it not to should be pretty simple, automatically generating a list of things you could try with any noun you examine seems… like it’d be a lot less simple. But again, not everyone might want to take that approach.
I’d be curious to know what kinds of help extensions game authors would be willing to use, if they were available.
Let me try to be more concrete and constructive for folks who want to stick with the standard play style.
I recommend:
- Ask the player if they’ve played interactive fiction before; if not, turn on some suggestions.
- Don’t auto-describe the first room, but instead ask the player to type “LOOK”
- In the first room description, suggest that the player examine something, e.g. “EXAMINE DOOR”; emphasize that they can and should examine pretty much everything.
- Add some suggested verbs to object descriptions, manually.
- Specifically, suggest “TAKE” when the player examines something that can be taken
- The first time the player takes something, suggest “INVENTORY”
- When examining an exit, explain how to use it. “The door is to the west, so you can GO WEST to go through it.”
With that, the player knows how to look, examine, take, view inventory, and travel. All other game-required verbs should be revealed through object descriptions, but only at first; you can ease off once the player has demonstrated abilities.
For a good example of this, look at Hadean Lands. It does almost everything I describe here (except that it doesn’t explain how to travel when you open the panel).
It would be a good idea to make an extension that adds all that, but I don’t think doing so by default would be wise. For one, TADS does something like that (an automatically included HELP command if I remember correctly) and I’ve seen it backfire horribly when the boilerplate text doesn’t match what the game actually does (for example, the help says you can navigate using compass directions but the game uses GO TO instead or is a one-room game). Secondly I still don’t think Crappy My Apartment Game will win anyone over no matter how easy it is to learn how to play it.
Serious question: Would you accept
Have you played a parser game before? (Answer yes or no) > no
Great! Here are some suggestions to get you started:
- Blue Lacuna by Aaron Reed
- Bronze by Emily Short
[...]I don’t think I’d care for suggestions of that kind, because when I play IF it represents a degree of investment. When I’m doing a tutorial, I want to do the tutorial, not go on a scavenger hunt on the Internet.
My 2p: If the barrier to entry is moderate, then having such tutorials (tutorial extensions) available within Inform 7 by default would be wise, with the ability for authors to add or not as appropriate (“Release along with beginners tutorial.”), perhaps with minor configuration for the game or location or nouns in the location.
I realise it is work for a core of people due to the closed-source nature of I7, but sometimes extensions should be brought into core for the greater good.
Assume, if you will, the list is literally a series of hyperlinks that go directly to the games themselves.
If the tutorial is telling me “to learn how to play this game, stop playing this game and go play these other games instead”…
…especially considering that those other games are so big and high quality, and the comparison will likely hurt the game I’m trying to play now…
…well, I don’t see it winning me over, basically.
If your game is actively hostile to if-newbies, I guess it could be a good idea to say “don’t play this game - play these instead” to them. That’s how I’d interpret your suggestion. Or I’d ignore it. (Putting suggestions at the end of a game could be a nice tough though, but would do nothing for the subject of this thread.)
Basically, what Peter Piers said goes for me too. If I’m in the tutorial of a game, that tutorial should facilitate my playing that game, not other ones.
It has been some time since we last visited this issue, but past consensus about making help/tutorial content on by default in Inform was that it would create more grief than it resolved. The only thing worse than the lack of help in a game is inaccurate help – help written for the general case that recommends verbs not actually implemented in this particular game, for instance, which might throw off both novices and adept players, and would certainly add that extra sense of broken-ness.
By making some options available but requiring the author to opt in intentionally (the idea went) we made it more likely that people would double-check the text of any included helps or tutorial features to make sure that they were actually a good fit for the game in question.
It sounds like there’s a general consensus that
a) parser games already exist with really fantastic tutorials;
b) the best tutorials provide a hand-holding walkthrough for IF basics (teaching LOOK, EXAMINE, TAKE, INVENTORY, and movement);
c) very few parser games include a tutorial at all, let alone a good one;
d) we don’t want to send new players to a different game to learn the basics.
(If we’re not in consensus on these points, someone should object and correct me.)
Based on this list, I see two things that we can do as a community to improve the new player experience.
-
Make it easy for authors to create good walkthrough-style tutorials.
I’m imagining a set of easy-to-use extensions for the major parser authoring systems, with excellent documentation. For the most part, they should be plug-and-play, but have enough flexibility for modification in the case of nonstandard mechanics. And then… -
Hold authors responsible for including tutorials in their games.
For the most part, we expect every parser game to be beta-tested (apart from speedIF). Some people hold the public policy that they won’t play or review major competition games that haven’t been beta tested. I think this has gone a long way to help improve beta testing frequency.
What if, as a community, we applied the same standards for tutorials? I think the incidence of tutorials would skyrocket. And the more games have tutorials, the more this would be a clear community standard, and the more authors would put tutorials in.
To be clear, I don’t suggest holding authors responsible until the above extensions exist. Or boycotting older games that don’t have tutorials. Because that would be unreasonable (and also, no one would play any of my games ever again).
But if we could make plug-and-play extensions for new player walkthroughs, and their existence is well enough publicized so that new authors can easily find them - then it would be a reasonable requirement. It would be another barrier to authoring, but not a very high one.
I think that mock transcripts are a wonderful way to demonstrate how to play parser IF, except for the (huge?) flaw that they’re not interactive. “Non-interactive” might be all that’s needed to be said against them, but I’m pretty sure that’s how I first learned how to play these games. Infocom’s, as far as I remember, also demonstrated genre, and the types of action that were fruitful in a particular game, but you could do more and write a transcript to act as a prologue, or the backstory of an NPC, or something else to add to the worldbuilding. So I guess the question is, is the fact that it’s just a blob of inert text a dealbreaker? I think for some players it would be, but maybe not all. (One technique is to make the transcript really funny and just enjoyable to just read.)
