This exchange I think ties in with what I was getting at with it being less the Bill of Rights as such, and more the discussion and design culture sparked from it, that marked the divide between the old school and new school approaches (bearing in mind the cautions others have raised above about essentializing those terms too much, of course!) Like, I think both Nathan and Dannii are right: it is certainly the case that the Bill addresses itself clearly to puzzlefests, but I think it’s also the case that it contains seeds of the story-first approach that sees puzzles as a necessary evil or just there to provide a pacing mechanism for the narrative.
(Again, these are generalizations – lots of newer-school games emphasize gameplay of some kind over pre-baked narrative, and even if you view puzzles as primarily there to slow the player down and make them pay attention, you can still design interesting, challenging ones to fit that purpose!)
See, there are a couple of the rules – like “not to be killed without warning”, “to be able to win without experience of past lives/knowledge of future events”, and maybe “not to need to do unlikely things” – that are about fairness to the player to a certain degree, but also about the integrity of the story. Like, one reason it’s annoying to require knowledge of what’s coming up to finish a game is that it requires keeping saved games and reloading. But another reason is that it breaks “mimesis” (there’s a word the turn-of-the-millennium r.a.i-f’ers loved, and which you don’t hear so much these days) – it’s hard to construct a single, coherent story that starts at the beginning and ends at the ending, if suddenly in the middle the protagonist douses themselves in fireproofing potion right before walking through a nondescript door behind which happens to lurk a dragon. Even in a puzzlefest, I think the Bill encodes a norm that you should be able to create a canonical playthrough – even if it’s only an imaginary one – that obeys the laws of cause and effect.
This is actually a fairly big deal, I think, and at odds with expectations in many other genres of game – like, roguelikes were the other big text-only 90s game genre, and it would be bizarre to suggest that you should be able to win those without the knowledge the player’s gained from repeated deaths. Sure, you might say, those don’t have any real plot to speak of, but even more narrative-adjacent games like your Princes of Persia, or your Gold Box RPGs, had no compunctions about requiring you to feed lives into the meat grinder to figure out the way to progress.
There are probably a lot of reasons for that, but I think once you buy into the idea that IF is, in fact, interactive fiction, it’s hard to shake the idea that live-die-repeat doesn’t work as the basis for a story that holds together. And saying “okay, I’m going to throw out a lot of received wisdom about how these games should work in order to make the narrative in my game more coherent”, is maybe the initial step in making gameplay a far second to story, rather creating a story to go alongside the desired gameplay – and that’s maybe one distinction you could construct a new school/old school axis around.
It would be interesting to know why people don’t mention mimesis so much anymore. They may just not be reading old theory/criticism. Or perhaps aesthetic preferences have changed.
I personally don’t mind if games feel like, well, games. I won’t argue if someone doesn’t want their game to feel like one, or if they’d rather call it something else—it’s their creation, after all. Still, for me one of the attractions of video games is that—unlike real life—you get as many chances as you need. You can learn from mistakes in a more gratifyingly immediate way.
I also wonder what about “Interactive Fiction” as an oeuvre might make saving and restoring less tolerable. Something like The Last of Us Part 2, for instance, has much more dramatization and dialogue than the average story-heavy IF game, likely involves tons of deaths, and yet people have cried over the ending. There are lots of non-IF games that have powerful effects on players via their fictions. It can’t be that the mere fact of being fictional dictates these expectations.
Perhaps it is that non-IF games can be mimetic in was that a text cannot?
I saw an example of this just last week, it happens.
This was in one of the fan contributions to Myst Online. The fact that it was Myst doesn’t matter. It was a 3D explorable environment, no different in principle from what you’d see in any modern game like Tomb Raider. It was a big fancy library room.
I happened to know (from spoilers) that there was a secret door behind one of the bookshelves, triggered by a hidden button. I looked around for any sign of a hidden button. Couldn’t find it. Shrugged; checked back on the forum.
