More on the Zork II baseball puzzle, and some thoughts on more current player “rights.”
- Jason Dyer did solve it by just using the lights in the floor, but that is still not a “fair” solution since exits appear and disappear. The player cannot get consistent feedback.
- The really bad thing is that it fails as a “baseball” puzzle. The player enters the field at the mound, walks to home, then circles the mound. No batter in baseball starts on the pitcher’s mound.
The puzzle is not internally consistent. Since the region does not look like a baseball field, the player has to perceive it conceptually. This requires internal consistency. I personally knew it was a baseball puzzle, but I never would have guessed that the starting point was the pitcher’s mound. I would suggest that a puzzle ought to have internal consistency, even if it is not “logical” in a strict sense.
So far as culture-specific knowledge goes: I’ve always told students, teachers, and workshop participants that a writer owes a reader a clean web search. That is, a writer ought not expect a reader to know everything, and ought to make sure that good faith efforts to research a problem or topic will be productive. I think this is a good consideration for game development today.
Finally—I said this last year when I wrote about Zork II—while a player might be too frustrated to celebrate failed attempts at innovation, a critic really ought to try and acknowledge them when possible. Yes, the baseball puzzle sucks. It’s bad for many reasons. It is also Dave Lebling’s (and Infocom’s) first attempt at the “looks like a maze but is solved like a puzzle” trope. This particular feature can be found all over the place now. In that sense, it is a deeply flawed but highly productive failure.
So (trying to stay on topic), there is a lot to learn from the baseball puzzle, and I don’t think its applications are limited to interactive fiction games.