By this do you mean interactive tutorials? Maybe in general they are the best kind, or maybe not, I don’t know. But I don’t know if they’d suit every game or every player, at least not in isolation. People differ in their approaches to learning things. Some people do like to dive in, some may want to “read the manual” first, some people may want to type lots of different things instead of whatever the tutorial currently wants them to type. Some people may prefer to have something they can look back on, for reference.
It’d be good to make it as easy as possible for game authors to include tutorials. But I’m wondering, assuming game authors do want to include some kind of help, what are the reasons the existing extensions aren’t getting used (if they aren’t)? That would be helpful to know when putting together new ones. For example, Emily Short’s tutorial extension that matt w mentioned looks like it already does most of the things Dan recommended, as far as introducing the basic actions. Is it just that it’s not possible to have a plug-and-play tutorial that’s also interactive?
Sorry, matt w - somehow, I missed your post previously. (Thanks for calling it out, bg!)
I tried out Emily Short’s Tutorial Mode, and it actually looks fantastic. (It’s not updated for I7 yet, but it’s a one-line fix - initialize the temporary variable way with “let way be north;” at the top of the teach compass directions rule.)
It is, in fact, pretty plug-and-play. The source code below will run a basic tutorial, including LOOK, EXAMINE, TAKE, INVENTORY, DROP, and movement by compass directions.
Here’s example source code (mine, not Emily’s - I wanted to see how it would adapt to a different environment.)
[spoiler]“Test Chamber”
Include Tutorial Mode by Emily Short.
Test Chamber is a room. “Pale walls, cold air, underexciting. The lobby is to the north.”
Lobby is north of Test Chamber. “Wholly unimpressive and forgettable. The test chamber is back to the south.”
The silver ovoid is a thing in Test Chamber. The description of the ovoid is “You gaze at your distorted reflection.”[/spoiler]
Here’s the resulting transcript. (All the instructions are actually in italics, but I didn’t italicize them here.)
[spoiler]Test Chamber
An Interactive Fiction
Release 1 / Serial number 150603 / Inform 7 build 6L38 (I6/v6.33 lib 6/12N) SD
Test Chamber
Pale walls, cold air, underexciting. The lobby is to the north.
You can see a silver ovoid here.
You can review your surroundings at any time by typing LOOK. Try it – type LOOK now. (Or, if you don’t need instructions, you can turn the tutorial off by typing TUTORIAL MODE OFF.)
look
Excellent – LOOK will print a description of your environment, like so:
Test Chamber
Pale walls, cold air, underexciting. The lobby is to the north.
You can see a silver ovoid here.
Individual objects have descriptions, too. You can find out more by examining them, as in EXAMINE THE SILVER OVOID.
examine silver ovoid
Very good. Since you’re likely to examine things frequently, you can also abbreviate this command as X, as in X the silver ovoid.
You gaze at your distorted reflection.
You can pick things up when you see them, like this: TAKE SILVER OVOID.
take silver ovoid
Well done. Now you’ll get a message to tell you whether you succeeded in picking up something:
Taken.
Now, it turns out that you’re holding something. To find out what, try typing INVENTORY.
inventory
Right! In the future, you can also shorten this command to INV or just I. As you see, it will print out a description of what you’ve got:
You are carrying:
a silver ovoid
If you want to get rid of something that you’re holding you can always drop it, like this: DROP THE SILVER OVOID.
drop silver ovoid
Dropping things will move them into your environment, like this:
Dropped.
To move from place to place, you can use the compass directions (NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST, as well as NORTHEAST, NORTHWEST, etc.)
From here, try NORTH.
north
Good! Like other often-used instructions, compass directions can be abbreviated down to N, S, E, W, NE, NW, and so on. UP and DOWN are also possible – keep an eye on room descriptions in order to learn more about where you can go and when.
As soon as you enter a new room, you’ll get a description of what’s there, like this:
Lobby
Wholly unimpressive and forgettable. The test chamber is back to the south.
And that covers most of what you need to know! There are lots of other verbs you can type as you go along, but you’ll likely be able to guess them from context. Don’t be afraid to experiment with new actions.
To stop the game, type QUIT; to save your current position, type SAVE. RESTORE allows you to bring back a game you have previously saved, and RESTART starts the game over again at the beginning.
[/spoiler]
Some observations:
-
It automatically begins in tutorial mode with a TUTORIAL MODE OFF command for people who don’t need it. I’m torn about this decision - I’d generally prefer a starting question (something like “would you like new player help?”) because it feels unattractive to me. However, it will ensure the people who need help most get help, and may be the best decision for that reason.
-
It requires all commands in full, and rejects commands based on input. (So “EXAMINE OVOID” was not acceptable in the example above - it had to be “EXAMINE SILVER OVOID”). That’s a little annoying.
-
The structure for adding new commands might be a bit intimidating to some authors… but authors who are intimidated by that system probably aren’t adding many new commands.
“2) Hold authors responsible for including tutorials in their games.”
This might be a bit tricky because definitions of “tutorial” may differ. Is a list of available commands good enough? Does it need to be adaptive? Do we now judge the game based on the quality of the tutorial? I would prefer the ability to experiment with how to present a tutorial without players dismissing me out of hand because it doesn’t follow the recipe.
Neil