Turns out the button was perfectly camouflaged – no visible sign at all. You could only find it by moving your mouse around and noticing the cursor change in a particular spot.
People on the forum criticized this as a sin against mimesis. They didn’t use the word “mimesis”, but same idea: the clue was hidden in the game UI, “outside the world”.
(I believe the creators of that area agreed to tweak the button.)
People are willing to roll with respawns and save points these days, in pretty much every genre, without feeling that it breaks the story. And, indeed, people were willing to do that in the 1980s and 1990s as well. So I wouldn’t connect this to story integrity.
(Some genres, like the Choice of Games bunch, are careful to avoid meta-textual story breaks. But it’s there’s barely any genre distance between those and visual novels, which are loaded up with rewinds and fast-forwards! So I don’t buy that there’s any audience seriously invested in “story integrity” in that sense.)
I would instead look at the nuisance and boredom factor of replaying parts of the game. I’d say we have a broad agreement that the designer should think about the retry model. There are lots of possible models, from sadocore “try try die again” to Choice of Games “always proceed to the end” – the point is that you have to make it part of your design. Don’t expose the player to unplanned frustration.
@mathbrush identifies the difference between communities as one source of mismatched expectations. I don’t have any numbers or sources to back this up, but my gut feeling is that this isn’t just true, it’s more true now than ever before.
I’ve followed what I considered to be “the IF community” from the rec.arts/games.int-fiction newsgroups and ifMUD to Facebook, and Twitter, and eventually this website right here. There’s also a subreddit with moderate activity, although a lot of the content there is either ignorant of or unconcerned with the past decades of hobbyist development. Meanwhile, you can find stuff like this tumblr community blog which seems to be coming from more of a VN/fandom/patreon direction, which means that even though their submission space basically overlaps with (say) the XYZZY Awards, I feel like the audiences for these two venues are completely separate. This is just stuff I know about off the top of my head; you can find more with the search engine of your choice.
The number of people who are in a position to play and make IF has exploded, both because the IF-specific tools available have multiplied and become more accessible. Meanwhile, the spread of easy-to-establish community tools—thinking here of web forums, discords, Slack channels, subreddits, blogs, Patreon accounts, wikis, etc.—allow any number of communities to grow in parallel, sometimes in ignorance of one another. The culture of these communities will differ: people have different interests and priorities.
What this means is that the higher profile IF games, competitions, and communities become, the more these draw the attention and evaluation by those differing groups. Again, @mathbrush refers to the different expectations between those who came up with Infocom versus those who came up with ZX Spectrum. I would like to know about as many of these schisms as possible: when I make another game, I may not please everyone, but if I know what groups exist, I can at least aim to please a plurality.
Thank you @mathbrush for bringing up this topic to be discussed explicitly once again. The thoughtful responses show that it is good to revisit and reassess the influence and the cementedness of the Rights.
I agree completely with @DeusIrae that even though the Rights may have been drawn up to give players a fair puzzle experience, they go a long way to pointing in the direction of a completely story-first approach to IF.
What a lot of the Rights seem to aim at is to eliminate the arcade/GameBoy-game feel. One can’t expect to get anywhere with Mario without dying a thousand times. Somehow this has become a negative in IF. It’s expected that the player stops being a separate agent and disappears into the game world, without any meta influences affecting the in-game narrative.
This can provide immensely absorbing experiences, the pinnacle of which being Slouching Toward Bedlam, that absolute triumph of mimesis, pulling even the meta-commands into the narrative in a suspenseful way.
It took me a tour through the 80s to appreciate the arcade-gaminess of IF. There is a try-die-repeat puzzle in Abbey of Montglane that I found completely unfair and sinfully mimesis-breaking at first. That was my Bill-of-Rights-prejudice speaking. After stepping back I came to the conclusion that this was a fantastic puzzle, and that I had almost missed the enjoyment because of my (more or less subconscious) adherence to the Bill of Rights.
