And that’s the fundamental lesson I’ve learned over years of doing this: The author is in complete control, and the best situation is when you can make the player feel like they have control. The term for this is agency and the best games are “high player-agency”.
Along with that, the other secret is the author needs to be on the player’s team - if you’re from square one fighting against the player to SOLVE MY DIABOLICAL RIDDLES AND GUESS WHAT I WANT YOU TO DO muahahah then the player will become frustrated more quickly and quit and not even encounter everything you planned later that makes it all worthwhile. The more you can make the player feel intelligent and like they’ve “outsmarted” you and are making progress, the more they are likely to hang in and see the whole game.
This happened to me with Arthur DiBianca’s Sage Sanctum Scramble - I had no intention of playing much past the first few screens to see what it was about, but the first few puzzles are easy and it’s like potato chips where you can’t stop putting your hand in the bag. I got about 15 puzzles in before they got hard and I had to skip. Now I can’t stop thinking about it and want to go back. If his first three puzzles were as hard as number fifteen, he would have lost me as a player.
The idea that the player has more freedom in parser games has always been overstated. The only real freedom comes in being able to read the author determined story elements in a slightly different order and pace.
Since we’ve reached that point in the discussion where we’re giving our personal hot takes on the difference, to me it’s always been the fact that standard IF is traditionally very linear. There’s usually only one plot to discover and the interactive elements come in puzzling out exactly what you must type to be drip fed the next bit of the story. CYOAs meanwhile tend to eschew the microscopic details to offer more breadth. The player experience is less about precisely steering their character through making a pot of tea, but navigating them through dozens of alternate lives.
But words supplied by the author are still the medium this happens in and their effectiveness is main thing being judged in this comp or any other.
this breadth is also, to be fair, one of the things that made it tough for twines to find broad appeal with video game players. one of the most consistent critiques i saw, and something i kept in mind when designing an IF system, is the “analysis paralysis” induced by the breadth of routes from any particular page. some work can be done to diminish this labor by highlighting the “navigational” or “important” choices, like “with those we love alive.” in general, though, video games as a broader field seems to prefer having a clear understanding of where they’re invoking agency, and where they’re just getting lore.
My preference in puzzles doesn’t come from odd situations and how to overcome them like MacGyver. I don’t care about trying to unstick the gear in the clock by using baby oil. I care about the fact that I can now go confront Tom with new information since Sarah’s statement blows his alibi to bits. Characters are infinitely more interesting than inanimate objects. This is just my opinion. But it’s also the reason I personally find it difficult to care about puzzles in text adventures. If anything, I’m only adding puzzles to my game because I feel a bit obligated and that maybe it’ll get parser players to enjoy it more.
And that’s the beauty of having choice narratives and parser narrative - each has a strength they can cater to. Parser is good for object-based manipulation and exploration (The Impossible Bottle is a great example with hundreds of moving parts and interlocking systems), Choice is often better for story and conversation-focused plots where it doesn’t matter as much whether you’re in the Church Courtyard or a Coffee House and the author is more interested in just telling a story rather than building a universe. Conversation can actually be a weakness in parser since it’s not inherently built-in and authors usually fall into ask/tell verb schemes or install a menu-plugin if they want to offer dialogue options. Hybrids can be any mix of the two.
In my experience it’s all about seating the player in the character and offering choices that speak to tension of the scene. I’ve had issues with a few choice games this year that just give you a grab bag of choices at each juncture that seem to have been decided just to be as diverse as possible. They haven’t told me who the character is yet and honestly I have no stake in where they go.
Someone asked me recently if coming up with choices is hard because I have to imagine everything the player might want to do. I don’t really care what any random player might want to do. I care about what my games character is experiencing and what their available choices say about who they are and how they speak to their current struggle. Saying: You’re at a dinner party, you can do anything! What do you want to do? That’s boring to me. Saying you’re at a dinner party with the family you were astranged from since yesterday. You’re here because you’ve felt guilty for leaving for years. How do you deal with the uncle who’s acting like there isn’t a giant elephant in the room? That’s a lot more interesting and if you do your job setting the scene and character right so the player is in their shoes, they tend to have an immediate visceral reaction of how they’d respond, and only have choice paralysis in moments when the character is feeling the same thing.
this is pretty close to how i’ve felt about it! but i’ve also found that, both because of the history of CRPGs, and the history of commercial mostly-IF, some more “mainstream” players also expect that there’s little to no dissonance between “player” and “protagonist.” a lot of the most interesting narrative difficulty in IF comes from the opposite of that – producing strange and compelling intersections between who the conceptual player is, who the protagonist is, and who the narrator is. those don’t necessarily have to be explicit, but i find they’re fairly unique complications to IF writing as opposed to broad games writing. part of that could well be losing access to the “cinematic” gaze provided by 2D and 3D graphics, which i think calls on a lot of visual-artistic history that IF doesn’t tend to evoke.
i think this was also what people found so strange and compelling about facade – you start knowing nothing about yourself other than that you’re about to go to dinner, and all the boundaries are formed through testing the limits of the NPCs. it would be insufficient to suggest that either player and protagonist are separate, but they’re also very clearly not the same. the protagonist is imbued with far more history than the player is given access to, and hardly only in an in medias res sense, given there’s a huge amount that simply must be imagined.
similarly, for a totally non-graphical parser game, spider and web gains nearly all its puzzling, and its narrative, from a protagonist-narrator who fully intends to lie to both their listeners. that would be extremely difficult in visual terms, but textually, and mechanically, it works!
