Counterfeit Monkey for Beginners

Playing IF Reviews and Essays
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Continuing the discussion from Upcoming 2024 IFDB Awards (held in 2025) (poll in response #10):

@pieartsy
:face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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Run Counterfeit Monkey in tutorial mode (which is the default) and play with hints, and you’ve got an experience on par with Lost Pig.

(Hardly any beginner can win either game alone without hints, IMO.)

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What do folks think “good for beginners” means?

I’ve got ideas like this:

  • It teaches you how to play. Almost every Twine game is “good for beginners” in that sense. Every parser game with a decent tutorial counts, including Counterfeit Monkey and Hadean Lands. Counterfeit Monkey’s in-game tutorial is better (IMO much better) than Lost Pig’s tutorial, which includes a line “(For help, use “HELP”.)” And, as a beginner, you had damn well better type HELP and figure out how to read and operate the Z-machine menu system, or you’re not gonna get anywhere in Lost Pig.
  • A focused beginner can probably win the game without relying on hints. But hardly any highly ranked games on the Games for Beginners poll fits that description. Certainly not Lost Pig, Bronze, or even Dreamhold, which is designed for beginners, but ends with a fiendish puzzle.
    • Maybe good beginner games need to be fairly short…?
  • A beginner can win the game if they rely heavily on hints. But, almost every game with hints fits that description, doesn’t it?
  • It’s enjoyable for kids. Lost Pig has that, but Photopia doesn’t. Counterfeit Monkey requires an adult-level grasp of English vocabulary.
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It’s Emily Short, so probably every potential interaction and gameplay is as absolutely user-friendly as it possibly can be. However…

It’s arguable Counterfeit Monkey might be the Ulysses of parser interactive fiction; it does things which are astounding, but the sheer meta of it may be lost unless you’re somewhat familiar with what parser fiction normally does and how it behaves. So while any beginner who’s on board to play a a parser game will have no problem, some of that game’s triumphs of implementation might be lost on someone who has nothing yet to compare it to.

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Cf is hyperfocused when it comes to itts system. But I remember starting off and wanting to look at scenery, and there were no special descriptions of what was around, or they weren’t implemented. It turns out that’s not important in this game, but it was a poorly start for me who always wants these things, I don’t recall a ‘don’t worry about this’ type message that some strongly systematised games will break out early. In the ‘it’s me’ stakes, I always want to look at stuff right away and get detail if X exists. I often feel like it tells me if it’s going to be my kind of thing or not.

Wade

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Thoughts about beginner-friendly games:

  • Is the game appealing, so that people of different ages and tastes will want to play, and will want to keep playing? (Related: Does it have content that might be seriously off-putting?)

  • If it’s the kind of game that’s not self-explanatory to play (many choice games are pretty self-explanatory), then does it have helpful tutorial elements?*

  • Does the game’s tutorial teach players how to play only this game, or does it teach players how to play IF in general? (It might or might not be someone’s goal that the lessons learned can be readily applied to other games.)

  • Is it rewarding and responsive, so that the player will try things and think “I’m successfully making things happen”?

  • Does it avoid overwhelming the player?

(Edit: I think I also agree with what other people said about the ideal beginner game being not too hard. Maybe it should be winnable with minimal relying on hints? And maybe the game would notice if players are having a hard time and would remind them that they can ask for hints.)

*Side note: When I was demonstrating a parser game to someone else, one of the most helpful things turned out to be having the How to Play IF Postcard open on the screen as well. That doesn’t answer the question at hand–just food for thought. I think Lectrote builds the postcard into the interpreter, but what if online interpreters did this as well, and formatted the text differently so that it could more easily fit on the screen alongside the main play window? I guess it wouldn’t help people who play on phones, though.

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Whether Counterfeit Monkey is as good for beginners as Lost Pig is a moot point for me, since I consider Lost Pig to be terrible for beginners. I say that having played it as a beginner myself. It was extremely hard. I couldn’t solve any puzzles. I gave up. Only years later did I come back with enough skill to finish the game. Grunk’s “charming” voice is often cited as a beginner-friendly point, but it didn’t win me over. If anything, when the gameplay itself was so difficult, it started to grate.

“Good for beginners,” to me, means foremost that a game welcomes people into the parser medium rather than driving them away. So: easy to play, easy to win, with mechanics that show off what the parser can do.

Kid-friendly – this can be detrimental. Maybe I’m wrong, but I imagine it’s teenagers and adults who are mostly drawn to parser games as beginners these days. If a game is too twee and cutesy and “for kids,” it could be off-putting.

