Well, Iâm new to genre and, as so, I think my two cents are worthwhile as someone that is not part of the community.
From what Iâve played so far, I think the parser isnât the main issue. I was pretty much unaware of the IF convenctions (l to look at the room, x to examine, etc) when I started playing and, so far, I only felt the parser to be in the way when the game itself was poorly designed. Good examples:
Violet, by Jeremy Freese
Itâs written in such a clever way! The hint system really works well and Violet herself is really good at pointing you in the right direction without serving you the solution to the puzzles. I think itâs a great game to start playing IF. I never felt the need to throw verbs at random and I never felt frustrated into giving up the game.
Blue Lacuna, by Aaron Reed
The way it handles the parser difficulty is brilliant! The different colors, the bold nouns, the suggestions when the player does nothing for a number of turns, etc, these are very inteligent tools that donât get in the way of a veterane IF player, but that prevent the begginer from giving up. Also it does something that I found to be very clever: it takes the time it needs to hook the player without rushing him. What do I mean? Someone mentioned before that an IF work needs to hook the player in the first few lines - the gameâs presentation, so to speak -, right before the player needs to write the first command and get frustrated, but blue lacuna proves this not so true. The first lines of the game wonât hook you, but the player is asked to give very simple commands at first, and the story breaks as slowly as the gameâs mechanism. When one gets to the place where it has to solve complex situations, one is already familiar with the âway things workâ - and hooked.
So, I think that what alienates new gamers is not the parser itself, but the way games are written - and most IF is written from and to people of the community, who share conventions that outsiders donât know about; but if a writer wantâs to, he can make an IF-traditional-parser-game that is non-IF-community-member friendly.
But such is not to say that the parser canât be reinvented, and a funny example pops to mind:
Llama adventure, by John Cooney
The game itself has not seen the best of implementations, but I think it to be a nice (maybe something like what Emily Short had in mind?) way to handle the parser. Also, from what Iâve read in the commentaries, It has also been quite well accepted by non-IF players.
I would like to end this already long post with a note about verbs:
I donât know all the verbs that a parser has stored for me - and I donât need to or want to know! I expect the game to be natural enough so this isnât a problem (even with not-so-common verbs!), and if it is Iâll surely give up*; but I think that a list of verbs, as in âGatewayâ, can be as confusing as no list at all when the game is poorly constructed. Take graphic adventure games: some have a long list of verbs to click, and others only a few (or none, in some cases), and that doesnât diminish the experience or the dificulty of the puzzle. I donât have a stronger exploration experience just because I have twenty verbs at my disposal - mainly if only 18 give me an interesting feedback in 90% of the game. I donât see why an immerse gaming experience, with tough puzzles, canât be accomplished with a handfull of verbs. The exploration potencial must be in the scenery, not in the verbs; the dificulty of the puzzle must be in the puzzle itself, not in the way the player handles the game to solve it**.
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- As an example, Iâll use Shortâs very own Savoir-Faire. The first time I tried the game, I gave up frustrated in the kitchen. Why? Because I downloaded the game, together with many others from IFDB, without reading much about it. I just started to play and I didnât know that âlinkingâ was a verb I could use. Only after playing other games and reading so much praise about S-F, I decided to read the feelies and then - only then! - I found out I could link objects. Then I noticed the âType HELP even if you have played IF beforeâ line. I didnât see it before because it was in that âauthor, title, versionâ heading that I pay little atention to.
** Unless that is the objective of the author, as in Aisle: a game that lives (and very well!) of the player finding which commands result in resolutions for the plot.[/size]
