IFDB: Should there be a field for parser, choice, or parser-choice hybrid?

General IF Community Resources
1

I don’t have any special authority or expertise to be able do anything about this–I’m asking this mostly to get an idea of what people want.

Right now, it is possible to tag games on IFDB, and it is possible to search by tag, but there is not a dedicated field to mark a game as parser-based or choice-based (or hybrid).

What do you think about this?

  • I would like to have a dedicated field on IFDB for parser-based, choice-based, or parser-choice hybrid.
  • I would prefer not to have a dedicated field on IFDB for parser-based, choice-based, or parser-choice hybrid.
  • Either having a field or not having a field for this (parser-based, choice-based, or parser-choice hybrid) is fine with me.
  • Something else
0 voters
4 Likes
2

On the face of it, I think it’s a good idea. But I think there will be a lot of edge cases to think about. For example, would parser games with choice-based dialogue count as hybrid? What about choice games with textboxes to input puzzle solutions?

4 Likes
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In the first case, at least from my WIP perspective, having choice-based dialogue don’t count as hybrid.

But if a story has choice-based scenes, this can count as hybrid.

In the second case, the same rationale applies: ex. inputting a combination, password or like, don’t count as hybrid.

But, the choice of action (e.g. verb menu) is followed with a textbox for inputting the noun(s) (or vice-versa), this can count as an hybrid.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

4

IFWiki agrees with you:

Parser games switching to choice

Some parser games switch to choice-based play for certain sequences, then back to parser. The choices are usually presented as a numbered menu, and the player makes their choice by entering a number at the command prompt. This is commonly used for menu-based conversation, which has largely replaced the previously ubiquitous ask-tell-based conversation in the 2010s. When this kind of choice sequence is used only for conversation in an otherwise parser-driven work, it is generally not considered a hybrid game.

Some works, however, use the numbered menu system to represent not just dialogue, but the player characters’s actions during certain sequences. For example:

You can read more here.

4 Likes
5

I’m not sure how to deal with cases where there is disagreement about how to categorize it. I guess you could make the options not mutually exclusive, so if a game is straddling the line between hybrid and choice, it would be possible to choose both, and then it’ll come up in searches for hybrid as well as searches for choice? Kind of like north-northwest, only it’d be parser-choicechoice? I don’t know…

1 Like
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Yeah, I think if we offered this then it would be nice to let people optionally classify as parser, choice, both, or neither (like two checkboxes for ‘parser’ and ‘choice’). I see it as mostly helping people who want their games to be more discoverable. It might make sense to automatically mark past Inform, Tads, Alan, etc. games as Parser, although even that’s not clearcut (like the game I organized called Untitled Relationship Project, which is choice-based but written in Inform).

4 Likes
7

If we were to do that, we might want to only do that for games dating from the parser-only era, and do the more recent games case by case.

Also, I wonder if there’d be a way to use the existing parser, etc. tags as a basis for automatically categorizing the games.

2 Likes
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If I may suggest a technical compromise: we don’t have to choose between tags and special fields in the database. On itch/io certain tags have special status, being marked as designating genre, engine, language and so on… while still being tags as any other. So they can be used to better classify games without complicating the user interface or breaking old code.

2 Likes
9

Not sure that privileging tag-based information like that plays well with the fact that tags, unlike most of the things comprising a game’s display, aren’t editable by just anyone – only the person who originally sets them (and admins). So you could end up prominently displaying a tag-based ‘fact’ about a work that most people (and e.g. the author) would disagree with, but can’t correct.

3 Likes
10

Maybe we could try it–that is, try using tags to determine the category–for just the one field, and see how it goes. If the parser/choice/hybrid tag is wrong, it might be a good idea to correct it regardless of where it appears (as long as the mods have time to do so).

11

I think you should add tags for the big-O complexity of a game. A game has N items/rooms/characters, and f(N) total possible game states. Or something like that. I’ll leave the details for someone else.

1 Like