This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_Wall_Game. Played by a small minority of students at a single English public school.
Worst guess-the-verb ever.
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It didnât work in this case, though, and I honestly think itâs less likely to work. You have to do work to figure out what the NLM message is telling you it understood. The default message is usually pretty clear about that, if a little brusque. (It doesnât respond well to ânorth to the hills,â though.)
What about âI canât understand your entire command, but the first part might have been something I know. You could try typing [snippet of understood part in all caps] in order to [action name].â (Had to be careful not to phrase that as a question, which the player might try to answer!)
This:
is still a little confusing as a response to âI capture the castle,â but I donât know if itâs that much worse than
(Of course Smarter Parser captures this.)
And in the case of Dougâs player, âI canât understand your entire command, but the first part might have been something I know. You could try typing EXIT in order to exitâ might have worked. (Or not. Ideally, the action name would show up as âexit something youâre in or on,â but that might involve some annoying exception-coding.)
On the documentation, one problem with source-diving is that the source is very regexy. I donât really understand this, and without that I donât know why reference to a âwalk-in closetâ donât seem to trigger this. Maybe the thing to do is comment the sections more?
I appreciate all the work youâve put in this, and the graciousness with which youâre taking the criticism!
Could you please be a little more condescending? People really like that, you know. Of course you are the only person in the world who cares about people etc. pp. But letâs get to the point.
I believe I already have:
That one makes me want to stop playing any game which throws this at me immediately.
What about this one:
I see people mocking ADRIFT4âs parser all the time for breakage like this:
How is that âsmarterâ parser better?
âŚand what about those people who want to try a game in a genre they are already familiar with being frustrated by being treated like total idiots?
You keep talking about your âresearchâ, however, thatâs only half of the story. The results are meaningless without analysing how many players who would otherwise have stopped playing you have gotten back on track with these changes to the defaults. The person in the transcript Doug Orleans posted certainly wasnât impressed by your efforts at newbie-friendliness. That is the number you have to determine and compare it to the number of players you have pissed off with the same changes.
Absolutely! I donât see anyone here arguing against experimentation. I see people who are against advocating usage of experimental, immature software in âproductionâ environments. What weâve got right now, in my opinion, is a step back: much more frequent fourth-wall-breaking, uninformative rejections, blatant misinterpretations and rules which make the games âstupiderâ. I have no interest in sinking to the level of âIt looks like you want to write a letter. Should I help you with that?â
To play devilâs advocate here just a littleâŚ
I think Aaron meant this to be taken somewhat differently than it was. There are several of the âhigher profileâ members of the IF community whose communications I have to take a step back from and read a couple of times before I get my hackles up. I donât think that they intend to come off sounding like they do. At least I hope this is the case. (Pudlo is the exception, but I believe he does it on purpose.) In this case, the discussion is getting a smidge heated at times, so that may have influenced the response.
There seems to be a subtle undercurrent of suspicion among the newer âauthorsâ regarding the intent of IF. Iâve seen it voiced on more than one website that IF is written for other authors, not players, and that the community is small-minded and cliquish. While I certainly havenât experienced this myself (at least not intentionally), I have seen instances where a response could have been smoothed over a little before someone hit the âSubmitâ button or where maybe someone should have better assessed the recipient of their âwisdomâ.
I think that what Aaron is trying to do is develop an environment that is easier for newcomers or the idly curious to pick up a game and enjoy it for being that, not wrestle with an exercise in guessing verbs and deciphering error messages. The hardcore IF community is full of traditionalists, just like any other community.
Take Sandra Lee, for example. As a self-professed âfoodieâ, I hate the woman. I echo Bordainâs sentiment of âshe tells you to take a box of crap and smear it on some other crap and call it quickie gourmetâ. I donât cook like that. I prefer traditional methods, fresh ingredients and putting some work into my food. Everyone doesnât share that passion. While some of her stuff is tasty, it lingers in the back of my mind that part of this came from a can, which doesnât suit me.
