Parser Games in the IFComp

Competitions IFComp
81

But The Colder Light doesn’t actually belong in that category. It is fundamentally a parser game where clicking on a noun produces a set of links constructed according to specific rules, e.g. “TAKE + [OBJECT NAME]”. (Not being focused on an object provides a set of movement + look links.) There may be some special-case links inserted, I don’t know, but either way it is definitely “a parser game mapped to links” as I described it. My Sand-Dancer demo was the same sort of thing, though it also included a command line so that the fact of its parseability was more obvious.

I do think that games that actually fall into the category of point and click text “adventures” (not necessarily CYOA, but based on modeled worlds of one sort or another) are the great (relatively) unexplored territory that is likely to be the most fruitful moving forward. King of Dragon Pass is probably the most interesting commercial venture I’ve seen.

This is really pretty much the same idea as The Colder Light/Sand-Dancer With Hyperlinks, except that in every implementation or mockup I’ve seen, contextual menus are used for the shortcuts. Personally speaking, I find contextual menus to be soul-sucking and I have no use for them. For a touchscreen game, shortcuts such as Peter mentioned are great, but any game that forces me to sometimes use my mouse and sometimes type for basic input–eh. That’s too much interface.

82

That’s how Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island 1 worked, too. You’d literally build an on-screen sentence as you constructed your command.

I agree that Quest-style pop-up mini-menus is not good.

You can use just the parser if you like, IME, for most IF games, I’d fall back to the parser only 25% of the time. 60% is just traveling and examining, and another 10% is picking up inventory items. So being able to click would actually save time.

Plus, it would help a lot to teach newbies how to explore the world (just click on everything to go places/examine objects).

83

Sorry, but I think UI conversations need more precision than this. Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island do not work the same way as The Colder Light. Those graphic adventures build commands out of multiple UI interactions (the player chooses EXAMINE, then clicks on an object). In what I am referring to as “mapping links to parser commands”, the game/application builds a single link for the player to click based on a model world. Earlier you said that no one thinks this can or should be done, and I am simply pointing out that it not only can be done, it has been done, and it was even pretty manageable (much more manageable to my mind than constructing a sentence via multiple clicks).

I don’t think it’s the interface of the future, though. I think a limited number of verbs that are, ideally, 1) always available and 2) not associated with simple object manipulation make for a much better UI. But that obviously points us away from the games, parser or CYOA, that we are used to making and playing.

Sure, but then we’re not really talking about a new interface at all, just a more user-friendly presentation that most existing systems can do…? That’s not bad and I agree that it would be a nice thing for parser games to offer, but it isn’t w/o problems. For example, how do you teach newbies that other commands matter, beyond the ones that issue automatically from tapping on words in the text?

I’m arguing that any really big step in terms of UI means creating a pretty different sort of game. Which is probably noncontroversial and we’re talking past each other to some extent, but there it is…

84

My favorite kind of IF is the “classic” puzzler: Curses, the Muldoon games, Vericella, Jigsaw, etc. Sadly, these seem to have become a lost art, although every now and then new work (e.g. Counterfeit Monkey) features gameplay that shares enough with this tradition to be very enjoyable.

Slice of life/puzzleless games are not my cup of tea, and puzzleless, CYOA games even less so. The one exception in this year’s comp was Solarium, due largely to the quality of the writing… but to be honest, I would have liked it even better as linear fiction than CYOA.

So I’m disappointed by the decline of parser-based games, for the simple and selfish reason that those are the kinds of games I liked to play. My all-time most memorable moment playing IF was solving the central puzzle of Spider and Web – I can’t begin to imagine how that game would work as a CYOA. But I’m not surprised by the decline of the parser: in fact I see it as a natural consequence of the rise of phones and tablets, and the community’s long-standing shift away from puzzles.

85

Obviously false, since the decline – if we’re measuring parser IFComp entries – has been roughly steady since 2000.

You could argue this, but you’d have to get into a lot more depth. We might take “the shift away from puzzles” as beginning with Photopia (as a vast simplification), but does this mean parser games peaked then? Hard to make that case.