There’s so many points I can’t figure where to start replying…
let’s use a “noblesse oblige” criteria, and start with the incident in Myst online Uncle Zarf cited.
I don’t know how that game’s UI work, but generally I consider pointer-scanning akin to FEEL, and the cursor changing being akin to, say “under your finger, you felt a little bump, discovering a well-hidden button !” this perhaps is at the root of text-vs-graphics, is true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but the thousand words are understanded differently (one can say that is the reciprocal corollary of that the mental picture of a text is different in everyone’s mind, and is here where lies the core issue in IF player’s rights)
Everyone perceive described things differently, and even the controversial article 16 can be reduced to that problem of mental picture, Graham itself noting the different meaning of “football” between the old and new side of the Atlantic, the word conjuring a round ball on the EU/UK side, and an oblong ball on the US side.
Let’s try to read the BoPR in the light that everyone’s mental picture is different, I’m sure that many things will became different; Personally I have accepted violating art. 11 in the opening, not only because is what set in motion the main plot, but also point to the player that the PC’s perception of the environment around often changes and re-EXAMINE items & similiar actions often during the game (a much bigger violation of arts. 6 and 7) will be rewarding, contrary to the rationale of art. 6 and 7.
Last thing, as historian, I recommend putting the BoPR in the context of its bigger picture, that is, the CoA…
Really interesting topic and discussion and there’s a lot of food for thought here.
I think this is mostly a matter of communities coming to value different things as they develop. The Adventuron community has a lot of people who found it via the jams on itch.io and/or came from a more graphical background in the first place, and the early games made with the system overwhelmingly had the retro ‘pixels ‘n’ beeps’ aesthetic (which I love but it’s also been lovely to see it branch out into more modern-looking games!), so there’s always been a fairly high level of community interest in multimedia bells and whistles like graphics, music, sound etc. It’s been really interesting, coming from that community, to engage with the wider IF community and learn about different values and preferences - as @jsnlxndrlv says, it’s great to be aware of all the different groups making text games.
A few thoughts on some of the Rights:
My feeling on this (perhaps, again, a result of coming from the Adventuron jam scene, where the rule is ‘no sudden deaths allowed unless you use the rollback function’) is that sudden deaths (or other ‘you lose’ scenarios) are fine so long as the player can instantly UNDO… but also that it should fit with the tone of the game. I usually use them for comedic value, which has worked better in some games than others.
Again I really think this depends on the narrative style of the game! I agree with @kamineko that learning by dying shouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if it suits the game. Yes, it can reduce the realism/coherence of the narrative, but there are many narrative styles where realism doesn’t (and shouldn’t) matter.
I think there’s an extent (certainly in more old-school adventure games) to which a genre-accustomed player will expect to pick up everything that’s not nailed down, because that’s the convention - I suppose I see this less as ‘having knowledge of future events’ and more as ‘this is just how you play these games’, though I appreciate this might cause issues for players new to the genre.
I’ve certainly always thought of unwinnable states as a no-no in modern games (probably again because there’s a rule against them in Adventuron game jams) - I was quite surprised to fall victim to the recent one in Alchemist’s Gold when beta testing it, even though it’s an unashamedly old-school style game. (I believe there is a warning about this in the final release, so it would no longer fall foul of Right #5.) Thinking more about it, though, I don’t see it as hugely cruel if either (a) you can UNDO for as many moves as it takes after you realise your mistake or (b) it’s a short game and you can quickly restart and find your place again - but then again I don’t see a lot of modern players having the patience for that!
I go back and forth on this (being a fan of hidden objects). IIRC there’s actually a rule in the TALP jams that EXAMINE and SEARCH have to be synonyms so that players don’t feel the need to do both with every object in the game. I can absolutely see the reasoning behind this, but at the same time I feel like X BOX (‘The cardboard is starting to rot.’) and SEARCH BOX (‘You root through the contents and find an old scarf and a novelty oversized pen.’) just feel more engaging as different commands. I think this kind of thing is okay if it’s logical… but then different things can be ‘logical’ to different people!
