By meta puzzles and meta secrets I mean things that take outside tools to solve or find. Or perhaps knowledge you can only have after playing through a game once before.
Perfectly acceptable. This has been the norm for ages, rather than the exception. It is a factor of the difficulty / cruelty level. I don’t even mind if it’s not disclosed that the game is not self-contained. Understanding the question can be part of the question.
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I think they can be fun, and I’ve done it myself a few times (e.g. there are actions you’d only do in If I Wasn’t Shy or All Alone if you’d played the other and realised they were connected).
I will say most players aren’t very good at spotting meta-puzzles between games. Even seemingly obvious connections go unspotted. For instance, as far as I’m aware, the Hat Puzzle hidden between four games in the 2011 IFComp went unsolved during the comp.
New game+ is a different matter and players are more likely to get the intended connection. The Wand had this and it was widely spotted.
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Agreed, though it’s sometimes hard to spot something if you don’t even suspect it is there. Even when they choose to hint at it, authors have very different ideas of what makes for fair warning as well…
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In a way, this is kind of what copy protection did back in the day. The old games would include feelies that gave you clues to solve puzzles in the game. This was really slick, and something I think we’ve lost by doing everything online.
A lot of games now kind of do something similar by including PDFs to download with the executable. GOG does this, though I think their system is a bit clumsy.
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The Wand is such a good one.
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The game I’m working on is meant to be my nephews’ introduction to IF/text adventures. I plan on sending it to them on a bespoke thumb drive with some custom made feelies. I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to require any information from the feelies in game. But I do plan on hiding Easter eggs and secrets.
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I’m totally fine with secrets only the most dedicated players will find, even if they are build on references you’d only get if there’s a huge overlap in the media you’ve consumed and the game designer has consumed or if you’ve played every other game from that creator. At least if the secret is optional and either doesn’t contribute to a completion percentage or is the kind of secret where getting it along with all the normal optional tasks nets greater than 100% on stated completion stats.
Now if it’s the kind of thing you need to get anything resembling a satisfactory ending, missing it puts the game in an unwinnable state, or its something where if you miss it when you first encounter it, the only way to get another chance is to start a new game and play a large chunk of game to get to the right paoint again, then yeah, that’s kind of unfair at best and Infocom levels of bullshit at worst.
Also, I’d hate to play a game where I needed information tied up in a PDF and if I ever make a game, I’d make sure the manual and any official out of game hints are available as plain text.
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I’m not a fan of this at all, although I realize it occurs frequently in historical games like Colossal Cave and Infocom’s works.
My take is that they should only be for fun. Just secrets and Easter eggs.
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These seem like two (or more) different things.
Things that take outside tools to solve: E.g., an “extracurricular research” puzzle where the player is expected to look up information outside the game. I actually really like this sort of puzzle, but the danger is that the player will not realize that they are meant to do this sort of research and get frustrated that they cannot find the relevant information in-game. So, this takes the correct context or careful hinting.
Bad: “I have to look up a book by name, but I don’t know the title and I can’t find anything in-game that tells me. Does this game just expect me to know the complete works of Rainer Maria Rilke?! (consults walkthrough) How was I supposed to know to Google that?! This game sucks!”
Better: “The game mentioned early on that it might be helpful for me (the player) to have some knowledge of the mating habits of the golden bowerbird. I didn’t, so I looked it up, and now I have both solved a puzzle and learned something new.”
Even better: “There is a message in Morse code. I don’t know Morse code, but that’s clearly what it is, and I bet I could decode it by looking up a reference guide.”
Context-appropriate: The Barber of Sadville, a game created for an Easter Egg / ARG associated with the BBC sitcom The IT Crowd, at one point requires the player to know something about the memory map of the BBC Micro computer. However, if the player has even gotten as far as figuring out how to extract the game from the DVD’s subtitle files, they’ll probably assume that Googling stuff is fair game.