EDIT-ADD: Actually, let me go back to an earlier point. If you think the rise in CYOA-style games has anything to do with the decline of parser-based games, you’ve already got a logical problem. The two trends appear on the face of it to be completely unrelated.

86

Actually I’d have said the decline in parser-based games, particularly in the IFComp, is at least partly due to the rise of CYOA-style games. CYOA is easier to write than parser and as people are naturally attracted to systems that are easier to use. Unless (and I might well be starting to sound like a broken record here) someone knows of anything else that might have changed in the last few years to discourage people from entering the IFComp.

87

Do you perhaps refer to the rule change that resulted in the most parser games since 1999 being entered to the competition?

88

Unless I’m mistaken, 19 of the 35 entries this year are not parser games, so by the look of things the number of actual parser games for this year is the lowest it’s been since 1995.

89

Oh, my bad then. The one I was thinking about was three comps ago which doesn’t exactly prove cause-and-effect.

90

What rule was that, out of curiosity?

edit: Which is to say, I thought that the only rule change in the last five years was the rule to allow updating, which I thought was new in 2012, which is not three comps ago.

91

It was in 2011, two comps ago. I don’t remember any rule changes in 2010, but then I didn’t have much to do with the IFComp that year so maybe it happened and I just missed it.

92

Right! Comparison time.

Here’s my chart: eblong.com/zarf/pic/tally-ifcomp.png

Blue are parser-based, green are choice-based, orange is the total. (I’m assuming every game is one or the other.) The lighter lines are smoothed averages, which is roughly what the original poster graphed as “smoothed fit curve”.

My numbers are slightly off what the original poster had, but only by a couple per year. (I trawled through IFComp pages on IFDB very briefly, looking for reviews that mentioned choice-based or CYOA gameplay.) The overall trend doesn’t change.

So what do we see?

There’s a general downward trend over the past ten years, and CYOA has nothing to do with it. CYOA simply hasn’t been a factor in IFComp for more than three years.

(Same goes for smartphones and tablets. I haven’t graphed those, but imagine a line zooming exponentially up starting 2007-ish. Doesn’t correlate with the downward trend at all.)

If there’s a downward bump over the past three years, CYOA may be correlated with that – but the question is confused by the strong 2011 peak. (“The year after GET LAMP.”) If we block out that point, all we can really say is that parser-based games are down this year, after being flattish since 2009. And obviously there’s a Twine surge that started in the past couple of years, and went zoom this year.

So do I think there’s causation there? Actually, yes. Some. This year. But I caution everybody against making up just-so stories about the data.

93

I want the CYOAs where the last choice is always “parse an answer…”, putting the issue to bed.

94

I suppose the more precise statement would have been that the I see the rise of interest in CYOA as a natural consequence of the rise of phones, tablets, and puzzleless games.

That a rise in interest in a new medium typically accompanies a declie in interest in an old one I consider self-evident.

95

I disagree. Most of the IFers I talk with are new authors working on parser games. Also, people didn’t stop seeing plays when movies came around, or stop using landlines when cell phones came around. I just find the logic to be spurious. But I thank you for giving me the opportunity to use the word “spurious” in a discussion.

96

I refute your spuriousness [emote]:)[/emote]

I bet if you found figures for the amount of people who see plays now compared to the amount who saw them prior to the event of cinema, you’d find the number had dropped. I’ve only seen a couple of plays in my entire life, but I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been to the cinema. Likewise, I have both a landline and a cell phone (or mobile as us limeys call 'em), but the landline is simply there because it’s always been there - I very seldom use it - whereas I use my cell all the time.

97

I don’t think the logic is bad, you just have to state the context. When 10 people are in a room, 1 person doing something is 10% of the whole activity. When 90 people then enter the room, you could say there’s been a ‘decline’ in what that 1 person is doing, or you could argue that there hasn’t been really.