I do like to code doors ‘properly’ (with open/closed/locked/unlocked states that require explicit changing) but I’ve found as a player I expect different things from different game systems - I’m fine with having to UNLOCK then OPEN in an Adventuron or PunyInform game, but I find it a little jarring when there’s no implicit door-opening in an Inform 7 game (I noticed this recently in Bigfoot Bluff, where you have to open doors manually). Maybe it’s just me expecting the game pace to feel faster in I7! But again, that’s something that would make no difference to a new player, and on the whole it’s probably generally kinder (or less impatience-inducing) to include the implicit opening.
Lots of synonyms for the particular verb of an expected command (e.g. GET, TAKE, PICK UP) are great and (I think) are essential for a good parser game, ditto for adjectives and nouns… but argh WHITE is not a synonym for SHIRT, especially if you also have a white letter in the same room! I feel that if a game has a complex parser (not just VERB NOUN) then players should be okay with typing more than two words in a command… but I think I’m fighting a losing battle on this.
Sensible parser responses are such a huge part of making it easier for a player! I think it’s worth the time for authors to put a bit of thought into this no matter what system they’re using.
I’ve actually seen players complain about having more freedom of action, because they don’t feel guided as to what to do next. I think a big open game can be really fun personally.
I haven’t played Zork II and thus haven’t encountered the baseball diamond, but the instance of this that always comes to mind for me (having grown up with point ‘n’ clicks) is the infamous ‘monkey wrench’ puzzle from Monkey Island 2, where you need to use a live monkey as a spanner to close a water pump (the term ‘monkey wrench’ for ‘spanner’ not being known in other countries).
I think this is a really good point and brings to mind recent discussions on the forum about whether non-autistic players would empathise with and understand an autistic player character. It is definitely important that authors from marginalised groups can make games reflecting their experience without being tied to the issue of ‘will everyone else “get” what I’m saying?’
That being said, I think it’s easy enough for someone making an American-set game written in US English (or, indeed, a British-set game written in UK English) to ensure that language and required outside knowledge is internationally friendly. In the modern scene, making use of testers from different countries helps a lot with this.
I think this is a far better way of wording such a rule!
I’m not really sure I understand what is meant by this one. Does it mean an indicator (e.g. a displayed completion percentage or score) of how far along the player is in the game? If so I’m a bit ambivalent - I quite like being surprised by a game’s length.
That’s a shame, because I really like the ‘Easter egg’ type idea of how it sounded originally (and also @Piergiorgio_d_errico’s idea for how it would fit with the narrative)!
This definitely seems right to me, but I think there is a mostly-specific-to-adventure-games complaint, separate from considerations of player frustration, about what happens when a work’s intended gameplay violates narrative causality in a hard-to-ignore way.
Like, if you go through a door that instakills you without fair warning, so long as you can undo and try the other one, that’s not very frustrating, and it’s not too hard to handwave that the protagonist got lucky and picked the right door (protagonists in adventure stories tend to get pretty lucky, after all). If you had a gauntlet of 10 lady-or-tiger choices like this all in a row, again so long as you’ve got undo, that would be a trivial challenge to resolve, but it’s harder to make sense of this in plot terms without positing a psychic or gods-blessed protagonist, and I think most players of modern IF would say that does harm the integrity of the story not to address such a truly epic run of luck – whereas if, in a CRPG, a player bursts into a room to find a new enemy they’ve yet to encounter on that playthrough, but immediately douses themselves in protection-from-fire potions since they know that enemy has a wicked, un-telegraphed fireball attack from having died that way in a previous run, I don’t think anyone would see anything odd about that.
Certainly much of this is a matter of degree – you can get story-integrity failure across genres, of course, if you try hard enough – but I do think the relatively close marriage of gameplay and story in adventure games (including IF) makes the issue more salient. To the extent I had a point, I think I was just trying to say that there’s a way of reading the Bill of Rights that isn’t about making puzzles more fun by making them fairer, but about protecting the integrity of the story by making sure the puzzles don’t damage it.