Personally⌠I hated Zork. I played it for maybe 10 minutes. I think itâs one of the most worthless pieces of crap Iâve ever played. Same with âAdventureâ. They were tedious, bland and at times downright infuriating. I respect them as forerunners to the genre, but I donât go back and play them again for a nostalgia high. Because they sucked. Everyone doesnât share my opinion. But I donât want to write things that emulate their style. Thereâs a reason that most people donât do the âjitterbugâ anymore. Frankly, it looks retarded.
(I also hate Star Wars, for the record. But thatâs another rant.)
Newcomers to the genre may not want to learn IF equivalents of brunoise or allumette. They just wanna âcut some stuff up and get tasty resultsâ.
Everyone seems to have agreed that, while not perfect, Aaronâs extension is a step in the right direction. Maybe the only step Iâve seen, outside of rewriting parser messages every single game or writing our own extension. He admitted that it could possibly be an educational failure, which heâs okay with. Nothing improves without feedback. Seems like thatâs what he needs to be getting.
Dude, can you chill out a little? I wasnât being condescending; I meant what I said. There are novelists who write novels exclusively for people who love literary writing and analysis that are boring or incomprehensible for most readers. Ditto for film, music, and most other art forms. I donât have a beef with that at all. Itâs just not what Iâm personally interested in doing in the case of IF. I have good friends who write IF for that crowd and more power to them. It just isnât my thing.
As other people have pointed out, âThat noun did not make sense in this contextâ is a default library error, not something to do with one of my extensions. The fact that it was showing up in a certain context was a bug, but I didnât write the message.
The default response to âscrew lid on jarâ is âYou canât see any such thing,â even if a jar is in the room. To me, that just seems broken in a different way. You can argue about whether you personally prefer the parser to misinterpret you one way rather than another, but Iâm not sure why the way I do it is making you so angry.
A case can be made that trying to recognize foul language and respond to it is pointless. Currently, the standard library already does this, and my extensions havenât yet changed any core behavior of the standard library, just the messages. Maybe a better approach would be just removing swearing verbs entirely. I could be down for that, but the current extensions are trying to just come up with a better alternative than âReal adventurers do not use such language.â Iâd be open to hearing alternatives to that message.
Indeed, they were removed from the standard library earlier this year, although there hasnât been a release since then.
I only remember this because I wrote a poem to commemorate the occasion:
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I guess thereâs some reticence in de-implementing a specific response in favour of a general one, but it might be for the best. In most games, most swear words arenât even recognised. The author then either has to put up with a specialised response for a tiny subset of swear words, or devote unnecessary time in implementing a wider variety of swear words. My collaborator Melvin tried to persuade me to write a Curse Words extension, so authors could have the benefit of swear words being recognised without having to actually read any in their source code. I declined.
There are some specific issues with the Signs of Frustration component of Smarter Parser. âScrewâ as Hannes I think tried to point out, might have perfectly legitimate use in a game (Calm contains screws, and the ability to unscrew); and a lot of the words might be meaningful things to bring up in a conversation with an NPC. However, as far as I can see, the authorâs own definitions of these words overrides the Smarter Parser usages. âScrew youâ, and âscrew the jarâ definitely give different responses when an author has implemented âscrewingâ as a synonym for twisting or whatever.
This is all to say the obvious: often there will be clashes between the contents of an extension and what an author is trying to express in their game. Extensions are very useful tools; but theyâre essentially an easy way of copy-pasting in someone elseâs code. And it behooves us to look carefully at what code weâre pasting into our games.
To weave it back into the topic at hand: one of the parchment transcripts for our game had someone quit after receiving no good response to âwhere am Iâ (despite, of course, the room description having just been given. Did he want a map, or to be told that he was in such and such a town?). Smarter Parser would have given a response (it would have reprinted the room description). I was pretty sure we had included Smarter Parser, and checking just now I see that we did, but it only fires when the game is in easy mode. So the player, starting in normal mode, wasnât directed to those messages.
