Threads merged!
3 Likes
The term “medium dry goods” was kind of new to me. When I google the term, the top hit is for “medium dry goods cannister” from Central Italy, selling for $280. At that price, I hope that it is like the Inform carry-all with its magically large capacity. Narrowing the search to “Medium dry goods” and interactive fiction, I find a lot of Mike Russo’s past reviews. He likes that term.
To Drew Cook’s questions about “favorite” review terms: I’ve been reading these reviews for almost two decades, and because of this forum I’ve expanded my vocabulary for evaluating literature and film. One term I learned here that I like especially (though it originated with Alfred Hitchcock) is the MacGuffin.
I also like the sound of the words “Oevre” and “Canon”.
3 Likes
I guess it depends on how much a person enjoys deep simulation. It’s usually a negative for me, but some people really love it! I have a sense that even its fans, however, enjoy designing such world models more than interacting with them as a player.
For instance, you could have something like this:
PICK UP CORKSCREW. PUT CORKSCREW IN BOTTLE. TWIST CORKSCREW. PULL CORKSCREW. REMOVE CORK FROM CORKSCREW. DROP CORK. DROP CORKSCREW. PICK UP BOTTLE. POUR BOTTLE INTO GLASS. PUT DOWN BOTTLE. PICK UP GLASS. DRINK WINE.
That’s the “medium-sized dry goods” style of simulation.
Or you could cut to the chase: OPEN BOTTLE. DRINK WINE.
Or even just: DRINK WINE.
You could zoom out even more: EAT DINNER. That command might encapsulate drinking the wine plus a whole host of other actions: carving the roast, spooning the soup, sprinkling the salt, etc. Even though it’s the same exact event, dealing with the same in-game objects, it’s no longer a “medium-sized dry goods” puzzle.
1 Like
This seems like a strawman to me. No one does this nowadays. In the comp, there is one parser game I’ve played that requires too many such steps (OPEN ENVELOPE, READ LETTER), but it’s nothing so silly. If I wrote reviews, I’d call them out on it, even though I like the “medium-sized dry goods”, “world simulation” style myself.
2 Likes
In fairness, from the reviews there seems to be one comp entry that does this explicitly and intentionally (Breakfast in the Dolomites).
2 Likes
Hah, great conversation happening here. I’m finding it very illuminating.
To me it did sound a little like a derogatory statement when applied to puzzles, if only because it means the puzzles are “standard” in some way, they happen so often that they have a category. Also “medium” and “dry” aren’t the most entertaining adjectives so they evoked a kind of tedious.
But there must be a million kinds of puzzle that you can make using medium sized dry goods. I couldn’t see how they could be made into a rote puzzle system so… I was confused.
1 Like
Granted. I haven’t played very far into that one, but I had noted the reviews. But this seems to be the exception rather than the rule, I think?
1 Like
To offer a counterpoint to this:
I’d say there are two extremes in implementing a parser game. At one end is the “simulation” side, as you put it—the world model is made up of consistent, regular rules without exceptions, and the puzzles consist of learning to apply those rules to your benefit. At the other end is the “MUD” style, where every command is a special case and you don’t even have a unified concept of “nouns” or “verbs”: TAKE KEYS and TAKE LAMP are two entirely separate inputs handled with entirely separate code.
Most games fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. But I tend to prefer ones that are further on the “simulation” side, for one simple reason: it generally feels like I’m learning the rules of a system so I can apply them on my own, instead of hunting for the one command the author wanted me to use in this particular situation. I’m much more likely to guess that the solution to this puzzle is SCRAPE PARROT if there’s a general system of scraping birds that I’ve explored throughout the game, than if the response to SCRAPE CROW is “I didn’t understand that sentence”.
1 Like
I wouldn’t take “medium-sized dry goods” to be a term equivalent to “widget”, or technical in any way. It’s like saying that Myst clones consist of pushing buttons (a “white goods” simulator, I suppose). This encompasses pulling levers and turning knobs as well. Quibbling over whether stepping on a pressure plate counts as pushing a button misses the point of the observation, which is that the dry goods puzzles of parser games are absent, NPC puzzles are absent, etc. That might be a criticism or a neutral observation. Similarly a game that’s all medium-sized dry goods revolves around toting inert objects to the proper place in order to obtain another inert object for your inventory. Maybe that’s a neutral observation, but it could have the implication of being stuck in a rut.
