Parchment transcripts from IFComp

While I don’t have any scientific data to back this up, I’ve presented IF in enough public contexts now that I’ve seen hundreds, maybe even close to a thousand, non-IF people interact with IF. And in my anecdotal experience, I can say that lack of interest is not the problem for most people.

By far the most common reaction is something like “This seems really cool, but I can’t figure out how to make it work.”

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Sorry for the (second) intermission, but…

I’ve been trying a game lately (one I should have been betatesting but, to my fault, I didn’t due to the Comp being in the way) which was really good imo, but in which the fourth wall was crushed every other turn. It kept “annoying” me with outputs more aimed at one who never saw an IF in his life and, yes, was more a teenager than a devote fan. Those brackets soon got to my nerves. To the point that my transcript contains, at some point, “grrrr. can we drop these messages asap, please??”.

Now I understand there is a NOVICE OFF command and that is fair. Funny that a routine for the newcomers got to the point of being a guess the verb for me who finished The Hobbit 25 years ago. [emote]:)[/emote]

What I’m trying to say is: Ok I understand everything about the topic, and I trust Aaron’s experience above mine.
But: i.e., isn’t the default hint menu in EmShort extension enough for newcomers to know how to play a game? I don’t mean that should be the ONLY way to approach the matter but I neatly prefer it. “To play IF you can LOOK at things, GO directions or even N/W/E etc” isn’t a nice and straightforward way to put people on tracks by itself?

I feel like Smarter parser is trying to achieve more than this. Especially when deciding what the player meant or something like that. It tries to avoid the guess the verb at all, which imo sounds like a gargantuan task. One hardly we will ever accomplish. In the end, IF IS about guessing the verb, even when doing the easiest things (“I’ve found an egg. What now? Shall I EAT it? BREAK it? WARM it?”)

I’m not sure I’ve made myself clear. Before answering anything, convince yourself I’m not trying to lecture or assault anyone [emote]:)[/emote]

It would be great, but this is 2011. Nobody ever reads the manual. Nobody expects that they’ll have to. Most games don’t even come with a proper manual any more. Gamers generally expect to be able to jump into the game and learn through play, or at the very least to have a shiny tutorial game*. The main exceptions I can think of are the kind of open-ended indie games – big roguelikes, Minecraft, complicated strategy sims – where you know you’re going to be playing for a long time, so the time required to learn stuff is trivial relative to total play time. (This was also true, to some extent, of the first generation of IF players.) And if this is true of gamers, what do you do about non-gamers?

  • I’m sure this has been discussed before, but: a pre-made IF tutorial game accessible from a first-screen choice wouldn’t be an awful idea. Although it wouldn’t be simple to just drop into an existing work. But it could serve the function of keeping newbie stuff out of the faces of experienced players, and impart information in a more engaging way than RTFM.)

Yeah, point taken.
Well, I know you are right. But, just for the sake of discussion – I believe IF to be a “harder” media than the average iPhone game. I understand the audience is probably the same (as in: everybody), though… it’s like reading a book. It’s not like watching a movie, isn’t it? It takes time. And passion. And patience.

But, as I said: yeah, you are right.

I love the idea of a tutorial in the main menu. As in most of the games nowadays, just a few steps in which to direct the newcomer. After all, IF takes LESS than Modern Warfare 3 to be fully grasped.

As Doc Manhattan once said: “I think I’ll create some.”

On the topic of default stuff – actually I suspect the amount of default content could muddy the waters for newcomers.

My understanding of why IF games come with instructions which aren’t actually for that particular game, but are a (relatively) vague attempt to hit something from all IF games (EG Andrew Plotkin’s card, Emily Short’s extension) is that we’re all doing this off our own backs, not for money (mostly!), not in teams, and not everyone has the time, skills or even interest or desire to produce specific help & instructions for their game.

That can make sense if you pitch your game at people in the know already. But all the accessibility talk is related to pitching games to people not in the know. What other genre of game out there comes with a generic slip saying something like ‘In most FPSes, this button is shoot, jumping might work if you press this button, usually you aim with this stick.’? Etc. Even if you think few people read instructions, new games comes with instructions for that game, and any tutorial and help content will be for that game only.