This leads to a question: in cases where there are different difficulties, should concessions for newcomers be extended throughout or only be in âeasy modeâ, risking newcomers who resent playing on easy never seeing those messages?
â
Oh and I love the poem Maga!
Iâm absolutely one of those people writing IF for IF lovers, and I love to riff on the default parser messages because my niche intended audience will pick up on that sort of thing.
But Iâm also the sort of person who occasionally puts interactive works up in a gallery or other such public setting. And you can bet that if I ever do that with a work of IF, Iâll be including Smarter Parser et al, posthaste. And Iâll be super glad that Aaron is helping me take care of my helpless n00bs I mean audience. (The Public can break anything.)
I forgot all about this, and the lovely poem. (More changes to software ought to be accompanied by verse.)
In light of this, I donât have any further problem removing the swearing stuff from Smarter Parser. The âsigns of frustrationâ section could also be up for the chopping block, or at least retooled to make it less likely to conflict with nouns. Yay progress!
âŚIâve also updated my signature in the hopes of seeming less condescending.
For my comp game Six, in a sense, I did write a âsmarter parserâ from the ground up for the game. This is because I believe in what Aaron said - that every author would, in an ideal world, consider/address/rewrite all default material for their game. I did this and itâs a lot of work, but itâs probably something Iâll do on every game I make due to my perfectionist streak. It doesnât cover as many cases as Aaronâs because some of the cases Iâm not interested in, but on the other hand, since itâs built for my game only, it works well and doesnât have edge cases or lead to mishaps.
For everyone who canât/wonât/doesnât want to write all that from the ground up, but wants most of those effects, thereâs Smarter Parser.
I was less of a fan of Neutral library messages, but in the end, itâs up to the author whether they want to use these extensions or not in line with their aims and tastes. And if they do, it is of course up to them to test their resulting game thoroughly. I find it can be hard excavating even all of Informâs default messages, let alone the smarter parser ones as well, but as I say, thatâs why I roll my own.
This was discussed in a panel at this yearâs IF Suite at PAX, and one of the core take-home messages was that you should never, never expect beginners to play in a mode called Beginner or Easy. You either have to call Easy mode Normal and Normal mode EXTREME NIGHTMARE UNFAIR MASTERCLASS OF MASOCH +11, or set difficulty to Easy by default and put the controls to change it to Normal somewhere obscure, or give up on a nice simple fix.
(In non-simple fixes, Blue Lacuna does some things to detect experienced IF players and recommend an appropriate track, but I think its effectiveness was pretty mixed.)
Until anyone does some sound âresearchâ concerning the effectiveness of different approaches to accessibility, any projection is pure speculation. Iâm seriously surprised that so many people seem to be happy with a big bag of assumptions. What I took offense in before (and still do) is the insinuation that sticking to the defaults in-game automatically means that an author does not care about newcomers to the genre. This is as short-sighted and one-dimensional as it gets.
I havenât used Smarter Parser, so am not in a position to comment specifically. However, I do have a few thoughts concerning the general idea of âaccessibilityâ to beginners.
When I think back to my own first experience with what we now call IF, a couple of things (in addition to the incredible amount of fun I had) stick in my mind. The year was circa 1977, the game was Adventure, and the parser was a lot more primitive than anything used today. One thing I remember was that, although the puzzles in the game itself were far from easy (I donât think I ever did actually get all the way through), learning how to play â getting a sense of what kinds of commands the machine would likely understand â wasnât all that difficult. I â and I think most other people who tried it â managed to get the hang of it in fairly short order. Second, at the beginning, the experience of âexploringâ how this new genre worked â of how to play the game â was, in its way, almost as much fun as exploring the cave.
