Medium-sized dry goods

Authoring General Design Discussions
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I think there is a need to have some shared terms, or at least shared understandings. In a 1,000 word review, I would not want to have to make a case for the tendency toward “thingness” of parser games. I think this is an idea that makes intuitive sense, and most people get it. A challenge is that “medium-sized dry goods” doesn’t seem to make intuitive sense to at least some readers and reviewers (as this thread attests), and it really seems to me that one measure of a general-purpose term is whether or not it is readily understandable.

We could rely on philosophical terms for more general, everyday things in parser games. There’s probably some good stuff in Timothy Morton, for instance, but I don’t know that it would help anyone understand what a scenery backdrop is in Inform 7. My thought is that shared terms for common concepts are necessary, but I’m not sure “hyperobjects” (from Morton) or “object-oriented ontology” would be effective as everyday shorthand.

That isn’t to say that I don’t like philosophical or literary terminology. I do! I think the difference is that they are good for engaging with something specific and complex. Mike Russo used the term “Kristevan abjection” in his recent review of “Verses.” I found that very apt, and the term was necessary to get to a well-developed idea in an efficient and effective way. It’s clear that such concepts can add a lot to a review.

So far as the thing(ness) itself: a phrase I’ve used is “Zorkian game of things,” which describes one kind of model–the oldest–for parser game design. There are lots of other kinds of IF for authors to make, of course. Inform 7 is actually very good for making games that do not consist in large part of portable items with utility. If we are hoping to resist a tendency toward thingness in parser games, ultimately the things resisted are expectation and tradition. The medium does not mandate or even push toward a specific approach to things (quantity or utility) in a design, and it seems to me that we are largely talking about shared assumptions between authors and audiences.

It is sometimes satisfying to resist or defy what is expected.

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J. L. Austin definitely had a sense of humour. The progenitor to this term appears in his Sense and Sensibilia, which is exactly what you would hope a philosopher with his name would call his book. In this collection of essays, the actual discussion from which we get the phrase “moderate-sized specimens of dry goods” is now quite obscure. Another philosopher, Ayer, says people have a naïve view of the existence of “material things” but the examples Ayer seems to give are just objects he finds in his study, while Austin says that people also perceive things which aren’t dry goods:

people, people’s voices, rivers, mountains, flames, rainbows, shadows, pictures on the screen at the cinema, pictures in books or hung on walls, vapours, gases

I’m sure we can all think of actually existing parser puzzles that include some of these items, but from our point of view, the unifying feature of the items is that you wouldn’t usually stick them your inventory.

To pick up on a thread from CMG earlier:

This question of how granular we want actions to be is really core, because just by having a world model based around manipulating objects pushes the design into this space— it’s a tendency that has to be pulled back from. By my count there are 30 separate steps in making and drinking a cup of tea with milk and sugar, but if it’s important in a game the action is better served in one or two steps. This is a design pitfall that’s easy for adventure games to fall into. Indeed, it’s one I made in the design of Calm, which Jenni Polodna made fun of, quite justifiably:

I just realized from Jorge’s perspective you are the worst storyteller ever.

“Then I drank the hot chocolate, but it was freezing, so I tried to put more chocolate powder in the cup, but the pot had closed somehow so I tried putting that in the cup, which clearly didn’t work, so I had to look at a couple things to figure out what was wrong and then I opened the pot, and put the chocolate powder in the cup, well, after rinsing it first, but then I forgot and put the milk in the cup instead of the saucepan and made another cup of cold hot chocolate which I would have just put in the saucepan but I kept deciding against it…”

Part of the design challenge in giving players actions at a larger scale is communicating that level of action to the player. This really only works if the player knows what more high level commands are going to work. To take the discussion full circle, Sam Ashwell’s Olivia’s Orphanarium does this quite well, spelling out the commands in a way :

(examining The Compleat Orphanmaster)
This handsome duodecimo volume briefly summarises the most important tools in the orphanmaster’s trade, as follows:

ASSIGN a dependent TO some constructive workstation; also UNASSIGN

BUY items listed FROM a reputable catalogue

CONSULT a catalogue ABOUT the nature and quality of its wares

DISCIPLINE a dependent, in a manner not exceeding established standards

DISMISS vexing and bootless tasks

SELL unprofitable superfluities

SCORE yourself on the ephemeral scale of worldly accomplishment

RECAP tasks one has promised to undertake, then neglected

ROOM NAME, navigation for the navigation-challenged

SCRUB someone incapable of taking responsibility for their own filthiness

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Because it’s hard to invent a scenario where the DINNER is a persistent object that plays into explorable mechanics.

The great thing about Adventure, the original Crowther stroke of genius, is that you immediately have a stock of world-model actions to play with. You can pick up five different things and put them back down. You can put them down somewhere else. It matters what you’re carrying. You can OPEN two different things in the first part of the cave.

For EAT DINNER to be interesting, you really need a scenario where you MAKE DINNER and SERVE DINNER and maybe you have a chance to MAKE LUNCH the next day. Otherwise you’re playing a “guess the next story command” game, which we recognize as the failure mode of parser IF.

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I feel like a game where you EAT DINNER is more likely to be one where you’re focusing on day-to-day actions like in many visual novels or life sims. The other useful actions would not be SERVE DINNER but GO TO GYM or FOLLOW SUSPECT or REPAIR BARRICADE. We only consider these less intuitive that PUT THING IN OTHER THING because we’ve been conditioned by decades of doing the latter.

(The seed of Superluminal Vagrant Twin was “what if you controlled a starship instead of an adventurer”, but I’m not sure how well that change of scale was actually apparent. It is at least a large-sized dry goods game.)