Anybody know some good brown goods simulators? (I suppose that would entail bringing complicated devices to the right place and operating them in an appropriate way.)
How about baked goods simulators? Mmm…
3 Likes
Speaking personally, I like the term and do not find it derogatory. (I think Assembly has been described this way, and that seems fairly accurate and fine.)
It’s useful to have a term that means “the sorts of objects that parser games are good at manipulating”; the fact that it’s dry and unevocative is arguably a strength (vs. eg. widgets, where I’d feel a bit odd describing eg. furniture parts as widgets even though they behave like classic parser-game stuff); the link to philosophy is insightful and charming. Jargon does need to be deployed sparingly, but the concept feels useful enough to be worth a name…
4 Likes
I have never seen a reviewer speak enthusiastically about dry goods, as in “the best medium-sized dry goods implementation I’ve seen in years!” or some such. Perhaps this is an assumed quality of parser games, and so praising it would not mean much?
I think “medium-sized dry goods” implies minimal implementation is needed beyond GET GOOD, DROP GOOD, and GUESS-THE-VERB GOOD.
I feel the thread contains different interpretations of the term, which isn’t necessarily a problem. I agree with Ben that we are talking about a kind of (in my mind portable) thing that a parser development system (Inform 7, at least, which is all I know) handles well. I interpret such things as having in-game utility. I don’t perceive them as having a fixed design template. Simulation has been mentioned and I do see them as part of a design that incorporates simulation, but I’m not ready to be more specific than that.
If “thing” weren’t already reserved by Inform 7, I might interpret something that is “medium-sized dry goods” as a portable thing with utility.
Yes! IF discourse makes for good reading, in my opinion. I learned “MacGuffin” through IF, too.
2 Likes
I understood “medium-sized dry goods” to mean a few different things.
At best, it can mean “objects that are at a relatable scale, used in ways that make sense in context with complexities (such as items being wet) carefully ruled out to keep the focus on succeeding at the puzzles and anything else the IF was meant to achieve, rather than unforeseen consequences”. Virtues in a game, but likely to be described in terms other than “medium-sized dry goods”.
At worst, it can mean, “IF does the easy stuff but not with any particular excitement or novelty attached to them”. That is definitely derogatory and is more likely to be used with that phrase (even though the same phrase would also describe a much stronger IF that leaned into the strengths and minimised the infelicities of the style).
5 Likes
It’s an extreme example to highlight one end of the spectrum, but “nowadays” isn’t really a factor. This type of simulation is not, to my knowledge, as sought-after today as it once was (although, as others have pointed out, some games still go for it), but the “medium-sized dry goods” concept is just as much about historical trends as it is about contemporary design. Perhaps more about historical trends! “Medium-sized dry goods” is usually invoked to compare newer games to old ones by saying: This puzzle structure fits into X tradition.
Possibly! You might be right! But it seems to me like a question of scale in addition to rules/system.
Taking my earlier DRINK WINE example: most games don’t zoom out to the EAT DINNER scale. But you could have a whole system of standardized rules on that larger zoomed-out scale.
Or an even more zoomed-out scale! I’m reminded of Pilgrimage, where each time you move NORTH or WEST or whatnot, you travel to another country. Sometimes years elapse in the space of a single action.
The “medium” part of “medium-sized dry goods” has been the conventional scale, but the parser can accommodate all sorts of weird systems.
4 Likes
The term reeks of so much boredom, I would never use it in my life, unless deliberately trying to make a point about boringness. The term would uglify and borify my reviews. Plus I agree on the technical overreach just required to interpret why anyone would be using this term in the first place, though that would go away if everyone used it.
I posit a spectrum of people. Those who lean into certain kinds of shorthanding jargon and those who repel it. I am way out on the repel arm. I would rather write one unique new sentence to describe an idea yet again rather than reduce it to the same term appearing in everyone else’s talk. I think the more you lean to jargon and over-shorthanding, the more you drain specificity you could be bringing to writing about the game that’s in front of you. ‘medium-sized dry goods’ would fall into that box for me.