Given how unfamiliar the parser can be per se, having default instructions is obviously better than none, but it’s obviously not as good as having specific instructions, and can potentially add to querulousness when they have to impart a message along the lines of ‘try some of these things, they might work in the game you’re playing.’

Btw, I don’t intend this as any kind of attack on the card or Emily Short’s help extensions. They’ve helped with a zillion games that would otherwise have no help content. I’m just pointing to an issue concerning specificity of instructions for IF games in general that I don’t know if people have talked about before.

No, I completely agree, and encourage people to customize the messages. The intent at least with my stuff was always to give people something they could tweak to suit their particular game, which would be a little easier than starting from scratch.

That said, I increasingly think that it’s necessary, accessibility-wise, to have an explicitly tutorial opening that teaches people the essential commands as they play. That’s what pretty much every other kind of game does these days. Walls of text are overwhelming and unattractive. I also think that if you ask people if they want to play on easy mode, or whether they want instructions, half the time they will say no even though they need those instructions. That’s why I’ve gone over to prefacing instructional content with “have you played interactive fiction before?”, a factual question I feel they’re less likely to lie about directly, and turn off the tutorial if they answer yes.

Careful, though, what you"re communicatingto your players. If you give them a tutorial explaining exactly how this game is played, that is what they will understand: These are instructions for this game. How much time would you think the average newcomer would be willing to spend learning to play a random IF Comp sized game?

Telling them “this is how you play this game and a couple of thousand more”, on the other hand, might make it worth the effort learning these basics.

That is irony incarnate.

In that case, I suggest adding an introduction (interactive, maybe) to the Comp’s site, rather than in all of the games. A big red button before the download, saying “click here if you haven’t played IF before”.

Now that I think about it, wall of texts, instructions and tutorials (all the xtras that don’t shout “this is the main game and just the main game”) are very likely skipped. By anyone. Take the game The Guardian by Lutein Hawthorn. It had feelies. Not even experienced players looked at those feelies. Half the story was in there, 90% of the people missed it.

So, on one hand we have people who will not read the hint menu.
On the other, imagine strolling through a dozen or more (38!) tutorials all alike for a dozen (38!) games who differ just for the ability to PUSH CLIFF or not to PUSH CLIFF.
If we had a third hand (and I hope none of you do), in there would fit people so lost to the parser as to try and use it as a web browser.
The eventual fourth hand would hold people that won’t go in a game other than by the game itself, skipping all the extras.

This is a mess.

Sorry.

I don’t think this is a good example because this didn’t happen because of a lack of interest in feelies. Lutein hit a specific problem - I would say he made a mistake (or an oversight - he might have failed to tick or untick a box) concerning a thing that I thought might happen if I let my game be played online… that it would become detached from its feelies. That did happen for The Guardian, so for people playing online, there was no sign initially that feelies existed. Then on the IFComp website, the gblorbs and such were available on their own, again detached from the feelies. So that’s the kind of thing all authors have to be wary of, and probably a logistical improvement that IFComp should look into next year.

In such a scenario, I expect you’d play one game with tutorial mode, hopefully get the idea, then you might play one more game with tutorial mode, or just proceed to leaving tute mode off from then on. I don’t think anyone’s advocating forcing tutorial mode to be on in every game. You can just ask the player.

Some people will never read anything extra-curricular, but it’s not really worth worrying about them. Just concentrate on making sure people who will or might read stuff are given the opportunity to do so when it’s relevant. Obviously not every game has to be for everyone or do things the same way. But if you’ve got feelies or instructions and do want people to read them, you have to do what you can as an author to encourage that to happen with your game.

A big red button to click first might be a good idea. Apparently IFComp does draw at least some non-IF people every year based on what some people have said about the online transcripts they got back. A tutorial would definitely help get new people oriented, but it would have to be IF also (not static text), and it would have to be fun-- short, merciful, VERY robust in responding logically to user input, not fiddly, no custom verbs, no excessively purple prose, no maudlin/angsty story-line, and focused on having the player learn by doing instead of throwing walls of explanatory text at them.