Iâm certainly not suggesting that we go back to the primitive two-word parsers of the 1970âs, but it would be a shame if, in our zeal to make things âeasyâ and âaccessible,â we deprive todayâs novices of the experience of exploring the world of IF itself, along with exploring the particular âworldâ that forms the setting for the game â particularly since I just donât see that it is at all necessary to do so. Granted, there are undoubtedly some people out there who have such a short attention span, or who are willing to invest so little effort, that they will give up if they arenât walked through everything step by step. Thatâs fine, but maybe those people should stick to comic books. IF, by its very nature, requires a certain amount of thought and participation on the part of the player/reader, and maybe it just isnât the right genre for somebody who isnât interested in making that investment. And if we remove the need for thought and participation in an attempt to get a larger audience, havenât we gotten rid of the very attributes that make it what it is?
Robert Rothman
I think that youâre failing to consider that, back in 1977, imperative textual commands were the dominant mode for interaction with computers. The experience of text adventures was like all other computing, only easier: you didnât need to remember to use proper punctuation, for the most part, or weird abbreviations.
In contrast, the vast majority of users today never even see the command line, or only see it when theyâve suffered some nasty error or software failure. Outside of expert-only command line systems, the only interface that looks anything like the textual interchange of IF is a text-messaging applicationâwhich, given that there is a human on the other end, has essentially no syntax rules.
So while the parser interface is relatively easy to learn, expectations today are much different than they were in the 1970s and 1980s, and so thereâs a much bigger gap to cross in acclimatizing newcomers to the IF interface.
âErik
What Erik said. And complaints about the parser donât just come from hapless noobs whose gaming literacy ends at Farmville and Minesweeper. Weâre talking dedicated indie gamers, game-designers, game critics. People who donât blink at memorising five pages of keymaps for a roguelike. Programmers. People who live and breathe literature. Smartest-kids-in-the-class. These arenât people who are incapable of learning the parser, or too lazy to do it. But theyâre capable of learning it in the same sense that theyâre capable of learning Old Church Slavonic: itâs tough, itâs frustrating and they really canât see why they should invest all that effort for a niche system that wonât meet them halfway.
Saying that the only problem is that everybody who bounces off the parser is stupid or lazy is deeply unhelpful.
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I never meant to suggest that somebody who doesnât want to take the small amount of trouble needed to learn what kinds of commands are likely to be accepted and understood is stupid or lazy â simply that he may just not be interested.
My point was simply that if you put an automatic transmission in a racing car to make it more attractive to people (like me) who are not interested in learing to drive a stick, itâs not a race car any more.
Robert Rothman
While I donât have any scientific data to back this up, Iâve presented IF in enough public contexts now that Iâve 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 âThis seems really cool, but I canât figure out how to make it work.â
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Sorry for the (second) intermission, butâŚ
Iâve been trying a game lately (one I should have been betatesting but, to my fault, I didnât 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 âannoyingâ 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, âgrrrr. can we drop these messages asap, please??â.
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 Iâm trying to say is: Ok I understand everything about the topic, and I trust Aaronâs experience above mine.
But: i.e., isnât the default hint menu in EmShort extension enough for newcomers to know how to play a game? I donât mean that should be the ONLY way to approach the matter but I neatly prefer it. âTo play IF you can LOOK at things, GO directions or even N/W/E etcâ isnât 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 (âIâve found an egg. What now? Shall I EAT it? BREAK it? WARM it?â)
Iâm not sure Iâve made myself clear. Before answering anything, convince yourself Iâm 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 theyâll have to. Most games donât 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 â big roguelikes, Minecraft, complicated strategy sims â where you know youâre 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?
- Iâm sure this has been discussed before, but: a pre-made IF tutorial game accessible from a first-screen choice wouldnât be an awful idea. Although it wouldnât 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 â I believe IF to be a âharderâ media than the average iPhone game. I understand the audience is probably the same (as in: everybody), though⌠itâs like reading a book. Itâs not like watching a movie, isnât 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: âI think Iâll create some.â