About a decade ago I taught a workshop aimed at teachers, encouraging them to use interactive fiction in their classrooms. One of the objections I heard from other teachers regarding lost pig was Grunk’s use of pidgin English. The teachers of early readers didn’t think that would be a good fit for their classroom goals.
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I completely agree. If a game is sufficiently engaging, most other sins will be forgiven. And a “beginner game” does not have to mean a game with easy puzzles or easy English. (Or, even worse, condescending puzzles or language.)
introduces the conventions and tropes of the genre
Not only that, but also the mechanics of the world model, which are often crufty and counterintuitive. Here I mean things like: how containers/supporters work; how to apply verbs to multiple objects (i.e., don’t); how to disambiguate objects; how the passage of time works and which commands increase the time; etc.
Not a hair on my head that would even consider suggesting Eat Me (or any other limited-verb game) as the best intro to parsers. Imagine having successfully played Eat Me to completion, gaining confidence along the way, and then launching into even an easy full-parser game with that newfound confidence.
----consults walkthrough----
“Huh? Waddaya mean THROW EGG AT GUARD THEN SHAKE SPEAR!??”
Limited-verb games don’t prepare the player for parser games, they’re a subset by themselves with its own expectations.
I’d recommend Metamorphoses or Glowgrass.
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my counter-argument is that a good beginner parser game doesn’t need to prepare you for other parsers, it needs you to learn to like parsers in the first place, which is a major hurdle for brand new people who haven’t been playing parsers for decades.
metamorphoses is a pretty good one as well (though I think my husb got bored of that one). I will also submit shadow in the cathedral, which was made for kids but is still very cool, as well as violet.
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I think both of these things can be true at the same time. Certainly a player who has played a limited parser game has become familiar with the general feel of a text-based game, inventory, navigation, etc. This will build interest and confidence for another game. It won’t help them with regular parser conventions, but it might well make them feel more confident in trying one. I assume that Aster continued to shepherd the husb through a standard parser after this.
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yep, he tried Violet next 
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It might be useful to think of things in terms of competencies and ascending challenges. For instance: even though the subjunctive mood is an essential feature of the Latinate languages that I’ve studied, it wasn’t mentioned on day one or week four of my courses (I am an American). Looking outside of IF, I think it’s very common to find topics or disciplines that are deferred until a certain level of understanding is reached.
While I’ve emphasized the challenges of understanding the input dialect in parser games, there are other competencies to consider. It isn’t rare to see discussions about the challenges of understanding parser geography, sometimes from experienced players. That’s one thing to learn.
The flip side of writing commands is reading the text, of course. It’s all old hat to most of us, but a new player must learn to… parse room descriptions for actionable nouns and directions.
I’m sure there are other things to learn.
I’ve never seen anyone try to prove this out (with IF Comp transcripts, for instance), but I have seen many people assert that the most commonly-used command is EXAMINE (I agree). If we’ve taught a new player to navigate the world, read descriptions, and examine things, we’ve actually taught them a lot.
& like Aster says, teaching people to enjoy the games is crucial, too.
e: I usually recommend Fairest, which contradicts my limited parser assertion. I think a lot of people I know could like Forsaken Denizen, though.
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Very good point. Interacting with a written environment by typing commands is the first obstacle. Finding joy in typing EAT EGG and seeing the world react would get a new player across that hurdle.
My first thought was that a full parser would crack that confidence, but the multitude of new possibilities (THROW EGG) might indeed make a new player excited to try other stuff.
Thanks to you both for tweaking my views.
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Big agree on these points. Some of the first parser games I played were Galatea and Aisle, and I think they made an excellent introduction to the form, because they’re very responsive and are exploration-focused, rather than solution-focused. That is, they’re not asking you to solve anything—you just try things and see what happens. There’s no way to fail. Seeing that responsiveness, how I could type “ask Galatea about art” and she had an answer, or “eat pasta” in Aisle and the PC would eat the pasta, showed me the possibilities of the parser and made me excited to play more.
I think these two games were also a good parser introduction for me because they don’t require navigation. Having to navigate without an on-screen map or other visual representation to guide you is hard!
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Just to say: my kids (10 and 13) loved Counterfeit Monkey to bits. I did give them a nudge to help through a couple of the tougher puzzles, but a lot of things they were able to get by themselves. I haven’t shown them parser IF without the wordplay elements yet, but the wordplay was a huge part of what they loved about CM.
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