I’m going to let people beeline for the end if that’s what they want to do, and I won’t punish them with a bad ending. Really, I’m just curious about ways to encourage exploration and experimentation without forcing it.
There will be some tweaks to the ending (and maybe a special new mode for completionists) based on what the player does, but I don’t want anyone to feel cheated. I just want to reward players who do more.
So what you are saying!
This whole thing could only work as IF. I tried it as a novel first.
Best way to do that is to provide depth and a rich world/story to explore. So yes, side things, stuff just to look at out of curiosity.
It can be tempting to write the core plot line first, and easy to neglect filling in the side details. I’ve been guilty of that myself! But adding a rich environment (and I just don’t mean physical environment, but also any other characters, side plots to explore etc) will be appreciated by many players. Even if each one will only see part of it!
Thank you for putting the effort in re this As a player I really appreciate it.
I’m a bit surprised that the completionist approach isn’t more common! I think it’s partially chalked up to the style of games I normally play (up to thirty minutes usually, so shorter, choice based games that encourage replay with multiple endings or ease of convenience features like rewinding back to before a major branch) and a bit from watching thorough playthroughs and lets plays where the norm is to show all of the endings (I don’t envy the gamers having to replay punishingly long RPGmaker games from the start, haha.)
When I play, I do try to see all of the content available- though I usually aim to end on a good/happy ending in most games. Usually this is because either the writing or concept gripped me enough I want to explore all of what the writer has presented us!
When I write… I try to balance what’s crucial to know with what isn’t- so ideally, reading everything would happen, but the general goal is in reading the most forwardly presented bits you still get a general handling of the narrative, and maybe the main stuff would get you curious enough to poke around a bit.
I had all of my fingers stuck in the pages of the book, because I was obsessed with finding all the undiscovered content. If I made a wrong turn that took me back to somewhere I’d already been, I could go back and take the other passage. With a physical book you can see all the places you haven’t been to (with those glorious FF illustrations!) and it would drive me mad if I couldn’t work out how to get there.
I preferred Ian Livingstone’s books to Steve Jackson’s.† You could get completely lost in The Forest of Doom, whereas The Citadel of Chaos, despite having the same number of passages, seemed much more linear and less rewarding to replay. I cheated in all the battles, because there was no way I was going to be bested by a pixie and then have to go back to the start and make all the same decisions just to get back to the same place.
I write mainly parser games. With my parser games, the player gets to see 90% of the content if they successfully complete the game.†† There are usually a number of set-piece scenes which can be experienced in a different order depending upon what the player focuses on first, but beyond that they’re actually pretty linear. Being able to solve the puzzles in a different order, IMO, helps give the player the illusion of autonomy.
I’m still trying to work out what my style is regarding choice-based games. I’ve published one - a long time ago now - which was a massively branching time-cave with over a thousand passages. I’m working on a new one which will be more linear, but I still love that sense of being able to explore and get lost that I remember from the Ian Livingstone books. Recently I’ve discovered the Fabled Lands series, which use a spoke-and-hub structure, and that struck me as a possible best-of-both-worlds approach.
A few years ago I used to be quite dismissive of very linear choice-based games, because at the time I saw the main value of the choice format as being replay value. I’ve changed my opinion now, but I still enjoy a good time cave!
† My assessment of Jackson’s and Livingstone’s styles is based purely on my recollection of the first five or six books in the series, which is as far as I got. It is probably an oversimplification.
†† The other 10% is made up of fun responses to optional things you can try, and failure endings. 10% is probably a conservative estimate.
Hey, he is also my favourite one! Great Livingstone, I presume! ^.^
Great truth here! That was a great motor to make peaople replay!
This also happens to many people. Perhaps that could be fullfilled giving different page numbers to go deppending on the result of the battle, not being always win the “best” option regarding to the story. A story of a man without hand or eye after a combat could be more epic : D
Great! Can we know the title?
This is a bit in the line of “this is the story I want to tell, so I’m centered on it not in a sandbox” approach, that I also like more.
Ifcomp gives parser authors the transcripts of every play-online-session of their entries during the competition. Judging from this statistical basis, less than 1% of all players ever experienced any of the optional content in my games. That need not mean much, of course, since
Completionists might not be part of the audience of ifcomp.
All completionists might download the games instead of playing them online.
My games’ titles and blurbs might not appeal to any completionists so they don’t even try them.