Then, when you run that into the culture and discussion happening on the newsgroups, including the LucasArts vs. Sierra debates (which, as far as I recall, the more forgiving LucasArts approach always won), other theoretical contributions like your fairness scale, the Crimes Against Mimesis essay, etc., it’s not hard to see how for at least some participants and authors, “puzzles should be fair and solvable so they’re more fun for people who like puzzles” could slide into “puzzles should be fair and solvable so a player can get through the story.”
That last attitude isn’t what solely divides old school vs. new school games, of course, but I think it is a philosophical difference in approach that’s relevant to how we came up with these two different (fuzzy, imprecise) labels.
I think the question of why this is more important to IF audiences (you agree this is true, don’t you?) remains.
Does it have to do with the rewards of play? I think that, in terms of narrative content, most people would agree that, say, Resident Evil 4 has a lot going on. Perhaps more than most conventionally-defined IF games (with only one ending, anyway)? And yet, I think most people don’t think that repeatedly dying violates its story content.
Is it the joy of moment-to-moment gameplay? Someone who enjoys the dynamic gameplay of RE4 might find the game enjoyable after multiple deaths, though there might be a point of unplanned frustration (as Zarf says).
Perhaps it is just that a text game is not so much fun to cycle through multiple attempts. Once the player has read the text, it is read. I know from asking here that most players are not interested in reading a work of IF more than once. They may not wish to reread passages of IF, either.
I am resisting the fiction explanation because I think we have many cases outside the genre where it isn’t a problem. Perhaps repetition—and the way it is experienced—is the issue?
EDIT: if so, is there a difference in the amount of repetition inherent to typical old school and new school IF?
On the other hand, in a text game, you don’t have to re-read passages. You can type commands as fast as the keyboard will work and just skim the output for unexpected thief attacks.
This is in contrast to 90s CD-ROM adventures, where slideshow loading time and animations were a significant burden on replaying parts of the game. (Sometimes you could skip transition animations, but they were still slow to start.) Walking around the world was slow, and replaying puzzles wasn’t that fast either.
I’ve always thought this was a big reason that “merciful” game design came in for Myst and its imitators.
My attempt to grope towards an explanation – somewhat buried, as is my wont, in an overlong wall of text – was that bit about how in adventure games, I think the player experiences the gameplay and the story as more or less coterminous. Like, in Resident Evil or Dragon Age or what have you, there’s an implicit understanding that the plot is what happens in between combat sequences, so if the rules are different between the two (the age-old “why don’t they just use a Phoenix Down on Aeris” thing), that’s no big deal; with that as the baseline expectation, a little bit of anachronistic knowledge hardly rates, especially if it’s anachronistic knowledge primarily focused on the gameplay layer rather than the story one.
(This is all being incredibly loose about terms like “story”, “plot”, and “narrative”, of course!)
It’s true that there’s a ton of rewinding in narrative-heavy things like visual novels, but 1) since they’re usually choice-based, rewinding to take a different choice usually doesn’t feel like it undermines the story, since even if I’m reloading and deciding not to trust my grand vizier rather than hand them the keys to the kingdom – having had him stab me in the back in my previous, failed playthrough – the mere presentation of the option (which I saw that first time through) means I was already suspicious of him. Plus 2) I think the VN and IF audiences are actually fairly distinct, including an expectation of lawnmowering all possible endings in VN-land, that again make them less vulnerable to story-integrity failures.
Anyway this isn’t to disagree with your thoughts at all, I don’t think this has a monocausal explanation (and just to reiterate, isn’t even universal across the audiences for all the different types of IF, or even all the different sub-audiences for whatever we mean when we say “new school” IF…)
IF development theory can be considered as a combination of computer game development theory, novel development theory and that specific part of theory that emerged from IF-specific elements (such as the parser) over the years. A lot of game development theory is part of IF, if phrased differently, this forum is good for picking up the IF-specific elements, and if you’ve read a lot of fiction, you’ve probably absorbed a fair bit of novel development theory along the way.
