I think linear stories and at least some types of agency aren’t mutually exclusive. One type of agency I find attractive is just the ability to walk around and interact with the world, which isn’t the focus of most choice style games, which are focused explicitly on narrowly framed choices and inherently limit your agency to a small number of choices. I personally enjoy story driven games that have a specific story to tell - I don’t need a ton of different endings or customizeations based on my actions. If I’m looking for a game that really responds to my actions I’ll play something like a more procedurally generated game like a grand strategy or roguelike. Finally, like others have said, and like much of art generally, the sense of agency is in some ways an illusion. I think it’s a fair criticism of some modern iterations of choice style games that focusing too much on the illusions and techniques can start to feel gimmicky.
Yeah, if you want someone to fully explore and comb through an abandoned location, parser is great for that since the exploration doesn’t seem to have the ceiling that fixed choices offer.
I’ve tried to fix that a bit with tricks like adding new choices on re-visiting a passage like the player is noticing new things, or unlocking new choices based on player knowledge. “The professor said he hid something near the baseboards…”
Another thought about what’s working against agency in choice style games - there is a relationship between gamy-ness and agency. If a game has a clear set of rules then you feel agency within that restricted world; on the other hand many choice style games don’t present a clear set of rules but rather present a set of custom choices and states. Something like the book/game Meanwhile might feel like it has more agency because you can see the graph and try to navigate more directly on it and see how it works. It’s possible that trying to obfuscate the underlying logic reduces the sense of agency.
I wonder if this is true.
Take a sokoban or sudoku puzzle: the rules are easy to understand and the player could, in theory, just do whatever they wish. However, there is only one solution and “agency” in puzzle games amounts to solving the puzzle: follow this path in its twists and turns and you will reach where the dev has asked you all along.
I think the feeling of agency comes from the illusion that you know the rules and think you can play around in it. When I see a roleplaying game that clearly lays out its rules, I feel like I can fiddle with the mechanics and see how much I can progress with it or not. That, to me, is agency.
That’s an interesting idea. I think sudoku is maybe an extreme example of a rule based game lacking agency. There are many simple perfect knowledge rule based games that do have a strong sense of agency - eg chess and go. Another extreme but common example would be a choice game that doesn’t have any underlying general rules, or at least it feels random and unpredictable to the player. In that case I suppose you could say it lacks the illusion that you know the rules and hence a sense of agency. I’m not sure I’d say that agency is only an illusion though, or that the illusion of agency is the same as agency itself.
An example of a recent choice based game which points in some possible directions I find interesting is The Thirty Nine Steps - Details. The choices are limited to fairly high level and important choices in high stakes situations, and in between the story is filled in without any choices. Non-important choices have a tendency to break the illusion of agency (why can you do one low level action but not some other reasonable one), as do choices that involve less direct actions (which in my experience almost always feel vague and unpredictable). If you can somehow combine this style of choices with a game whose state is meaningfully affected by those choices, I think you’d be able to create an interesting sense of agency.
Huh. I think of The Thirty Nine Steps as an example of a game where the choices feel really tense but the story just keeps rolling on regardless of what you choose. I do think it does a decent job of that (though it, could, as Graham says in his postmortem, be done better in some ways). But you’re choosing how you’ll get to a good ending, not whether you’ll get a good ending, so I can see some people feeling like you don’t have meaningful choice here.
I thought it was a good example of the types of choices I thought were interesting. It’s probably not a great example of a game where your choices really matter, though that’s also true of most choice games I’ve played despite the marketing.
Well, that’s exactly what the Lady Thalia games are, so…
To some extent, this is true of every game, and every vehicle for a story. I mean, you can’t have unlimited choice without having an AI write it. Part of the reason we play IF is to experience a story, and stories have arcs, and not every arc will work.
The Thalia games work well for a lot of reasons, but a big one is how well the gameplay fits the narrative, and how sensibly the boundaries are defined. There have to be boundaries or it’s not a story. If players could make the decision that Lady Thalia could be abducted by aliens or go into a nunnery, these would definitely give more choice, but they would not improve the game. Cue the fans screaming for alien abduction in the next installment.
To me, it’s all about that interplay between the story and the gameplay. What I’m hearing is that clicking is often not exciting gameplay. I agree. Just typing isn’t exciting gameplay, either. An author is making that platform work with the story, or they’re not.
SCREAAAAAAMMMMM
Who doesn’t like a good Alien Abduction? - Details
Oh come on, obviously the nunnery is the solid-gold idea here - trying to lift a jewel-encrusted relic while navigating forbidden tension with the Mother Superior, it writes itself!