Knowledge you can only have after playing through a game once before. The “bad” version of this is what @Mike_G mentions, and Graham Nelson specifically highlighted in his “Player’s Bill of Rights”:
But this only annoys because it seems unfair. Conversely, in Aisle, the entire game is played in one turn, and repeating the game with knowledge of past events is the whole mechanic. You also mentioned The Wand, where there’s a whole second game that is only hinted at after winning. Both of these examples work because the extra content that is available on restarting feels like a reward rather than a punishment. Rather than communicating, “You did it wrong, sucker,” the game communicates, “You liked that? Now go back and you’ll find some more!”
It’s a matter of preference how hidden to make this meta-content. I like how The Wand does it: there is hinting, but it’s obtuse enough that most people who discovered the hidden content probably found out about it from reviews. Conversely, I’m not sure Ryan Veeder ever expected people to figure out all of the hidden meanings in Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing.
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Knowledge you can only have after playing through a game once before
My thoughts for something like this in the game I’m working on is that the knowledge you gain from playing the first time allows you to prevent the problem the main game revolves around thus giving the player a secret early ending.
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If a game is going to take outside research just to solve/complete I think that needs to be made clear. It can be stated in a preamble or in an about or help menu.
If outside research is only for secrets or Easter eggs that can be a little more loose in implementation.
Some of my favorite computer games ever are the old Dr Brain games, in part because I loved the books they came with. The games all but required you to look stuff up, especially the Island of Dr Brain. Maybe these games are kind of an exception; in edutainment, you ought to know what you’re in for. Carmen Sandiego did something similar, but especially as a kid, the only chance you had to progress the game was to dig into the almanac.
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For examples of both, see the games from Cryptex Jam 2021. There are 12 games in the series. They are meant to be played in order.
Every game has a meta puzzle. Some games have to be replayed when you finish in order to see slightly different puzzles. Some games require outside knowledge, but you are expected to search online to acquire this knowledge and solve certain puzzles.
These games are brilliant. However, they were designed for a puzzle hunt, so the puzzles are very hard, as they cater for experienced puzzle solvers.
Old games also had this as literal copy protection: I like some of the old Sim* games and got them running on DOSBox, but e.g. SimEarth had copy protection questions after installing like “What is the circumference of the sun?”, “How long is the major axis of earth’s orbit?”, etc. The only problem was that nowadays we apparently had more accurate answers to some questions, so googleing didn’t work. Thankfully you had unlimited tries and I eventually always found a question I could google.
Some 80s games took the concept of repeating playthroughs to an extreme, just as a proof of concept.
For instance, Atom Adventure is a very short piece where the only idea is to carry several objects across the map under very severe constraints, so the task is seemingly impossible unless on repeated play sessions you realise there are “tricks” you can use to bypass said constraints.
Or the better known Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle, a treasure quest where the player has to solve several puzzles, but each one of the “straight” solutions prevents another puzzle to be solved due to subtle cross-dependencies. This is deliberately crafted as an advanced trial, as the player can have the impression they have been progressing nicely when in reality they have tangled themselves in a web of softlocks. And nothing will give them a hint that the whole game needs to be sequenced in a very different way.
Certainly not for everybody, but these kinds of pre-Bill of Rights challenges had their public, and they still do.
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Speaking of copy protection: The D&D gold box game Pool of Radiance had a codewheel as protection.
I played the game in my college dorm on my C64. Several other people used to come to my room to play the game as well. I didn’t want the wheel to get damaged so I figured out how to compute the solution without it and copied the runes and the required steps onto a sheet of paper. That way I could leave the wheel safely stored, and everyone could play the game. Is that weird?
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That POR wheel looks significantly more sophisticated than the one for Captain Goodnight and the Islands of Fear (1985)
My friend bought this game for the Apple II so he had the wheel. I copied the game (not from him – copying an uncracked Apple II floppy was very hard) then borrowed his wheel, rotated it through each position and wrote all the possibilities on paper.
In looking for an image of this wheel, I found this internet archive with a whole collection of game code wheels:
-Wade
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Ooh, I’m very interested in that collection…but I can’t seem to actually get it to work? How do you access it?