Old school adventures, new school IF, and player's bill of rights

Playing IF Reviews and Essays
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Quite possibly, MIke. In truth, I think there have been some twists and turns since we first began. This is likely my fault, since I am so easily distracted.

Ultimately the issue (now many posts ago) was that I characterized a contemporary player’s dislike of failure and repetition in IF as a process issue, while I understood your comments as being about the nature of IF as a medium. We can both be right; neither of us made a case that completely excludes the other’s.

As a side note, I think people forgive the Aeris moment not because of genre expectations, but because the game earns their forgiveness. We are talking about Final Fantasy VII after all, not Final Fantasy XIII (sorry! I can’t help it). As an IF parallel: it is like the near-universal tendency to forgive Wishbringer for penalizing wishing in a game about a magical wishing stone. A good game can get away with a lot! I also think IF audiences often undermine story (licking doorknobs, kissing creatures and things), and they can enjoy it as long as it is not repetitive. Lots of players set out to troll the parser; that is part of the fun for some of us.

In a general conversation on Twitter about the IF community’s resistance to repetition and death, I found myself jealous of Baf’s reply, which was as succinct as my posts have been discursive: “Mainly I think it’s because IF is about revelation, not execution. In most genres of game, replay lets you exercise hard-won mastery, and there’s pleasure in that. But most IF doesn’t feature mastery of that sort.”

I think we’ve just been using two different lenses, and that has naturally amplified and/or diminished different facets of video game experiences. I do see how some players might dislike disruptions that call attention to the “videogaminess” of IF, even if I am one of those weirdos who kept playing Suspended until he got the best score.

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43

Couldn’t have said it better. Pleasing a plurality surely is harder to achieve. If you consider the so-called old-school fraction, you likely don’t want to take the most “artsy” approach which you find in many modern IF titles these days, while you won’t please everyone in the IF scene with a Scott Adams style old-school adventure game or a Quill’ed game as it was common in the vibrant UK text adventure scene. While my fanbase is mostly rooted in the old-school scene, I aim with my efforts to strike a happy medium (Rabenstein was an exception). But without considering my own work, there are plenty of great examples out there that it can be done, like Unhallowed. And yes, the game will even run on a ZX Spectrum Unhallowed by Blerkotron.

@mathbrush I think the “Bill of Rights” serves its purpose but I have to admit it’s the first time I see it. Many of the points that Graham mentions here though are “no-brainers” to me. So I kinda adopted them without knowing about their existence in a written manifesto.

When I design games, even considering the retro / old-school scene, I actually want to create an idealized version of an unexisting 1980s memory. Hibernated aims not to be an Infocom-style game. It aims to be an idealized version of an Infocom-style game. The reason behind this is an effect that is pretty easy to observe with yourself. If you played video games in the 80s, there surely is a bunch of games that you enjoyed so much that you still remember them vividly. If you go back to these games after more than 30 years, you sometimes feel a certain disillusionment when you realize that the game actually is not as great as you remember it. On one hand we have an idealized memory, on the other hand the memory was shaped by my 80s-self, which is not who I am today. So even though I enjoy becoming nostalgic and taking a walk down memory lane, my current self is spoiled by modern game design concepts. So you want to meet at least some of our modern era expectations like. Here are a few of the rules I made for myself:

  • You cannot die.
  • You can control how much of the game you consume.
  • The level of difficulty is moderate.
  • Puzzles need to make sense.
  • It’s more about experiencing a story rather than drowning the player in frustration.
  • No grinding.
  • No dead ends.

Not letting the player die is more of a personal preference. When I look back at the games I played, I enjoyed many of the point and click adventures and I always liked those more where you were not able to die. A good comparsion is Lucasfilm Games vs. Sierra On-Line.

In an era where Netflix shapes our consumption with on-demand services, people expect to be able to dose their level of consumption for your game. The most obvious way to make sure the player is able to do so is allowing the player to save / restore anytime.

A moderate difficulty makes sense. Back in the day you wanted to market your game with many hours of gameplay and of course you wanted to sell Invisiclues. None of this applies to me and generally it’s good to make a game not to easy as the player might get bored, on the other hand not hard for the player becoming frustrated so that in the worst case scenario he/she won’t complete the game. If this happens it is not a good thing for anyone, not for you, not for the player.

Unlogical puzzles are a frustration for everyone, I don’t think this needs further explanation.

Rather experiencing a story than drowning the player in puzzles is personal preference. I tend to place a resonable amount of puzzles that go hand in hand with the story’s progression.

“No grinding” actually comes from my experience with old-school games. I always hated the X THIS and X THAT concept. It’s okay to examine objects in the room description to get an extra portion of depth and immersion, in fact you should do so in terms of realism, but it should be an optional thing. If you want the player to interact with an object, make it obvious and if it’s hidden from the view at least point the player in the right direction with a subtle hint in the room description. Another form of grinding from my perspective would be something like this:

> TAKE LAMP
The oil lamp is on top of the cabinet and you can't reach it.

> CLIMB CHAIR
You climb on the chair.

> TAKE LAMP
You try to reach for the oil lamp but you're too far away from it. 

