What’s the sweet spot for diegetic hinting/guidance? Can you think of a piece of IF that did it particularly well?
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Obligatory mention of the truth and lie fleas from the wizard sniffer
but violet does this nicely too
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I liked the hinting in Robin & Orchid.
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The best I think is well, use THINK as alternative for HINT. It’s a powerful narrative device, one where digesis and mimesis mate so well that no chainsaw can separate 
also asking NPC is one of the best ones, (PC/NPC dialectic is a major narrative device of mystery literature since the days of Doyle and Poe) and in my main WIP case, allows even a major homage to Curses
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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I was going to say this too. When you ask for a hint, a cat wanders through and goes and worries at whatever the next thing you need to futz with is.
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What is “diegetic hinting”? I tried Googling it without much success.
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Diegetic means sourced from the game world. So, an NPC saying something to you that helps with a puzzle, without breaking the fourth wall, is diegetic. Getting a hint written directly by the author with a HINT command, or from invisiclues etc., is non-diegetic.
Same meaning applies in other invented worlds. In Star Wars, the Cantina theme is diegetic (source is the film world, characters experience it), the rest of John Williams’s score is non-diegetic.
-Wade
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Thanks. That makes sense. I would call this an “in-game hint”. I tend to be very liberal with in-game hints, but I know from experience (primarily from testing) that modern players tend to skim over things and do not take notes, so they miss or forget about the in-game hints.
That’s where a HINT command can come in handy. It can remind you of the things you missed. A response may be “Remember what the sign said” or “Remember what the innkeeper told you” or “Remember what you found when you examined the stone lantern”.
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At the risk of over-categorizing things, I think it might be helpful to separate out three different kinds of hints we’re talking about: I think besides the in-game hints you’re talking about, Garry, where details in the world prompt the player to find the puzzle solutions, it’s also possible to divide the possible approaches to the HINT command into diegetic (like the fleas in Wizard Sniffer) and non-diegetic (like the typical menu of out-of-game hints) options.
In particular, a player may or may not be able to suss out whether a specific detail is an in-game hint or just color, but one of the things that makes both diegetic and non-diegetic hints more helpful for a player is that they’re being directly told “think about this, it’s definitely important.”
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These are great answers so far (and I definitely need to play Wizard Sniffer).
I am specifically wondering about hinting and player guidance that comes up through the regular course of play and not from the player asking for a hint.
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Oh, you mean puzzle design in general 
(simplifying, but only a bit)
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Maybe two steps past puzzle design.
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I think good puzzle design inherently should include designing the guidance the players need to actually solve the puzzle 
will try to elaborate when I’m less sleepy
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On the subject of ten dollar words, what are digesis and mimesis? I’m guessing the former might be a variation of digetic and by contrast the latter might be related to out of world things, but I’m not sure and I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard either word.
“Diegetic” means something that happens within the world of a work of art, with “nondiegetic” meaning something that’s external to it; the Star Wars example Wade gave above, contrasting the diegetic cantina band music, which of course exists in the story and all the characters can hear, vs. the Imperial march theme which isn’t “really” there as far as the world is concerned, is a good one.
“Mimesis” basically means the mimicking (there’s that Greek root!) of reality; it was big as a design goal in 90s and early aughts IF. But it’s more or less the idea that a game shouldn’t unintentionally jolt the player out of the world.
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Not everything that is in game is diegetic. A main menu is “in game”, but it is a clear cut exacple of something that isn’t diegetic.
The phrase I used was “in-game hints”, not “in game”. “in-game” is a compound adjective, “game” is a noun. The combined phrase is synonymous with “diegetic hints”, as this is exactly what diegetic hints are. According to those that know more about this definition than me:
Hence, a HINT command, a hint menu and a hint file are outside the game world, hence non-diegetic, as these all break mimesis. Let’s not talk about these, as the original question was:
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To be fair, I also use “in-game hints” to mean something like a non-diegetic HINT command, as opposed to something like InvisiClues that are separate from the game itself.
Moving on, though…
My big problem with diegetic hints is that I always eventually hit a point where I have to choose between the hints being effective and the hints fitting in the world. My solution so far has been to have a diegetic nudge toward what you should be working on next (a diegetic task list of some sort), and a separate, out-of-game hint document for if you’re really stuck.
Amusingly, I didn’t actually remember that I’d made a task list in Scroll Thief (2014) when I reinvented the wheel in Enigma of the Old Manor House (2022), and since then I’ve had some variation on the concept in everything I write.
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I’ve become a fan of writing room and object descriptions that reduce over time to make clear their purpose (or lack thereof). So you get all the world-building nouns in a scene at first, but if the player visits that room beyond a certain threshold, those extra pieces are removed and only objects key to the situation are left in the description. And perhaps the description of those key objects morphs as well.
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I have a lot of first time only text in my work in progress for the very reason.