Finding the extra content in my games might be practically impossible (for all players or just for completionists, hard to tell).
I will confess though that I find none of these especially convincing and my own suspicion is that people preferring a completionists play style are rare in the wild.
Many players seem to follow the walkthrough from the beginning.
I appreciate you bringing some data! I feel like there is probably something interesting to say/consider about what I’d call the “playing context” of the various comps vs what liturgical churches call “ordinary time”. I’ve only played IFcomp games once, but I was very aware of a) the number of games outstanding and b) the two hour time limit. Personally, I would not have explored optional content in such a context, even had I discovered it.
In the old poetry days, I remember needing to read one hundred poems in a week, or sometimes four manuscripts in two weeks. It’s not completely fair the way such things work, but some poems thrive under such constraints. Their virtues are readily apparent. They have kick. They crunch like the best potato chips do. Some poems, on the other hand, just take time. They marinate. One type of poem isn’t better than the other, but evaluation processes tend to select poems best suited to their reading situation.
Though I’m sure that you are right to say that completionists are rare, which is totally fine, of course.
I struggled with this for The Exigent Seasons, and I think my instincts lead me astray.
Frankly, this was less a game than it was a proof-of-concept of my alternative structure for those personality quizzes I took so often during my MySpace / LiveJournal days. I would often retake quizzes just to figure out what answers would bring about certain outcomes. (I did the same thing with my CYOA books as a kid: I’d flip through them and try to figure out how to get to certain passages.) The online quizzes felt like a waste of time because they so often reduced to “pick one of these five options a bunch of times and at the end you see which of the five possible outcomes you’ll get”. I felt like you should have fewer responses to each question but many more possible outcomes to undermine quiz takers’ ability to aim for a particular outcome in advance.
(The approach I took was to create five “values” that you were ranking in a round-robin format through ten situations. In each situation, you could favor one of two values, or you could choose instead to take no action. Ultimately the game would award you an outcome based on your commitment to none, one, some, or all of the values.)
Since I was presenting this in the format of a game, I added another character who would be the one quizzing you, and I had him express a desire to figure out all the endings. While it would quickly become a repetitive and monotonous task, probably made worse by my choice to shuffle the order of questions every time, I thought I could mitigate the problem by having the NPC have additional commentary that would only appear after you’d taken the quiz multiple times. Not sure how successful this was, as I found myself struggling to come up with comments and observations for the character to make, and I think I shouldn’t have been so coy about the existence of options to request hints or to outright cheat and just read the endings directly. Something to think about if I ever do another release.
I’d be interested to know how often that happens. It’s one reason why I don’t provide walkthroughs with my own games, although I do provide annotated solutions for CASA.
For anyone using a walkthrough, it defeats the purpose of playing the game in the first place. I write and play parser-based games and they’re all about exploration and puzzle solving. If you follow a walkthrough, you miss all the challenge and the fun.
Just following the walkthrough without any further ado is a minority sport. Like I wrote, the numbers I have are not likely to be perfectly representative of all players and play sessions. I should also point out that I’ve only been provided with these for two games, one in 2015 and one in 2020, when I entered parser games into the comp. However, from what I can tell by these datums, turning games into books has become more popular recently (from about 3-4% of players to 6-7%).
For me personally, doing this would indeed feel like cheating myself out of the experience I come for when I start playing a parser game. I do want to express explicitly though that I am perfectly fine with other people preferring to experience my works in this manner if they so desire. Who am I to tell my readers how to treat my work once it’s published? It would be a poor work of literature if it required instructions for how to read (and understand?) it. Death of the author and all that. So by all means: go ahead, indulge in mediocrity if you must, you have my blessing.
It also seems worthwhile to point out that turning to the walkthrough when stuck is ordinarily perceived as legitimate (though of course a sign of weakness) and I am not ashamed to admit it has happened to me in the past. In this situation, there is a slippery slope towards sticking with the walkthrough. Some players get to the point where they give up on trying to follow this author’s preposterous stream of provocative settings and situations with their own devices sooner than others. This being surely true, it follows by induction that there are necessarily some people who are already perplexed by the very first prompt, turn to the walkthrough in desperation (or rather exasperation?) and get stuck in the soul-crushing tarpit it is.
One thing I’ve noticed is that comp games released without walkthroughs are much more likely to inspire discussion threads on the forum. And who doesn’t want to see people discussing their game!
As a player I really appreciate it.