> MOVE CHAIR
You move the chair in front of the cabinet. 

> CLIMB CHAIR
You climb the chair.

> TAKE LAMP
You now have the oil lamp.

While a concept as this still might be a thing today I have to admit that I don’t like this at all. If you would be the protagonist on the game and you’d want that lamp you certainly would climb the chair anyway to get it.

And no dead ends is a no brainer. There’s nothing more frustrating than an adventure game where you forced yourself in a dead end state, either by bug or by design choice of the author.

Just my two cents as usual.

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44

I vividly remember that one. I played the German version of the game and I literally had no idea why you would use the monkey on that location to progress. It made no sense.

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45

The wording of rule 16 is unfortunate, but I think the lesson is “don’t assume that your players come from the same cultural framework”. I fell afoul of this with Alias 'The Magpie’, when I assumed that everyone would know what a cucumber frame was. I was forgetting that many people come from climates where a small greenhouse is unnecessary for the cultivation of cucumbers. In the post-comp release I added a detailed description so that players from any background could visualise it.

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46

Well, here I would like to disagree. Certainly, wild searching is not such a nice game element (although it’s fair to say that exactly this pointless item searching has given rise to its own game genre, which is far more successful today than interactive fiction), but this game element remains a matter of taste, as perhaps do mazes (which I actually hate like the plague). Nevertheless, one should be aware that grinding elements are likely to scare away players.

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47

The VN thing of having rewind/rollback and reload is because they tend to get used in different circumstances. Rewind/rollback for when needing to re-read something missed or immediately realise the choice was bad, reload for when realising the thing not understood or badly-chosen was actually four hours ago. Part of the reason it became standard in the genre is because the tools for both are built into the standard tools for creating VN.

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48

Also, I reeeeaaaaally like to make detailed, interactive rooms, even if it has nothing to do with a puzzle. I like rooms that live a little.

So in my style of game, you absolutely need to have objects missing from the main room description, and use X to find them, because otherwise you’d get a 3-page room description when you walk in. It’s less of a “gameplay mechanic” and more like how a visual game has all these little objects and details, but there’s a big light at the end highlighting a key, which is what you’re in the room for.

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49

I had to reply to this thread eventually. Disclaimer: Dee, I picked your post because of a word you used plentifully, and that’s where I thought I’d start. Nothing in what follows is intended to oppose anything you say here.

That word was Community. I would like to know what that means. It is one of the words I try to avoid, by the way. Another word I try to avoid is should.

The best way I can bring myself to make peace with this word is to whisper after it, “of practice”.
In other words, you are in a community by means of what you currently do. When you change what you do, maybe you become part of a different community. But then it is up to you to locate it. That can require some legwork. And since we excuse all sorts of behaviour by saying, “You do you”, today the socially permissible minimum size for a community is actually and regularly 1.

What is the size of the IF community? In this year 2022, does it exceed two thousand?

I have never heard of anyone writing down rules for printed fiction, to declare that they would read no book that did not conform to them. And how would you know? You’d have to go through it first.

So why this fixation on purity (however you might define it)?
Anyone today who wishes to experience Interactive Fiction, whatever that is, has to take the good with the bad. No rights exist. It happens to you. And you should deal with it.

Damn. There’s that word again.

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50

One of the things IF does well is allowing extremely detailed set-design and environmental storytelling - “museum games”. I counter that examining things is certainly an IF game mechanic, and if players can’t examine items mentioned in the description in any consistent fashion they get fussy.

It’s like non-clickable scenery in graphical games. I need to cut a wire and there’s a knife in the kitchen, but the game won’t let me even touch it because that’s just scenic detail even though that would be a logical thing to do. Discounting EXAMINE basically puts the player in a situation where they’re just walking past painted 2D sets and can only pick up the one thing that isn’t in the room description.

Plus it sort of mimics how things work. You walk through a room, you see desk, chair, lamp. You stop in a room and examine the desk closer and you then notice drawers not obvious on a first glance. Normal humans don’t grok everything about a location just by standing there. You gotta EXAMINE CARPET to find the loose corner that hides the key.

I’d venture EXAMINE is the major game mechanic in IF since it’s how you get more text about a text. If you can’t examine, you might as well be reading a book.

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51

My musings on communities were something that came to mind in response to @mathbrush’s point about different IF conventions arising among different groups. I absolutely agree that it can be a very transitory thing, but I still think it’s a helpful way to think about it - I know that I tend towards certain things in my own work because they are conventional among my own ‘community/ies’ (by which I don’t mean a closed or unchangeable group of people - both the membership and culture of communities are usually quite fluid in my experience).

I also don’t think there should be ‘rules’ for IF (I think this thread probably demonstrates that nobody would agree on them!) but I don’t really see the ‘rights’ under discussion as rules - maybe others feel differently, but for me they’re just helpful things to consider when authoring.

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There are ton of rules, not for reading fiction, but for writing.

The hero’s journey, three-act structure, save the cat.

The romance sub genre has a lot of unspoken rules (like a central love story and optimistic ending, according to google).

Stories without these things exist, but people still debate these things and talk about them and make videos like “3 essentials when writing stories.” And I’ve found some of them useful!