The game that got me into IF (Long Live The Queen, which as a visual novel would not have been in Graham Nelson’s mind when he developed the Bill of Rights) has breaches of the Bill of Rights #1 (not to be killed without warning), #3 (to be able to win without experience of past lives) and #4 (to be able to win without knowledge of future events) advertised right there in its blurb as part of the appeal (in different terms, of course). It emphatically broke #2 (not to be given horribly unclear hints) and #5 (not have the game closed off without warning), largely in service of a strongly-presented theme. However, even this complied with the other parts of the Bill of Rights (except #10, which is only relevant to parser games in its stated form), and players were going in expecting to learn by death a lot. It was an IF that worked because it knew what it was doing and why.
The baseball problem in Zork II, having seen the context in this thread, might have breached Rule #16 (not to need to be American to understand hints) but could also be understood as a failure of Rule #2 (Not to be given horribly unclear hints) brought on by equivocation late in development about how, exactly, the puzzle was going to work. It’s a lot easier to correctly clue puzzles if one knows what exactly is being clued.
However, Zork II was built from a mainframe adventure of the same vintage as the original Star Wars; back then, extremely difficult puzzles only a few people could possibly solve were a sign of genius programming, not bad game design. The proportion of people who play old-school IF in order to brag at the student bar about their colossal genius, or to bond with other undergraduate students bored with the course content and wishing to collaborate on something tougher, is rather lower nowadays than it was when Zork II was being developed.
I only started seeing the term “mimesis” about three years ago, although that was when I started reading The Digital Antiquarian (whose author, Jimmy Maher, has definitely read the old theory). All but one of the other IF circles I’m in are a lot newer, and some of them don’t read theory at all. Some source their theory from literary criticism/theory, others from GDC videos and other game development videos (which don’t discuss the concept, from what they’re describing) and a couple expect a concept like mimesis but don’t use that word (either they call it something like “consistency”/“flow” or some longer circumlocution such as “the game has to work in terms of the plot and vice versa” or “Make things make sense!”).
Texts can definitely be mimetic, but they don’t always have to be.
I recently replayed the Sierra Quest for Glory games and the waiting—even with much faster load times—for animations and such could be pretty miserable.
Most VNs can automatically skip all previously viewed text/screens though. Many are pretty painless to get through with very little rereading. They actually fit my (completely idiosyncratic) definition of IF, but they do not require repetition.
Is there? I think a ton of people play Resident Evil and The Last of Us for the story. Their genre is sometimes called “cinematic shooter”. If you find a thread about them on a mainstream gaming site, you may well find that most of the conversations are about the story. I hereby confess: I have followed the Resident Evil community for years. I think that for a lot of players, the gameplay portions of non-IF narrative games are a dynamic, high-stakes component of the narrative, not an interruption of it. Story can motivate a player to continue through challenging portions of the game.
There’s usually an “easy” mode, which caters to some players’ preference for narrative over gameplay (there are many other reasons to play on easy, of course). I think the Baldur’s Gate reissues even have a “story” mode. The Persona series would be another example of games that some play for story rather than between bits of it. Some people just want to see the story. At the opposite end are players who are playing at maximum difficulty for a sense of mechanical achievement. However, such players have likely already seen the story at another difficulty level.
I always play Planescape: Torment on its easiest setting, personally.
I hear you as saying that the text of IF is closer to its story than other genres, and your logic makes sense to me. However, it’s hard to account for games in which story is a significant draw.
E: I would bet that most online discussion of FFVII (1997) is about the story.
I never heard the term over the course of an English BA and a writing MFA. I get the thrust of the essay and am glad that I read it, but ultimately, I don’t agree with it. I think an author can choose to be mimetic or not. It isn’t a universal “good,” though it can be a useful lens to look through.