What I’m hearing is that clicking is often not exciting gameplay. I agree. Just typing isn’t exciting gameplay, either. An author is making that platform work with the story, or they’re not.
I agree with this. I don’t want to start a platform superiority debate, but with choice-based, the pressure is on the author to make the choices matter for the player. If the choices have no real impact on the story, you feel desensitized to them and won’t spend as much time thinking on them, effectively making you skip the gameplay in favor of the story.
I also feel like games that don’t have much in the way of stories mattering also tend to be written by less experienced authors: either they don’t know enough about the programming to track and respond to a player’s choices, or the game ends up with so many obligatory choices that branch off in a way that ends up unfinished and left to rot.
The ideal mix for me is a game that keeps the plot concise and interesting, while at least acknowledging my choices and letting me play my own character based on what it gives me. I’m definitely going to go over the recommendations here to see what works.
I know this topic has been beaten to death a bit and I’ve already commented, but it just struck me that a lot of my personal favorite Choice-based games are not really that interactive. Birdland, for instance, doesn’t even track data between chapters, really. It branches a lot but there’s no ‘memory’. One of my top 10 games, Creatures Such as We, doesn’t track any stats. The first twine game I ever really enjoyed was Astrid Dalmady’s You Are at a Crossroads, which does track some state but is more of a ritualistic game.
I think for me personally, Choice-based games satisfy my ‘book’ itch more than my ‘video game’ itch in general (with some big exceptions like 4x4 Archipelago). So it’s possible you may find the same thing; you might be like a newly-converted vegan trying desperately to find the best soy sausage substitute or eggplant parmesan that’s ‘just like chicken’, when maybe instead of meat substitute you might more enjoy fully vegetarian meals that aren’t trying to imitate something else. Or not (I have enjoyed both parser-like choice games like Detectiveland and fake meat like Trader Joe’s soy-made ‘ground beef’).
Completely agree! (Which is also why I feel that the fact that most commands in your average parser game give you some kind of “can’t do that” message is a necessary feature of the medium and not a problem to be solved. But that’s a whole other only-tangentially-related essay.)
Anyway, I didn’t really intend my comment to be self-deprecating; I’m just saying that if someone likes the Lady Thalia games, 39 Steps’s lack of branching shouldn’t exclude it from the category of things they might like, because in many ways they function quite similarly.
(I think Lady Thalia would have a great time infiltrating a nunnery. She might be a bit put out about the alien abduction, though. Unless the aliens had a particularly nice artwork on their spaceship…)
In my case, I welcome what you describe as “pressure” as an advantage: my major problem with parser games is getting them tested sufficiently since there’s never any way for an author to predict everything a player might try. Even a not-too-complex moderately-sized parser game probably needs at minimum three experienced beta-testers (ideally more) who know how to try unexpected commands and kick the walls and abuse the system to find bugs and are willing spend hours doing so. There’s always going to be an “I forgot to make the piano fixed-in-place so the player can carry it in their pocket…” type of thing that happens.
In choice, I get to define exactly what the player’s agency is. I can mention a piano in the text and let it be scenery without needed to implement it in a world-model. The player won’t get sidetracked playing with things that aren’t part of the story. And because I have parser roots, I can generate and manage complex interactions I build from the ground up, so the game doing unexpected things like “the player can carry the piano” types of goofs are much rarer. And, since I am in charge of how complex interactions is I always know how to fix them and won’t run afoul of my ignorance of Standard Rules. In my experience, even my largest games (Cannery, robotsexpartymurder, Pickle) only needed one or two people to do quick read-throughs for typos and the occasional “this link doesn’t do what it’s supposed to if you come at it from this direction” type of bugs.
Being in complete control of the narration and interactions - to me at least - gives a story more momentum since a player doesn’t get hung up in the first room trying to pull up the carpet because it was mentioned a bit too importantly in the room description. I feel like I’m writing more than set-decorating. Ryan Veeder probably gave the best advice to parser authors: “Don’t mention anything that’s not important because you then will be expected to implement it which increases the amount of work you have to do.” (paraphrased) That’s why his games feel so immediate and immersive - he doesn’t spend time over-describing rooms and adding extra things like bathrooms filled with junk that isn’t plot relevant just because a location “would have a bathroom.” In a choice narrative I can give that detail “Of course there is a bathroom here” and if I want, the link can just say “You don’t need to use it now, you’ve got better things to do.” That type of light immersion feels better to me for plot momentum than risking the player spending 300 turns ransacking a random bathroom because if a room exists, there must be a reason and something important hidden there… Where in Choice I can casually mention a restroom and prevent the player from getting hung up on it while the bomb ticks down.
