In my games, I take the approach of combining text input and choice-based input - or, rather, allowing both to be used in parallel. The main reason for this is that mobile devices don’t have physical keyboards, and playing with a soft keyboard is simply annoying. However, I think it’s extremely important to ensure good playability on smartphones and tablets, because younger gamers are more likely to play on mobile devices than on a PC or Mac.
But: If you try to support both text input and multiple-choice questions equally, it’s initially a lot more complex than a game that’s text-input-only or choice-based-only. I don’t think my results are perfect yet, but my IFComp entry for this year definitely plays well on mobile, and I’m still tinkering with it.
(The second round of beta testing will start in the next few days. So if anyone else is interested, let me know. )
This is just me, and of course it depends on the game, but I think of choice games as being more accessible than parser games because I don’t have to type so much. Which makes them easier to play on a phone if I can just select the choices by tapping, as opposed to having to input a command every time. Typing takes so much longer on a phone than on a computer, especially if you have lengthy nouns, that the last time I tried to play a parser game on my smartphone I gave up and said, I’ll just play this at home where I have my computer with a keyboard and don’t have to spend a second or more per command instead of half a second. Which adds up.
This also makes choice games much easier to play on the go, for me, at least the ones that are mobile compatible and don’t do fancy UI things that make them completely inaccessible for phone users. I imagine the same dynamics also affect many other people.
There are parser games now that offer something of a choice interface, and I hope to see more of this since it will help with accessibility and in particular help me play more on my smartphone.
This isn’t meant to denigrate parser games - I’ve played and enjoyed many of them, though I gravitate to choice nowadays because I’m often without my personal computer.
And, personally, I think you have hit the nail on the head. While I will still hold that choice-based games will not “exercise your noodle” as much as having to think about what to type, playing on a phone (or pad) is getting to be the norm for many (most?) games. So, although I am a solid fan of Advlite3 (TADS3) with the great support it has from Eric Eve, I am going to start exploring this (new to me) way to build games…
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