I’m working on an IF piece with a lot of “found” material. I’ve been trying to switch up the styles in both writing and visual design to reflect the various genres of stuff the reader comes across. There’s a section where you can read a lot of emails, and one has an attachment. Would it be bad to make it an actual PDF? I’m thinking it could break immersion to have to go to a different tab (desktop) or application (mobile) to read part of the game. But maybe it would be MORE immersive? What do you think of including a PDF document as part of an IF piece?
Congratulations! You’ve invented the feelie.
Seriously, there’s a long tradition of doing exactly this, largely because computers back in the day didn’t have the memory for all the additional lore and illustrations. Using a PDF is just fine.
It would annoy me having to go to a website, probably not hugely, but maybe enough that I wouldn’t feel like continuing the game.
There’s also the future playability aspect, websites can easily disappear in 5 or 10 years time, and then the game becomes unfinishable.
EDIT: having the document come with the game is okay.
As everyone know, a WIP of mine is so full of lore that will be released with appropriate feelies, trouble is, integrating the feelies with the story without raising to the old-timers the bad aftertaste of copy protection (aside avoiding spoilers…)
of course, IMO the best handling of feelie(s) is bundling with the story file(s) in a .zip/.tar.gz
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
this is a feelie as people said, and is great. but i’d consider packaging it with the piece (if it’s on itchio, include it in the downloads, if it’s on ifarchive, include it in a .zip) instend of on a separate website. as andrewj said, link rot/websites going down is a real thing.
Sorry, I don’t think I worded my question right. I want to link to the pdf file in-game, as part of the game, and include it in the game file if possible. It would be a contract that you as a player would have to agree or disagree to sign (so, not auxiliary/augmenting to the game experience like many feelies, but central to it. Or maybe I’m underestimating feelies? I thought their whole thing was that they are a physical object?).
From a user interface perspective though, I’m worried that this might make the text less accessible to screen readers or cause problems for people who might not have pdf readers on mobile (or who don’t like switching their attention from the interactive fiction “page” and this pdf file that popped up). Maybe this isn’t as big a deal anymore? I remember that ten years ago, I would avoid reading pdfs on my phone because I didn’t have a good pdf reader on it, but I guess it’s included in most web browsers nowadays.
Could you “fake” that contract it in-game? Bureacracy fakes a decent form in the beginning, and Arrival, or Attack of the B-Movie Clichés does a very good impression of a non-interactive web-site at one point. Screen-reader-wise, I do see the potential complications. Some authors ask the player whether they are using a screen-reader, and adapt accordingly. May be the best solution.
Some players don’t even like having to be tethered to the internet to play a game, so that’s already a potential issue for the “link” thing. Apart from link rot.
Feelies that are central to the game experience are essentially Infocom-level feelies. You can call it copy-protection, or you can call them an extra part of the game that happens to be outside of the game file. You can always even password protect a pdf if you like, and display the password at a specific point in your game.
They used to be, but well, time moved on. 
We’re not going to see another Wishbringer stone, but a Wishbringer-style letter is definitely doable and immersive.
It would certainly be a friction point, even if a low friction one. Maybe most players will just switch back and carry on, but some would definitely just stop at that point, having been taken out of the game.
My question is, what does an actual PDF offer that a “fake” in-game PDF doesn’t? I can’t think of much in the way of look and feel that you can’t just emulate with HTML, and if you keep it in-game, then your game can actually know if they signed it or not.
I’m just assuming this is a question about parser games, since systems like twine can do what pdfs can and may even be preferable in a lot of cases. The standard parser interpreter, though… not so much.
I believe @Draconis 's web-hosted games open separate html files containing hints. As far as I know, those files are local to the game (ie, on the relative path where the game file is hosted). Perhaps they can say whether similarly localized PDF files could be linked as well.
Inform has no ready means of doing this, so far as I know.
As a player: I love feelies and encourage you (and everyone else!) to make them.
As an author: I enjoy making feelies and adding extra texts in games, and have done a lot of both. Because of the analytics at itch.io, I know that a non-trivial number of people play Repeat the Ending without downloading its feelie. I think this is more or less normal, and not about my game. I don’t say this to discourage you! In fact, I encourage you to think of your ideal audience, the kind of people interested in your work, and to make what you make for them.
Yeah, Dialog (or rather the Å-machine) lets you include arbitrary “resources” (files) along with the game, and have links that open them in a new tab. I haven’t gotten any complaints about that personally.
Oh yeah, that’s right, I forgot the obvious - a game that allows you to embed images pretty much has the feelies in-built. It’s not the same… but you won’t really get a “feelies” experience anyway unless you print the things, these days.
Which, trust me on this, can be absolutely worth it, by the way.
nah, I’m just a basic girl working in Twine! It looks like I’ll be able to include a pdf file in a zip like other people were mentioning. I like the idea of players using a pdf interface as well as the one I create for regular text stuff.
Well if you are working in Twine it will just open the PDF in a new browser tab (make sure you specify target="_blank" in the link or it will open in the same tab).
I still think you’d be better off with a “fake PDF” in Twine, but you should be able to use a real PDF easily enough
I saw The Corsham Witch Trial mentioned as a game that makes extensive use of external documents… none of which are accessible anymore. 
YIkes! I remember playing that. That certainly underscores the importance of using files and archives instead of online documents.
It’s too bad; I think I liked it.
I’m confused about this. If the pdf is a separate, real pdf, twine has 0 way of tracking if it was signed or not. i don’t know how you’d make it central. Unless you’re thinking of adding a choice that says “did you sign the pdf”, or thinking to approach it like the body writing in With Those We Love Alive (ie just take their word for it as part of the experience)…but it’s a big assumption as to whether players will engage with that approach as “central” or not.
you could do the same thing with a fake pdf in game and probably keep the tracking.
+1 for putting the PDF in the archive downloaded with the game. Back in the day, a big part of the joy of getting a new game was to open the box and see all the cool stuff inside. I’m a little sad that modern kids don’t get that; today, when you buy a video game, there’s no physical collectables as part of the experience. Yeah, sure, it makes distribution a whole lot easier… but it makes me sad, too. It’s the sort of thing that’s now kind of reserved for “special editions” of a game and likely will be sold at a premium The last time I tried to get a special edition of a game with some feelies I was excited about, scalpers made sure I’d never get a copy.
If I’m really excited about a new (digital) game, I might still print out some feelies so I can have them handy as I play. Crud, with 3d printers becoming increasingly common as household devices, you could include an STL with your game, too.
yeah, there’s a link to the contract and then a separate choice on the passage! I like it because it encourages you to do the same thing you’d do with any contract… skim through it and make the decision you were going to make anyway! But if you do read it, you’ll know a lot more about the body modification process you’re signing up for… begin hype for IFComp game
I do remember finding it frustrating and distracting in Corsham Witch Trial to keep having to tab over to external documents, but in that case there were a lot of them and you were expected to read them thoroughly, so it might be less of an obstacle if it’s just the one document and you’re in fact trying to incentivize people to scroll through it quickly and get back to the game.
I put a multi-page PDF in this Inform 7 game, but as converted images rather than the original PDF: Daddy's Birthday - IFWiki (type WALKTHROUGH). I imagine it would be even easier using Twine.