And there are some for what to read, like “movie and game novelizations are bad and not worth reading” or “I won’t read a book where a dog dies”.

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And also, certain genres have rules that fans of the genre will be upset if you break. If you write a whodunit and reveal at the end that the victim spontaneously combusted with no further explanation or hinting at that fact, fans of the genre will be understandably annoyed.

Certainly, nobody is forcing you at gunpoint to follow those rules, and publishing houses won’t blacklist you if you break them. They’re not “laws” in that sense. But if the point is to have people read and appreciate your work, you don’t want to alienate your intended audience.

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I should mention as an aside that my original post wasn’t intended to say that the Bill of Rights are good rules; instead, I was positing it as a major source of current IFComp culture through trickle-down traditions, and might explain the difference between new-school games and old school games (which many people openly prefer).

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Oh my gosh, I see this kind of behavior all the time, especially with movie adaptations of books, or new writers taking over old franchises. I myself will not read any more Jack Reacher books since the brother took over writing them, because I heard Reacher got a cell phone and that IS NOT OK. And I was SO UPSET at the first installment of The Hobbit films that I didn’t see the others. I even messily broke up with Peter Jackson and I’m super annoyed that he doesn’t know about it.

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The Bill isn’t a prohibition against non-compliant games. At least, I’m not aware of it making such an argument.

It’s just one critic’s idea of ways to avoid frustrating players or jerking them around. The intended audience consists of authors, not players (though it has interested many players of the years). It’s not so different from many texts on poetics or craft writing in writing studies. Considering IF as a field of writing with its own craft considerations, I’m surprised that there aren’t more documents like it or iterating upon it. The fact of its existence is not so unusual.

Over the course of an MFA, students will hear many suggestions on best practices and widely held aesthetics. Students in turn can decide what to take or leave. The Bill of Rights functions in a similar way.

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It can be even more formal. I was once a fly-on-the-wall in a Facebook group where several romance authors were comparing their publishing contracts. Some had stipulations such as “a minimum of four fully-rendered sex acts” and “no more than two implied sex scenes.”

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@Stefan_Hoffmann And it’s absolutely fine to disagree. What I shared here reflects my personal preference and might not be compatible with the tastes of other people. I should mention that I have this element in my games as well, the only difference is that I give a subtle hint, so that you don’t have to examine pointless to get further, at least if you carefully read what’s on the screen. As so often, it’s the dose that makes the poison.

Mazes in adventure games are the proof that we are ready for the apocalypse. May the four horseman come and judge us for our sins.

@tundish I cannot tell you about the actual size but what I can tell you is that Hibernated has been downloaded more than 15.000 times on itch, so my assumption is that it’s much bigger. What needs to be mentioned though is that the game may be played on more than 30 retro systems as well, so that the majority of those who downloaded it are rooted in the retro scene, which I consider an ecosystem on its own.

@HanonO I absolutely agree here. It adds so much to the depth and immersion of a game, so I make use of this myself. I just disklike the general concept of uncovering like four items in every room once you examine the environment. But again, it’s just personal preference. If you do that on a few occassions, your carpet is a good example, you’re fine, if you make it a central element of your game design, it might be too much, I would even say too old-school’ish, at least that’s my personal perspective. I really believe it’s the dose that makes the poison. And just to clarify: yes, I do uncover new items and more scenery once you start examining the environment in my games, but I try to give subtle hints so that you can progress very well if you pay close attention. Never heard of the term “museum games” before but I actually like it.

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60

I could sign that.
Maybe this would be the more general rule here: Strongly repetitive game actions should always be able to be avoided by attentive reading or thinking along. Only those who leave their brain switched off while playing (which is a serious mistake) have to grind.

Well, yes, the only thing that can save us is that they don’t find us in the maze.

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You would think the player’s bill of rights is mostly common sense, wouldn’t you? Then again it took a couple of decades to work out. I’m sure there are a number of reasons for that. One of them being that these rules are all too easy to break for an author without meaning to.
Let’s say your playtesters are complaining about…
…a missing synonym: They’re nitpicking! No true scotsman would ever use such wording.
…a tedious action: The lazy swine! You’re providing this for free, toiling away for months, yet they have the temerity to complain about having to spend ten seconds longer.
…a difficult puzzle: They really expect to be spoonfed, don’t they? They had no problem hitting their head against the wall with the Infocom crazyness. And anyway, you weren’t thinking you’d have to provide for total fools.
…an under-implemented entity: Yeah, you were just winging it there, but it’ll do, It’ll do!
…incomprehensible writing: Style is just a matter of different tastes, in the end. You like it the way it is and you’re going to keep it that way.

Everyone knows it’s not advisable to always react to criticism in this way, but you are surely entitled to make allowances for your own taste from time to time. Well, in a longer game, it kind of adds up.

Note that all of the above, being obvious cases, could be overcome by disciplined writing. It is however, perfectly possible to overlook things you’d need to improve nevertheless because you, as the author, know what you expect the player to do while writing, whereas they have to figure it out while playing.

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The more I read this thread, the more I’m inclined to create a new comp where the only rule is you have to break every rule in Graham’s list.

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