I’ve been enjoying the reviews. Please forgive my ignorance but I’m confused by what you mean when you refer to “medium-dry-goods” puzzles. What are they?
I’m quite interested in how people integrate puzzles into their games so I would love to know a little more.
Puzzles around the manipulation of human-scale objects: Sam Kabo-Ashwell talks here about how he took the term from a philosopher – apparently J.L. Austin?
“But then we have to ask, of course, what this class comprises. We are given, as examples, ‘familiar objects’–chairs, tables, pictures, books, flowers, pens, cigarettes; the expression ‘material thing’ is not here (or anywhere else in Ayer’s text) further defined. But does the ordinary man believe that what he perceives is (always) something like furniture, or like these other ‘familiar objects’—moderate-sized specimens of dry goods?” though he’s using it in a different sense.
Sense and Sensibilia, pg. 8 according to Reddit
Thanks for the kind words and sorry about the jargon! “Medium (sized) dry goods” are the kind of thing you buy in a hardware store - crowbars, rope, screwdrivers, ladders… so “medium dry goods puzzles” indicates traditional challenges in the mold of more traditional 70s/80s text games (I think Graham Nelson might have popularized the phrase in one of the versions of the Inform Designer’s Manual?)
Edit: thanks for the reference, Josh, not sure I’d seen that before!
I like “widget”: traditional adventure game thingy, often assumed to have an in-game purpose or use
You know I had the same question . . .
It’s interesting to me that these both just focus on what kind of an object is used.
I have only ever seen the term “medium dry goods” used on this forum. From context, it seemed like it carried a connotation of “this is a puzzle in the vein of other puzzles you have seen before” (e.g., looking under a doormat for a key).
I’m curious for those who use it–would you apply it to a puzzle that was very innovative and creative, but involved, say, manipulating a rope?
Hmm, interesting question! I probably still might, but would probably qualify it - in my mind the phrase is partially about originality but primarily about the kinds of interactions the player has with the game (i.e., physical object manipulation rather than social engagement, codes or riddles, a magic system, etc.)
if I made a medium dry goods thread, would people talk about it?
To me, “medium-sized dry goods” means objects that fit the default parser world model without any special behavior: they can be taken and dropped, possibly opened and closed, but don’t push the limits of the parser world model in any tricky ways. Ropes, in particular, are very seldom medium-sized dry goods in my mind, because they can extend between rooms, be tied to different things, and so on.
“Medium-sized” = can be picked up and dropped without worrying about positioning or quantity, “dry goods” = don’t spill or flow, can’t be divided, all that. The moment you introduce, say, a bucket of water, your implementation gets a lot more complicated!
I personally don’t consider it a derogatory term at all, and would apply it to good puzzles. Spider and Web is a game of medium-sized dry goods, for instance.
I love the term; in one of my games, I made a cabinet in a zoo labelled ‘Medium-size dry goods’ that had things like remote controls and filters.
Edit: I think the idea is that implementing anything else is really hard. Liquid puzzles, puzzles with sand, manipulating big machinery (like the crane or whatever at the end of Heist by Andy Philipps) can be really tricky!
Seems like there’s interest!
Occurs to me that Impossible Bottle is a small, medium, and large dry goods game!
Oh yeah, I don’t see it as derogatory at all. In my mind it’s the equivalent of a Twine game having expanding/cycling/advancing links (is that the right term?) or a ChoiceScript game having a stat-tracking page. Only the most experimental parser game won’t have any medium-sized dry goods puzzles, because using the tools you’re given will usually give a better result than reinventing every wheel!
EDIT: If this keeps going, we should split this into a new topic perhaps.
EDIT EDIT: Drew has spoken! Lemme split these.
As with any term, it tends to have a clear central concept or concepts, and then around the edges it gets fuzzy or different people interpret it differently…
I’m partly with Daniel that it’s about granularity: objects you can pick up and put down and that usually aren’t divisible, but for me it’s almost just as much about tangible objects rather than abstract concepts (or emotions or codes/riddles or magic systems like Mike said, although some magic systems can be medium dry goods for me, I think).
And yeah, I don’t think of it as a derogatory term exactly; for me it’s more that these kinds of manipulations are well-known to be a sweet spot for parser IF that has been fairly extensively explored, so you have to work harder at the craft or theming or whatever to make them feel like something that fits the story well and not just puzzles like we’ve seen a lot before.
Hmm. I bet it gets mentioned less in a positive sense because if they fit the story and themes really well then they fade into the background.
In Mike Russo’s IF Comp 2024 Reviews thread, a question was asked regarding the term “medium dry goods.” What does it mean?
A confession: I’ve never cared for the term, because I don’t think it makes intuitive sense to everyone (as the conversation suggests) and because its origins seem overtechnical in a way that further limits its intuitive sensibility. Still, it I am probably fighting a losing battle there, despite my preference for terms like widget (implemented portable thing with a presumed use) or doohickey (complex widget with multiple functions or parts) or even contraption (doohickey that is non-portable).
This thread is, itself, a contraption: it can divert posts from Mike’s review thread, clarify the meaning and value of “medium dry goods,” and–my favorite possibility–welcome discussion of criticism and craft terminolgies. Do you have favorites? Pet peeves? What terms used in IF discourse seem worthy of remark?
Oh, shoot, I split the thread while you were typing. Should I merge the two, or just link one to the other?
I don’t know! I like the idea of a general discussion, but who knows if there would be takers? Do whatever seems best.
I believe the term was original by Sam Ashwell – whose blog originated a lot of the IF theory we use, actually. It was “medium-sized dry goods”, if I recall.
It was meant to be a bit of a joke, not technical at all. “Dry goods” as in “dry goods store”. No, that’s not a common term any more (but Sam wasn’t born in the US!) Just picture walking into a store and picking up a roll of toilet paper – sorry, loo paper – and two cans of beans and a mop. That’s the sort of thing you do in an IF game. You don’t pick up a refrigerator or a sofa (too big). IF is also legendarily bad at liquids and continuous quantities, so “dry goods” is a joke that way too.
We have two threads going, unfortunately, and I should have linked the source. But I’m referring to Ashwell’s post, which seems to reference philosopher JL Austin. Josh cites it here
When I hear “medium-sized dry goods,” I think of the store William Munny, the antihero of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, opened with the proceeds from a paid assassination.
(Feel free to merge threads.)
I feel like “medium-sized dry goods” is more appropriate than something like widget or doohicky. Those terms are too open-ended – and potentially too interesting!
When I hear the word “dry,” that has resonance. A live, wriggling octopus might be a “medium-sized good,” but if you have a puzzle that revolves around an octopus, that probably wouldn’t strike the “medium-sized dry goods” note for me. I mention an octopus because it’s wet, and also because it’s more engaging than something like a bottle or a newspaper.
There’s a sort of boredom evoked by “medium-sized dry goods.” Functional but inert. The term leans into the “simulated world model” type of parser game, where a lot of technical juice has been invested in the manipulation of mundane objects.
My biases are showing. I’m not a fan of deep simulation in parser games. So in my mind, “medium-sized dry goods” is an easy way to reference this larger design philosophy, which I’ll often struggle with as a player.
Ah, yes I think that is part of this. In the previous conversation, it was asked if the term “medium-sized dry goods” was derogatory. Replies were negative. And yet, it doesn’t strike my ear as neutral. For what it’s worth, “widget” originates as a business school term for a generic, hypothetical product: perhaps our thoughts are not so different.
I do think there is a need to get at the natural thingness of parser design (whether authors resist it or not). There are… I think four takeable things in my 150k word game, so I understand the resistance