It’s not a case of choice or parser being “superior” it’s just what the author vibes with and can do their best work in.
I think story vs gameplay focus is sort of a sliding scale: On the story focus side you end up with an interactive story, on the gameplay focus side you’d end up with a text-based RPG.
I liked Trigaea very much, and I think I even found most endings. The fighting and slight grinding gives pacing to the story: It would be much worse if you could just read it all in one go. It’s like a story broken up by minigames, though the fights get repetitive quite fast, at least if you’re playing on hard and have to grind more.
I’d even go as far as to say the modern 3D RPGs/Adventures are the logical evolution of parser games: With the increasing compute power, you’re able to actually place the player into a world where you can interact with stuff. Adventures are more 3D versions of parser games of sorts (many things you can look at/interact with to get some text), while RPGs lean into the gameplay with usually a main quest and side quests sprinkled throught the map for the actual story.
The parser is counterintuitive. It requires devotion by the player. This makes it a challenge to write good games which use a parser for player input. The best use case is probably word play, but most parser games are exploration / medium sized dry goods puzzles, which could conceivably be made more user-friendly with a different interface. But it is, at least in principle, possible to write parser games that fit their user interface.
However, the aforementioned fixation on certain parser-ish gameplay mechanics will often derail the author’s intention for the story they set out to implement in the beginning. Writing a choice game side-steps this problem by defaulting to a far more abstract model of player actions. In my opinion, many choice games are therefore better at creating a coherent narrative, which, as has been pointed out, reads more like a book.
This does not necessarily mean there are no meaningful choices in such a game. On the contrary, there are sometimes very interesting risk/reward, long-term/short-term, idealism/pragmatism etc. choices to make that may or may not lead to wildly different branches and so on.
In fact, if you feel you’re not making real choices, that might be a sign the author is succeeding with their writing. It might all be so seamless you didn’t even notice where you made a choice, since your own subconscious compelled you to make it as you did.
In contrast, you will sometimes notice that you unwittingly made a choice early on in a parser game when, for example, you ate the greasy shoe-rag you actually had to hold onto until chapter five to bribe the goblin. That’s a blind decision, which, in a better game, would probably not be part of the design. But it’s not even fully intentional. It’s just that the author felt compelled to implement the eating action for everything remotely edible. You know, for the emergent gameplay feeling and the illusion of limitless choice. And don’t we all agree that games have become far too easy these days, anyway? Probably due to the bad example set by all of those choice games.
I completely agree that trying to force parser mechanics into a choice game isn’t usually ideal, but can be made to work based on the game. The author needs to think of the story differently - in a choice narrative if you’re not just doing a straight linear branching flow, I have found it helps to think in terms of board game mechanics. If you think of Monopoly, the player’s experience isn’t linear due to randomness, but there is a set structure and set of interactions that will always occur: you arrive at a random location (you may get your money/stats replenished if its been long enough) where you may get to acquire an item (buy a property that will help you later) you might have to pay a fee, or you may get a random encounter which involves getting money, receiving money, or being relocated to another place which may be helpful or not.
In my opinion, the parser’s world-model is really good for:
- games where the plot has already occurred and the player is digging through the aftermath to figure out what happened with no plot time-pressure - like solving a mystery at a crime scene
- treasure hunts where there is no time limit or a very relaxed time limit and deep “tear every room apart” exploration is the focus
- time-loop or “arcade” style games where the actual game loop is short, but is intended to be played multiple times to dig deeper and aggregate player knowledge for a “perfect” run with lots of moving parts
- a plot where the player is always “one step behind” the mastermind antagonist and can take as much time as they need to solve a puzzle at each node to progress
Choice narratives excel at stories where immediate world model is less important and the overarching plot is either hands-on in the moment, or can be inferred from bits of scenario and gameplay “fires in the desert” style like a boardgame/QBN:
- conversation focused games
- rogue-likes where there is limited interaction but a lot of randomness that may work to the player’s advantage or not
- games where the player is directly involved in a developing plot that is occurring in the moment making immediate choices that don’t rely on an inventory. Scenes aren’t about finding carpet-lint and keeping in their pocket for later, but often involve NPCs that are also in action where having them stand until the player interacts to dispense plot lore doesn’t make sense.
- “Simulationist” games where decisions are much higher granularity such as where a player manages a kingdom or develops a character as they grow or survive over time, and each choice/turn might involve days and weeks at a time. Choices are more like “Do you want to invest in product development, safety testing, or advertising this week?” instead of “Do you go left, right, pick up the scissors, or open the locked chest?”