The Baron and The Ascent of the Gothic Tower were two of the earliest parser games I played that really pulled me in.

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A bit of all of these options. But mostly " A beginner can win the game if they rely heavily on hints." But that’s just my opinion.

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I was a schoolteacher for many years, and here’s the first principle of teaching anything for the first time:

Set the learner up for a fairly easy win that they can achieve mostly on their own.

CM is not a game that fits those parameters. Neither is Lost Pig.

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A lot of beginner-intended IF also seems intended for beginner readers, with simple language, cute characters, and basic plot lines.

There’s not much IF I can think of that’s intended for mature, capable readers that are beginning IF players.

Maybe Zozzled or Coloratura? But those are still a bit tricky. Maybe Gun Mute or Eat Me?

Edit: I guess Bronze and Dreamhold were written to fulfill those criteria, just that the standard of what’s ‘easy’ has changed since they were written.

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Steph Cherrywell probably is a good place for players to start - I’d include Brain Guzzlers from Beyond and Chlorophyll - which has a YA tone but does not pander to the reader - both of those from what I remember have straightforward map navigation and puzzles.

I’d say that a beginner-friendly parser game needn’t necessarily be easy nor simplified with regard to puzzles and plot, it needs to be friendly regarding presentation, interaction, and implementation and for the most part you want a beginner to play a game that behaves more or less like the real world, at least to start. I don’t mean to say “old school” - they can be contemporary, but mainly concern with object manipulation and navigation and don’t go off-the-board meta…

So I’d say you don’t want to initially present a beginner with something that uses nonstandard interactions and navigation like The Gostak or Toby’s Nose or Ad Verbum or Threediopolis.

Some games that might not come to mind as ‘beginner friendly’ probably are - Taco Fiction (Veeder goes out of his way not to distract or confuse players) Alias: The Magpie (new, but old school) To Hell in a Hamper, Violet, Oppositely Opal (one room, but exploration-heavy and item-focused). I’d even suggest Anchorhead despite its size and difficulty mostly uses standard implementation of a character walking an environment and collecting things they need to use.

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I totally agree with that. In fact, this is a general game design issue that goes beyond the IF context. There are a huge number of games, not just independent games but also commercial games, that are widely distributed and bought, which are elitist not in terms of their difficulty but because they presuppose that the player is familiar with the gameplay codes of video games, or even with the particular subculture associated with the video game genre in question.
I’ve lost count of the number of games sold without documentation and with a summary and erroneous tutorial, which force us to stop constantly during the first few hours of play to consult either videos designed by gamers who do the job of explaining the basic commands correctly, or forums that bring together gamers who are faced with the same problem, wondering whether it’s a bug, until one of them explains what the tutorial meant. With the pressure on production costs, entrusting players with the drafting of documentation is becoming the norm.

I think that producing an IF that is not subject to market logic is a great opportunity to show empathy with first-time gamers, and that has absolutely nothing to do with the difficulty of the plot.

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It should be doable without prior experience with how parsers work. This probably means it should be on the easy-ish side, or with a very gentle ramping up of puzzles. Present the new player with success! Friction is important to maintaining interest, but friction for a newbie doesn’t necessarily mean puzzles. It can mean navigation or interaction with items/NPCs.

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Eat Me is a fantastic parser game for beginners, it’s what I started my husb on for IF.

  • You have one tool (Eat) and you point it at the right target in the right order. When certain other tools (verbs) get tossed in, they are very clearly delineated with guides on how to use them and when.
  • Nearly every object mentioned is implemented and explained in some way; the player is rewarded with new descriptions for, as far as I know, all the combinations of eat with some object; and other verbs are gently guided back to eat.
  • You don’t need to know anything about other parsers or parser conventions to play the game.
  • The puzzles gently ramp up in difficulty, with the first puzzle being to eat some chocolate manacles that you’re chained in.
  • You can’t lose the game.
  • There are several conveniences that open up once you’ve solved puzzles which collapse the map and make it easier to navigate.
  • Despite the bizarre world, events are very explicitly described so that you know what’s going on at most times, and the puzzles follow a consistent internal logic that is also easy to comprehend. (The weirder unexplained parts, like what happens after you eat a main course, are clearly symbolic representations or hidden lore, and do not affect the puzzles.

IIRC, I finished Eat Me without hints, or with very few, the first time I played it.

Counterfeit Monkey, on the other hand, is based on a mechanic that reflects no reality whatsoever. Its first puzzle already has like…5 different possible things to do (vanish one of the letters of a 5 letter word) and you can do it wrong with no way to fix it. It only balloons in complexity from there, and many things are simply not implemented or deemed unimportant.

