Suggested names:
- The Raw Dog Comp
- The Unconstitutional Comp
- The Zero Nelson Comp
- The Piss Up a Rope Comp
- The Chaos Comp
Any others?
(yes it’s 4am and I’m being goofy)
5 Likes
I’d just want some world consistency in games. Arbitrary plot rules like “you can’t interact with the painting until you read the diary” are the worst because the game says “you are not interested in this” and then five minutes after it’s suddenly a critical object.
4 Likes
Oreolek, I have a plot sequencing issue, and for now I kept the consistency giving a rationale for the sequencing, enforced via a blocked passage between rooms, albeit I’m assessing allowing a reverse sequence (and free passage between the pair of rooms)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
1 Like
I may be in the minority here, but if I knew ahead of time that a text adventure followed even half of those rules I would be unlikely to play it.
I think part of the problem is that the term “Interactive Fiction” is too broad for such a set of rules. What applies to a parser based text adventure is not necessarily going to apply to a gamebook, choice based online game and interactive novel.
Also, some of the rules only apply to certain fiction genres. For example, in a game where you are a detective, it would be strange if you didn’t need to examine objects and search for clues.
Personally, I like games to be challenging, when I’m in the mood for that type of game. I also like CYOA books when I’m in a different mood.
What I wouldn’t like is both of those to be so similar to each other that the experience is the same, which would be likely if the authors of them closely followed these restrictions.
9 Likes
I find this to be a very interesting presumption (not trying to be rude 
).
Where do playtesters come from and why do they offer their time? What does an IF author do if he cannot find any?
I suggest that a playtester is someone who volunteers to be a Participant in an Event because it might serve to reinforce a Mythology they maintain about (in this case) Interactive Fiction to the effect that (for example) the best ones remind them of Zork.
That isn’t a criticism from me. It is beneficial to those who (in this example) like Zork because even after decades of time and monumental strides in technology there is still a living Doctrine which unites a Performer (author) and Participant (playtester) in an Event which reinforces the Mythology of Zork.
Those of us who are not seeking to reinforce existing Mythology, but instead are creating new Instruments from the latest Technology, and are practicing to Perform novel works and generate fresh Events - we cannot call upon playtesters.
The best we can hope for is an editor, who will maybe say, “There is a typo here”, or “Don’t kill off that character so soon, I was having fun with it.”
3 Likes
I mean, playtesters come from all around, including here, and have all sorts of reasons for volunteering, including authors swapping testing with each other, but I don’t think there’s too many folks doing so to intentionally enforce conformity with the template laid out by Zork? Like speaking personally, in the past year or so through these boards, I’ve tested a ChoiceScript game based on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a Python game about losing at tic-tac-toe, and a game using concrete poetry to talk about Alzheimer’s, and I hope I for the most part gave those authors feedback based on the design goals and player experience they were going for, rather than telling them they needed more treasure-collection puzzles. And when I’ve recruited testers for my own games – one kind of Infocom-y, the other very much not – I’ve also been really happy with the way they clearly provided feedback aimed at making the games more themselves, rather than trying to use their comments as a gatekeeping mechanism to enforce a narrow view of what IF should be.
This seems super self-defeating to me, I have to say! Sure, if you’re creating a new gameplay experience, as an author you need to do more work to communicate to testers “here’s what I’m trying to do,” so they can tailor their feedback accordingly – and in the absence of that communication, they might default to assuming you’re trying to emulate one of the more familiar models of IF.
But god knows even bog-standard games need testers to work well, so if you feel like you can’t get them because your piece is too inaccessible, the absence of that necessary feedback will basically guarantee that yup, your thing will be inaccessible, potentially reinforcing the false notion that the only way to succeed in IF is to emulate old stuff.
Long story short, I’d really encourage you (and other prospective authors reading this thread) to not psych yourself out and if you need testers, and need them to approach something in a particular way, just ask for that – since I think the image you paint here isn’t really how things actually tend to play out.
16 Likes
Mike, I still owe you thanks for the time you spent looking at something I wrote two years ago, which now I cringe at because of all the basic mistakes I made.
This next part is going to be tricky to say though. Imagine that all the printing presses stopped tomorrow. Why should they? Maybe for reasons around energy consumption and the breakdowns in the supply chain. Is anyone here able confidently to declare that could not be so?
So in that scenario, the future of literature becomes digital, and then we discover very quickly the shortcomings of the traditional (I could say, legacy) frameworks we imagined fit for deployment of Interactive Fiction.
As someone who hesitates to call himself an author I have to tell you I do not have the privilege of access to anyone I could regard as a tester.
Late for work? As a commuter you need to buy a faster car.
2 Likes
That’s what the beta testing category is for: Beta Testing Requests and Discussion - The Interactive Fiction Community Forum Everyone has access to that! Now I don’t know if everyone is always successful at obtaining beta testers, you do have to write your request well and give enough time before you plan to publish.