We don’t need yet another static-text article about “how to play IF”. There are several of those already, and it’s not reasonable to expect a player to have to read so much before starting to have fun and play.

That means I can’t be doing the job [emote]:)[/emote]

But yes, I mean a very fast, very easy tutorial IF.
I’m working on it. Will show something for you all to put straight in no time.

Wow, you’re an asshole!

I almost never read supplemental materials until after I’ve played the game, and then only if I liked the game fairly well.

If I’m playing an IF game, that’s what I’ve signed on for: it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m interested in the author’s static fiction or art or whatnot. I think it’s reasonable to assume that all crucial information will be delivered within the game, and that supplemental materials will be supplemental. If I like a game enough that I want more, I’ll look at feelies. If I’m unimpressed by the game, I’m not going to waste my time on them.

The design assumption that feelies will be experienced before the game is a holdover from the Infocom days, when it made sense: when you opened the box, you could read the leaflets and fondle the whatsits more immediately than you could load up the game. For moderns, this isn’t the case: the files are all equally accessible (or the reverse: my IF terps load a lot faster than my PDF viewer.)

Eh? I’m confused.

Seems like there’s confusion and misunderstanding both ways: It looks like you’re saying that it’s ironic that it’s Emily who discredits walls of text, implying that the irony is that she herself made the extension that’s basically a collection of walls of text (and/or that she tends to write games that are too wordy). You probably wanted to say, instead of specifically pointing at a single person, that it’s ironic that text is undesired in the context of text-only games in general.

At least I hope this is the case. I’ve been known to misinterpret things.

Just a note: I’m working on some major updates to Smarter Parser and related extensions taking into account the feedback here, but this is not reflected in the updates that just were posted on the I7 Extensions page, which were older fixes I hadn’t submitted until recently.

But I am listening to the feedback, and future updates will definitely take advantage of it.

Hehe, putting the floppy in the computer and turning it on was not a big deal. 8-bit computers may have had loading times, but they had no startup time and no hard drives and no fans or anything that had to power up. They booted up way faster than 16 bit computers, often instantly. I speak from experience [emote]:)[/emote]

My point was about the author taking responsbility for what they’re doing, not about people’s habits. If Lutein was dead set on having that feelie, with you personally, he’s not gonna succeed no matter what he does. If he doesn’t tell you to read it, you won’t read it. If he tells you to read it at the start of the game, you’ve said you won’t read it. Basically, you’re not gonna read it til after, which with this game, was too late. In that sense, you’re one of the players I would say he can’t worry about.

On the other hand, if he wants to scoop up such players - who as you say, are the majority - he’d move the feelie content into the game. But then in his case, it potentially becomes a wall of text issue. And you lose all the aesthetics of the feelie. If we keep viewing it from all these bad things that might happen, it keeps looking like a negative. I view it as a positive when the author owns and dictates the circumstances of the thing they really want to do (in this case - tell player at game start to read feelie - though more gracefully than I just did) and is clear in communicating it.

Still, you open the box and you can read the text straight away. If you can read data from a floppy in your hand faster than you can read text on a piece of paper in your hand, I think you’ve got a non-trivial superpower.

Well, it isn’t very difficult to get images into games. If I were going to spend time on making illustrations, say, given the current distribution model of IF I’d never consider putting them anywhere except in-game. Even if they weren’t crucial content. Art’s really hard work!

The wall-o’-text thing is another issue, though. I remember really enjoying Worlds Apart but glazing over at the big piles of information in the (in-game) leaflet. But this is an inherent problem of mixed-media, I think, and not one that I can solve in this margin.

Yes! Totally! But it’s not really dictating the circumstances if you put your feelies in the same folder and mention them in the game. That’s like saying “you really ought to to read the tie-in novel before you see my movie” and leaving copies in the cinema lobby. If there’s something that you need the player to know, it’s best to put it where they can’t miss it.

Exactly. I merely meant that this statement about “walls of text” being “unattractive” made me smile, because I couldn’t help thinking about applying it to the medium as a whole. Whether I believe Emily’s games too wordy (or too brief, for that matter) is hardly of any consequence to this discussion and I’ve used the help menu extension in games myself before. My sincere apologies if this came across in an insulting or otherwise offensive way.