This is something I’ve been struggling with in my own game. I tried to get around the faceless player persona by introducing a sister character that walked around with you and said all of the stuff that I was afraid would distance the PC from the player if they said it, but then I realized that once she was gone, the PC was just an emotionless robot. Which is exactly what 99% of parser game PCs are, I guess, but it just feels wrong in this environment. So I need to think it over some.
Agreed completely here, well said. Although this is touching on another schism in the approach to playing/writing IF that I’ve seen lead to a lot of arguing in the past, and to me is more significant that the authoring system or world model. Somehow it’s become a not uncommon idea that every character should 100% represent the player…somehow…even if they’re a magical assassin in a fantasy world with deep lore. Available love interests need to represent their exact preference, and the character has to have their own gender and beliefs or else it’s not “relatable”. So from the get go the author is dealing with limitations, having to offer instead of interesting and meaningful choices and character nuance, a billion useless cosmetic options. They always affect nothing in the plot and for me, force this generic plastic feeling to the simulation, but are vital to appeasing these more casual readers.
Conversely, I’ve experienced dissonance in the other direction. I don’t mind if the PC is " Ageless , Faceless , Gender-Neutral , Culturally Ambiguous Adventure Person " or if they have elements of their own personality, or if they’re a very specific character I’m roleplaying as. However, when I first discovered Choice of Games, I initially bounced hard off of the ones that were like “So…I can choose to play as a Belgian nun or a bisexual werewolf or a wheelchair-bound clairvoyant twelve year-old…and the story is the SAME somehow???” That kind of dissonance would cause vapor-lock and I couldn’t proceed. As the player, I’d like a little help from the author about who the character is! But I understand that’s the actual magic of CoG stories.
I’ve come to terms with it, but I certainly would have to stretch to write a game like that where the entire game has to reconfigure based on what the player chooses to set up for the PC. It’s quasi role-playing and my example above is exaggerated for humour, but for an author, it requires a feat of conceptualization for a game I wasn’t ready for!
(That said, I’m all for inclusiveness with regard to gender and orientation as appropriate to any story, just the ones that are like “Be a retired plumber from New Jersey or a ballerina!” that caused mental whiplash!)
yes, this is part of how those systems also tend to reveal the men (and women, and otherwise) behind the curtain. one of my best memories of that is playing The Walking Dead S1 – one of my favorite games still, to be clear – and then, on replay, mostly realizing the game had very successfully fooled me into thinking other choices would’ve ended substantially differently.
I’m a big fan of putting the actual “roleplay” of a scene in the choices the player has, even if they all lead to the same outcome or a limited number of them! The illusion of choice can simulate agency for the player but keep the author from collapsing via combinatorial explosion!
There’s a Choice of Games game called Heart of the House that did that for me. It felt like your decisions could really break the game into seriously different directions, but on a second playthrough it ended up being that they bottlenecked into the same story pretty frequently.
That’s not a knock against the game, as it’s still one of my favorites and everyone should check it out, but I guess it’s just one of the inherent flaws of the medium. A lot of it is smoke and mirrors, but it can be really effective on the first playthrough. Illusion is everything.
Personally, I feel like every work of IF should just start off with the choices the player is asked to make in Robotsexpartymuder, even if the IF is like, about a bank heist in the 1950s or a fairytale.
That’s exactly what I was getting at, but you were much better at getting to the point. There’s a huge range of ‘choices’ offered, but the actual stories have to remain generic and static because there’s no way to write out plots that realistically respond to them all. Not having them at all would be preferable to drawing so much attention to them and then having them mean nothing. Same with all these faceless mannequin love interest that I’m supposed to convince myself are real characters even though the game will swap out their parts and genders and anything else just on my whim. .
Plenty of readers are fine with this and I’m not knocking what they enjoy, but it’s not what I go looking for in any interactive fiction, and it becomes frustrating when I encounter players who haven’t experienced any other kind of IF and expect that to be the norm.
Choice of Games has one very important design decision: there is no back button. Players complain about this a lot, but if they made one available it would become too obvious that most of the time absolutely nothing of significance changes regardless of what choices you make.
There are exceptions of course that offer true branching, but those aren’t the norm.
Skybreak! was my first attempt to write decent romantic encounters in IF (besides some content in 6SB). I tried to make them realistic people…that I, the writer, wanted to hook up with. Naturally at no point does the game prompt you for a gender, but the player simply chooses a romantic target and then sees whether it succeeds or fails. I think a romantic interaction in a video game is much more satisfying if the character has an actual identity beyond “plug and play target of affection” (so in skybreak all 8 “romanceable” characters have very different things that happen when you romance them)…but of course the downside is that this fundamentally collapses the number and variety of different romantic targets (so in skybreak if you’re playing someone attracted to men, you’re not going to be hooking up with the Acolyte…which has other game consequences).
In my opinion, this is the worst kind of illusion of choice. What’s the point of letting you choose to be a robot or werewolf if it’s never mentioned in the game and everyone reacts to you exactly the same? I think that the game would actually be improved by removing the option.