I appreciate that he calls these “rules of thumb” rather than straight-up rules. I feel that’s more in the spirit of any artistic endeavor.
The “backwards puzzles” observation, for example, doesn’t have to be rigorously followed, but it illuminates a design element that makes puzzles rewarding for players.
This bit in particular seems manifesto-like:
As the story builds, we are pulled into the game and leave the real world behind. As designers, our job is to keep people in this state for as long as possible. …
I have created a set of rules of thumb that will minimize the loss of suspension of disbelief. As with any set of rules, there are always exceptions. In my designs, I hope that if these rules cannot be followed, it is for artistic reasons and not because I am too lazy to do it right.
I think we’re kind of saying the same thing? For many games in other genres, even (especially?) story-heavy ones, I think there’s a disconnect between the plot bits and the gameplay bits – – like, the plot bits tend to involve cutscenes and limited interactivity that’s different from the much more mechanically complex and expressive gameplay bits – and that disconnect is part of the price of entry.
This isn’t to say the story in these games can’t be good, or a draw – just that if there are things that happen in the gameplay that undermine the plot, or vice versa, it’s less of a hurdle to just run with it because the player’s already engaged in a bit of doublethink. The existence of “story” difficulty modes sort of goes along with this separation-- they’re for players who are so into the plot they don’t really want to be bothered with the gameplay.
Whereas for much IF – especially, of course, “newer-school” IF, this separation is nonsensical. What’s Galatea’s plot if you take out the gameplay? Or even Spider and Web’s?
The concept of mimesis was a big deal in IF theory developed in the early 2000s. The article Crimes against Mimesis by Roger S. G. Sorolla uses it to identify the the fiction-breaking elements about old-school IF and its differences with modern IF. The article ties in heavily with the bill of rights.
It can be found in the wonderful (although dated) IF Theory Reader. Here is the IFWiki entry on the book, with a link to a free PDF version:
(EDIT: Note: Although dated because its production was in stasis for a long time while parserIF marched on, and of course because it doesn’t take choiceIF into account, it’s full of worthy insights about how text-games work, should work, how they can/should/could mesh with fiction and the player’s imagination. Also, like The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, it is a work worthy of historical research in itself.) (Ok, I might have gone a bit overboard with that comparison…)
We’re chockfull to the brim with lore, inside jokes, shorthand historical references and cultural idiosyncracies in our cozy little IF niche. There was already an intimidating amount of that when I started around 2005. I remember scouring the internet for IF articles and references to try and make sense of a lot of it and put some seemingly incomprehensible comments/jokes into context.
I can imagine a lot of this stuff comes across as utterly alien to people who stepped in more recently, especially those who are mostly on the choice side of IF. (Many, many of these things are firmly rooted in parser history.)
Again, the IFWiki is a good place to catch up, especially if you follow the internal and external links and let yourself be drawn into the rabbit hole.
Some random topics of ancient lore that pop into my head:
-The magic word XYZZY
-The Babelfish Puzzle
-The Grue
-GET LAMP (see the top prize of ParserComp this year)
-Any jocular response to a thread that starts with “A hollow voice…”
-Floyd
-EDIT: (How could I leave this out?!):" Twisty little passages" and all of its permutations.
Mike, I can understand that this is an IF forum, and that you carefully avoid explaining what do a Phoenix Down and who was Aerith, but I must point that you’re referring not to a spoiler, but to THE SPOILER, (allcaps because is considered the archetypal, and unspeakable, one in JRPG circles), whose changed forever the JRPG narrative.
ON VN, I never understand that “belt and suspenders” thing of having both rewind and reload, but I note that is now a standard in the genre (digression, as Imp, I feel that “undo X turns” (that is, rewinding) should be a legitimate and very useful debug command in IF, because recompiling after bug correcting voids the prior version’s saves)