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It’s almost certainly a limited parser game, whatever it might be. I wouldn’t seriously recommend Lost Pig or Counterfeit Monkey to somebody trying to learn how to play parser games.

I think… it can be hard to imagine what learning a command dialect (it’s not natural spoken English, really, it’s a dialect) might be like for someone who didn’t grow up typing commands for even the simplest things, like launching games. Or who isn’t a programmer.

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I’ve posted a poll for best beginner games according to how people feel nowadays:

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I agree with @HanonO that, while beginners should have no problem getting into Counterfeit Monkey, it’s better played later in one’s career in order to appreciate what a triumph it is.

I disagree with anyone who claims that a beginner game needs to be easy. Anyone taking that position needs to provide an explanation for how ADVENT and Zork managed to become wildly popular even though, when they were first released, everyone was a beginner because there was nothing else to learn from.

A good beginner game, first and foremost, has to be a good game in general. This is where I dock points from ADVENT and other early classics, because they’re full of things that are now understood as simply bad ideas, like the limited light source and (most unforgivably) the capricious RNG deaths. The difference between a good beginner game and a good expert game is that a beginner game provides a good ramp-up that introduces the conventions and tropes of the genre, while an expert game assumes you’re already familiar with them and tries to spare you the cliches. A beginner who tries to play a game not intended for them may stumble on things that were never meant to be puzzles because the author assumed they’d be an autonomic reflex, like remembering to start off with “X ME” and “I” and examining everything in inventory, or searching under every bed and inside every drawer and cupboard. Trivial “puzzles” such as those are a good way for beginners to start off, especially while they’re getting a handle on the parser. However, a game that presents “*** You have won ***” without ever moving past such finger exercises is short-changing the player. It’s like an action game that ends as soon as it’s taught you the controls, or a workout program that sends you home after teaching you lifting technique and refuses to put any weight on the bar. Games need gameplay!

There’s some great puzzleless interactive fiction out there. Shade is one of my top ten favorite games. But it’s an acquired taste. I was chagrined that it has several votes on the (original) IFDB poll, because in 2000 I tried introducing to a beginner (specifically, my mom) and the result was a disaster. “Okay, okay, everything’s turning to sand. So what? What am I trying to achieve here?”. Conversely, she had a lot of fun struggling with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, even though she never got far and on its merits that game seems like a sadistic thing to inflict on a beginner.

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I think one of the big draws of parser games is the same as crosswords: players like to feel smart.

A game that looks easy won’t make them feel smart, and a game that’s impossible won’t make them feel smart, but a game that looks hard but lets you win is great.

I agree with you, most people I know that got into IF did it on a difficult game that felt rewarding to progress in.

I think it’s good to keep in mind the difference between ‘being a smart person in general’ and ‘being knowledgeable in interactive fiction tropes’. Eat Me is a game where a smart person can succeed even if they don’t know IF, since it’s pretty easy to know how to type EAT and N,E,S,W. On the other hand, there’s a group of ADRIFT games (not all) that are strongly focused on players needing to LOOK BEHIND and LOOK UNDER a lot of furniture scattered through otherwise empty rooms, and expect you to be familiar with all the possible IF conversation expectations (like ASK __ ABOUT ____ vs TALK TO vs ASK ___ FOR ___ vs ,). Both can be rewarding, but one is great for new people and one is better for people who know what to expect from adventure games in general.

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The ASK ABOUT topic should have a whole 400+ posts thread by itself.
It is, in my opinion, the most extreme Guess the Verb situation ever.

I tried annihilating the feeling by bolding out words in Andromeda Apocalypse. I have since removed the possibility entirely in any following game I made.

Soon, I’ll try and use numbered topics like in a Lucas PnC but I rarely like that approach, too.

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i may be the old fuddy-duddy here but i think infocom’s ‘wishbringer’ checks a lot of boxes for a good first game (as it was intended).

it starts the player out with a very achievable early task (deliver a letter to someone) and gets progressively harder from there. if i’m remembering correctly, it starts out with a very quick pseudo-tutorial on using the parser as well.

there’s no maze to speak of (ok, like a 4-room maze), and, although there are no hints, there’s the available option to use magic which can help to un-stick a frustrated player.

some of the puzzles are still fairly tough but this keeps the game experience rewarding when you solve something.

‘a mind forever voyaging’ would be an option also. it’s essentially puzzle-less and is the closest infocom ever came to a ‘choice game’.

infocom’s other efforts at “kid” games (“seastalker”, “moonmist”) could also be considered but, IMHO, wishbringer is the far superior game.

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