7 Likes
When you are ready, I will 100% test your thing! And as Dannii says, the forum here is a great way to get folks – I was blessed with some awesome testers two years ago before I even did much posting on this board – and I’m sure you’ll get at least a couple more people interested in checking out and supporting what you’re working on.
4 Likes
I can’t see why this scenario would particularly expose problems with IF. I mean, I know a lot of people who already read all their books digitally, and I don’t think they see it as a particularly different experience than a printed book. Can you elaborate on this statement?
4 Likes
Most of the people I know don’t read books at all. So yeah, not much different from not reading them digitally.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s the safest way to avoid hearing people complain about this or that shortcoming of your game. Literally no-one likes that. It’s hard to stomach and even harder to resist
the urge to tell them off for not getting the point.
As you wrote, testers will tend to defend their own aesthetic preferences and can therefore not add anything to your creation. Indeed, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere already, you can never be sure they don’t have other, more sinister motives for their criticism.
I think you have a great advantage in that, as you wrote, there are but few people in your social circle who read. This will spare you any criticism from that corner, too, and leave you free to pursue your vision to perfection.
It can also be a question of community. You have to get lucky, though. I gather there are places on the vast plains left and right of the mainstream information superhighway where kind spirits dwell who are not judgemental and will accept you and your work without any of the oppressive expectations you can sense lurking between the lines of some of the comments here.
Seriously, though: get your stuff tested by the most thorough testers you can find. Fix the bugs they find and follow their editing suggestions. Do it again. You can find such people easily on this forum.
4 Likes
Pen, meet paper.
Quill, meet inkwell.
Chisel, meet rock.
2 Likes
This is really not a healthy way to think about playtesting. There’s a reason that IFComp strongly, strongly recommends that you get some playtesting before you release your game.
Of course nobody likes hearing about problems with their game. Programmers hate getting bug reports too. But it’s a part of the process. Iif you refuse to listen, you will fail to learn things that you need to know.
Important: the playtester may be wrong about what the problem with your game is! This is very common! You don’t have to follow their suggestions. You do have to think about why they had the experience they did. That way, when the next player runs into the same thing, you can at least say “I did it that way on purpose” rather than “I didn’t know the game did that.”
By the way, literature has playtesters too, and for exactly the same reason. They’re called “beta readers”. Many books these days have an author’s afterword where they thank the beta readers.
4 Likes
Oh, you were kidding. Well, just making sure! :)
It’s still true that you don’t have to follow the testers’ suggestions though. Playtesters (and beta readers) are often wrong about how to solve a problem. They’re usually right that there is a problem, though.
8 Likes
Yes, one of the most important things I’ve learned in my career is that testers are usually right about a problem existing, and usually wrong about what the problem is. This lesson is more about software testing where the users might not have any programming experience and won’t usually be critiquing the prose—as opposed to here, where many IF enthusiasts have tried their hand at writing as well as playing and prose is everywhere—but I think the first part still holds. Even if the tester doesn’t always know what’s wrong, they’re very good at finding that something is wrong. “I don’t understand at all what’s going on” is valuable feedback even if it doesn’t tell you specifically what to change!
3 Likes
Play testers in IF can totally mess with you’re head if you let them. You have to maintain your vision or you get an ending like the one in Cattus Atrox (I succumbed to pressure to “add more”).
You were just supposed to die. No girl. No second man. No orgy. No lion pit.
2 Likes
Definitely. An extreme case of this is, in Actual Real Life ™, I’ve had people I dislike tell me What My Problem Is and even give misleading advice how to fix it. But then I realized I could do better for people who could stand me, or people I could actually stand, which made more people happier, longer. Well, I hope.
Though another wrinkle on this is: sometimes testers think something is a small problem when, in fact, it exposed a big problem, one very interesting and worth fixing. It feels good as a programmer when I’m paying attention, or when as a tester the programmer says they got a lot of mileage out of a small idea. It makes me feel good to know that testing’s about more than just checking off boxes.
And some of the best observations I’ve had have been along the lines of “you probably can’t do this, but it’d be neat if…”
4 Likes
Another wrinkle - there are two types of beta-testing you probably want to do when you get serious:
Ideally you want experienced IF players to test so they can tell you exactly what you are doing wrong and constructively assist - even better if they are also an author in your system of choice and can sometimes even look at the code.
Whenever possible, you also should try it out on at least a couple “civilians” - either newer IF players or complete beginners just to see how the game will bounce off a person who has no preconceived ideas of convention so you realize subtler things like “oh they can’t even get past the title screen because I forgot a click to continue message…” “I need to tutorialize that they can click the inventory button or the status screen button…”
4 Likes
Clicked “archive” by accident instead of “reset bump date”, luckily it was undo-able…