Some would say if the idea is unimportant or tapped out enough, it deserves to be shorthanded. I get that, but being me, I’ll still write that new sentence.
-Wade
1 Like
Not to get into an Argument Online, but I feel this is precisely the opposite of how jargon works; it’s used and useful for precisely the concepts that are the most central, that matter the most, that come into conversation again and again.
Like, here is an article titled In Defense of Moderate-Sized Specimens of Dry Goods. [1] This paper was written in 2003 – more than fifty years after Austin first introduced the term in philosophy. [2] This is not the behaviour of a community that thinks the idea that they’re getting at is stale or unimportant – it’s vital enough to have kept a conversation going for fifty years! As jargon it serves all kinds of purposes: it makes it easier to tie your ideas to past work, or connect it to a tradition; it makes that past work easier to find by using common terms; it makes it easier to leverage past understanding, avoids the need to retread common ground in every conversation about an idea. “Survival horror” is a recent example from the comp – that term means nothing to most people, but if you’re into horror games it’s a very useful idea.
Which is not to say that jargon can’t be overused or misused, or that some people lean in farther than others! But folks who think an idea is unimportant or tapped out don’t tend to coin new words for that idea; they tend to not talk about it at all.
7 Likes
First, I just want to say, I don’t want anybody to stop having their conversation in this topic or discussing the term. I’ve just told people why I wouldn’t use it in my own reviews. I find it aesthetically ugly. It doesn’t matter if it is witty and pithy and sort of brilliant for purpose. I just don’t like it for my reviews. I apologise to anyone who found my post annoying or closing-down-leaning. It probably was.
I hope reading or understanding this paper is not a prerequisite for replying to your post, as I could do neither!
I think you (@bkirwi) are right about all the useful possibilities of jargon in general. Probably the divergence in what we’re talking about comes when I look at what we are doing in reviewing IF. Here, we do retread the same ground all the time. We have to. Art can’t be qualified by constant transgression and newness. A filing system approach to what has been done is the province of academia, which in our area can help inform reviews. But the more reviews become Maze (tick), medium-sized dry goods maniupation(tick), the more reductive we can end up sounding and the less we may talk about the differences from the norm in what’s in front of us, no matter how subtle.
My reviews are mostly concerned with aesthetics and emotions, as far as I can tell, and they’re not the things that are conveyed with sufficient detail by most jargon.
Sam Ashwell, the source of this conversation, has produced all this lexicology which is bearing fruit now. When he was reviewing IFComp prolifically, some feared their first review would be from him, as he had a bit of a hanging judge reputation. I don’t think I’m misrepresenting him to say he’s interested in what he’s interested in (I think I’m paraphrasing from somewhere) and so his tendency would be to box what could be boxed, and sometimes spend 90% of the review talking about the difference in one area. That’s one kind of review. Sometimes a really useful one! It often didn’t coincide with what nervous authors wanted in IFComp, but reviewers have to pick where and how and why they do things. Certainly with his interests and approach, it is not a surprise that he coined the term of this topic.
-Wade
4 Likes
Whether it’s used in reviews seems kind of beside the point. The fact that the term exists and that it accurately describes an IF paradigm is what matters to me. Honestly, until I typed out my previous posts in this thread, I don’t think I truly realized just how much the “medium-sized dry goods” model is encoded in the parser medium. Rather, I didn’t realize how much it didn’t have to be!
Why don’t more games use the EAT DINNER scale? Why aren’t more games like Pilgrimage? Probably because, as humans, we’re usually concerned in our day-to-day lives with… medium-sized dry goods! We think on this scale a lot. So we design games on this scale.
But games could have another scale. Many other scales!
What would it actually mean to design a system with commands like SCRAPE PARROT which has been expanded to encompass events like EAT DINNER? How would a game like that unfold, where you’re managing the narrative from a higher level? Go up high enough, I suppose, and you’re a god. But stop when you’re still pretty low, and you might be a stage director. I don’t know! I haven’t thought about it enough yet. But this thread has sent my mind off in some interesting directions.
6 Likes