IF as exploratory spaces

Have you played 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery?

It comes to mind when reading your question. The map is huge with probably over a hundred rooms.

Ostensibly, there is a story and a series of puzzles, but a lot of the magic is just exploring the vast space.

To be honest, I want to really like the game’s story and puzzles. I’ve tried to play it several times and they seem a bit undirected. For example, to get into x room you need to have taken a random object somewhere else on the map. But there’s no indication that you should even be in that area.

That being said, I find myself returning to the game not because of the story or puzzles, but because of the world to explore. The game also models time of day and a week, and the player character has to eat three times a day and has to sleep. So this limits what you can do in a single day.

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Have you? Have all of you? Have you allowed yourself to be transported to the impossibly vibrant and joyous experience of the World’s Fair?

If not, you must. I’ve spent many an hour walking around there, being blown away by the sheer detail and magnitude of it.

One of these days I’ll actually tackle the crime-solving mystery. I saw that David Welbourn has an excellent hint-sheet for it.

Everyone should at least go visit. Say hi to the Eskimos from me…

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I’m in. My next game.

Thank you.

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I think I understand the question. I’m creating an IF game right now, and while it’s not word for word what you are describing, there are some similarities. My thinking is that limited scope and production value are one of the great limitations of IF. So lets say I’m designing this IF work “A Dark and Stormy Night”. And it’s a classic closed room mystery and everything happens inside this house. There are tons of opportunities for plot permutations, but only so much possibility for choice outcome variance.

So to give a simple example, what I want to play is a game where the outcomes of my choices can lead virtually anywhere. I’ve been working on it for about a year, and I have a system set up to try and develop that game. Here’s a simple concrete example. I pick up a CYOA book, and it’s about being on a train that gets hijacked. I come to a choice, hide in the engine room and see if the hijackers notice, or try to overpower one of the hijackers. It’s cool, I’m interested to see what happens, but here’s the thing. I can’t ever get off that train. I can’t ever make a choice that really derails their main story. I absolutely understand all the reasons for that, but technology, and many other areas have progressed a lot since the 80s, and I think it’s time now that a story can be created that’s simply larger in scope by many orders of magnitude.

So a choice in my platform can be something like, do you drive to the restaurant, or do you drive to the airport. Do you buy a ticket to London, or do you buy one to Cairo. On the surface, you might not see the difference between what I’m describing and what’s been done 1000 times before.

Here’s the difference, this is an entire system set up to generate “cells”. It’s kind of like a university where you pay your tuition by being an intern. We teach digital filmmaking, convert the output to cells, which are like sections in a CYOA book, and then monetize cells to provide resources for the interns. So the idea is to create an infinite number of modular interconnected chapters that function like interactive tv episodes.

To address the original question more directly though, I’d say that the npc and dialogue stuff you’re discussing would simply make a lot more sense in an AI driven IF environment, or in a regular video game.