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Exactly! I’m envisioning a hypothetical game where you’ve got bigger narrative granules, which have been systematized in the “dry goods” style.

It goes without saying that you’d need to teach the player how to use such mechanics. But players had to learn the “dry goods” mechanics too.

I’m not convinced the “dry goods” style is more intuitive either. More conventional, yes, but I struggled a lot with my first parser games. I still struggle sometimes. This is why I tend to focus on action rather than item management in my own games. Eat Me, for instance, has no “dry goods” puzzles.

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That’s what I imagined for Hadean Lands, but everything wound up in the magic recipe system. There was a lot of design gravity in that direction. It’s hard to imagine it as a really general model.

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It is hard to imagine, I’ll admit, but the parser is so open-ended that other models are probably just waiting to be discovered! This is why discussions like these are so great. Just this morning, I’ve been struck with ideas for two new games! If I could only find time to write them…

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It’s interesting to me how easily the “room” model scales to bigger sizes or more conceptual places but the object model seems to pull more in physical directions…

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This is going to make any puzzle difficult - non reversible, hard to explore and reason about. Ie any puzzles using this are going to tend to be cruel. Also it might be jarring if you mix high and low level mechanics, eg if movement takes a year but then you have to fiddle with doorknobs when you get to your destination.

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Not necessarily! It would depend on the nature of the game. I don’t recall Pilgrimage itself being cruel (although I may be wrong; my memory is spotty). As for fiddling with doorknobs, that’s exactly the kind of puzzle that a zoomed-out scale could bypass.

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I’m only saying you have a few things working against you if you’re using it to create puzzles rather than say focusing more on the story. If an action which covers years is reversible, then it has major implications on the premise and story of the game.

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My theory—mostly from personal experience, but also some observation—is that beginning parser authors are more influenced by library terminology than we realize. There’s something seductive about knowing reusable objects like Room, Vehicle, Container, Lockable, Dial, Key are at one’s immediate disposal.

(I’m more familiar with TADS than Inform, so perhaps the terminology is different there.)

This leads early IF writers down the medium-sized dry goods path, not only because it’s so easy to code that kind of simulation, but also because so much of the built-in library is dedicated to it, giving one the impression that this is what an IF game is all about.

I don’t know if it’s intuitive, but I think the “dry goods” style is simply tempting, much as literalism is tempting to fiction writers.

I like your point about action. I’ve come around to seeing IF as more about knowledge acquisition than I first thought, both in terms of tracking (in code) what the player character has learned, and tracking (in game design) what the player has learned.

There’s been some work in the TADS group about improving knowledge tracking in code. If I write another large-scale work, I’d probably look into that before starting.

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I believe it was used in times of yore when ledgers were hand written and might still be for transportation and shipping. “Medium Dry Goods” was a default designation for “boxes of stuff that require no special handling” that can be grouped together - and likely can be carried and loaded by one person. A case of boxes of macaroni is medium dry goods; a barrel of live electric eels is not.

As made clear it’s not derogatory as a metaphor for parser puzzles that don’t stray far from world-model manipulation: open a container to find a key to unlock a door; put the jade figurine on the jade pillar to advance the plot; give Bob his lost wallet so he’ll talk about the murder; carry and switch on a lamp to see in the dark…

Non “dry-goods” puzzles require special rules, handling, and perhaps unique verbs and interaction from the player and may or may not involve objects.

[whirls in with cape flourish and baker’s hat and apron…]

Or you can be weird like me and go "I can represent an idea as a physical object that exists inside a container attached to the player called their “mind”.

Inside your mind is an idea to return Bob’s lost wallet, and a spiky ball of crushing guilt that you set that hedge on fire.

Weird prototype ideas

I had an idea for a game where motivations were sets of physical “tasks” with directions attached that could interact and conflict with other tasks and ideas in someone’s mind. If the butler were looking for his feather duster, that would be a “task” object in his brain so every turn he would try taking the feather duster - failing would generate a “The Butler can’t see that right now” type of message to clue the player he was searching. If he found the feather duster, that task disappeared. if none of the local tasks could be achieved he had a general task to move toward the library to discover the mess the player made. If the player made a lot of destructive noise in a room, the butler would receive an “investigate” task that moved him toward the location where the noise occurred and might override other tasks he wanted to accomplish temporarily. So you could have situations where if you broke the expensive Ming vase in the Study, you could delay the Butler discovering it by creating distractions in other areas.

The PC would also have motivations in their head - if they accumulated enough “fear” in their mind, they would refuse to obey the player’s direction to walk down a dark scary hallway. If they had a “groovy earworm” in their head, they might dance randomly, causing suspicion by onlookers.

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Yeah, but remember that Inform 6 only conceptualizes a few “classes”, and they’re really flags rather than types: container, supporter, animate, edible, clothing. You can combine them sort-of-freely. (container+supporter doesn’t work cleanly, which makes those two feel a bit like classes.)

“Room” isn’t an explicit concept at all in I6; it’s a design pattern.

I know TADS has a much more robust type system, but between 1995 and 2007 (ish), I think Inform 6 was the biggest single influence on the community.

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Manifests (maritime term) is one of the points of contact between Naval and Computer matters, but I should look up on the usage of our term in my reference collection, but now I seriously wonder if the term was exploited when Naples was the black hole of WWII US logistics (I 'fess up, in my house former US parachutes “liberated” around 1944-5 covered our need of white household textiles up well into 1950s…)

I have some perplexity on implementation of thoughts (needing a separate thought for an object is indeed one of these…) in adv3 and adv3Lite, but “weird” isn’t one of these…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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