98

I look at it this way (and I’ll be honest, I haven’t read through this entire post so if this was already brought up I apologize), to me the numbers are not what are important, quality is. I would rather have a handful of good parser games (well written, meaningful puzzles, well tested, …) than a ton of crappy ones. As the number of parser games go down, I hope the quality is not going with it. Same goes for the CYOA games, because the numbers going up, does not mean that the quality is rising. For me (and perhaps me alone), CYOA has to reach a higher bar for me to call it good. The story has to be excellent and the writing well done. I look at my father’s long legs as an example…to me that was well done…good writing, and an interesting implementation, which made up for the lack of “puzzles”.

I guess it boils down to this…I typically play what I enjoy (parser games) and that means I write what I would enjoy playing (again parser games). Maybe that will change someday, but for now that’s what it is.

99

What people above said. Potentially grouchy and disorganized tequila-muddled thoughts ahead.

There’s been an explosion of indie games, now that the tools to make them are more available and user friendly.

Five or eight years ago, let’s say you had 20 big publisher releases each year, so that’s 100% of the games.

Nowadays, if there are 80 indie releases and 20 big publisher games, you could say that big publisher games has dropped from 100 to 20% of the marketplace for an 80% decline, and a lot of stupid people will believe that big publisher games declined from 10 a year to 2 a year because you showed them the math on paper and because statistics can be skewed to show or falsely highlight nearly any result the preparer wants to.

Another person might say “We used to have 20 games per year to play, now we’ve got 100!” Of course that person is going to be groused at by the people who somehow find indie games inferior.

Just because there was a drop in parser games this year doesn’t mean the art form is dying out. I often write in I7, but I tried a StoryNexus game this year for fun. I think any good author is always going to want to at least see what else is out there. Emily Short did games in Varytale and Inklewriter, but that didn’t stop her from releasing COUNTERFEIT MONKEY. I’d be curious to gauge the parser game output of many of the people who are the strongest on the side of “Twine is killing parser IF”. If one is just a consumer of IF, and wouldn’t consider paying for the games they like as an option (which is one of the possibilities when a thing is web-only), it seems a very moot point.

I see a ton of Quest games, sometimes 20 at a time, logged on IFDB, and then never read any reviews or hear anything about them again. Some of these are choice based, but there are parser games in Quest, and you can download them off the web if you have a PC. Why aren’t these getting supported? These people are your future generation of parser fiction authors.

The numbers are weird because IF is such a teeny group. If there were two million people dedicated to IF, you’d probably see the numbers varying a lot less.

Yes, lots fewer people see plays since the advent of TV and Movies. Before the latter two, there were no other choices for plot-driven entertainment, especially if a person didn’t like to or didn’t know how to read. Delivering a movie or a tv show to an advertising audience of millions is cheaper than delivering a live stage show to ~10,000 paying audience members per week. That’s why plays cost $50-100 now and fewer people go see them regularly.

Twine lets you produce a game in a week or days if you want. I7 requires lots more learning and lots more programming to do it right. There are more authors who are capable of writing a short flashy slightly interactive beat poem about their deep thoughts on urban decay than there are imaginative authors who can bring to term a quality and entertaining narrative longer than speed-if in a parser engine. The Twine beat poets are like the indie-games. They can get a quirky thing out to more people with less work, and if nobody likes it, it’s not such a loss of investment (time or money or muse-juice) so that’s why there’s been an explosion of them.

It does slightly disturb me how certain reviewers seem take great glee in pointing out with almost as much verbiage as an actual review how they are absolutely not playing or judging a Twine or a web-based game, when they could save a lot of time by just ignoring what they don’t like and moving on.

100

Then again, I’ve been seeing gamebooks all around since I was a teen in the happy 80’s, and, according to wikipedia, the genre itself can be traced back to the 40’s, so I wouldn’t call it exactly a “new medium”, or at least I think we’ve got a rather subjective view on what “new” actually means here.

Incidentally, trends make strange bedfellows. Most movie theaters at the center of my hometown are currently beeing reconverted to host live stage shows. It seems that people got so used to watch movies at home that going to live plays was the actual interesting thing to do when going out. [emote];)[/emote]

Anyway, If I try my best to get the big picture, I can see that people arounf IF forums have been honestly asking themselves for a few years now how they can rate with the same criteria CYOA-like works and parser-based pieces… without a satisfying answer. And now, with the CYOA boom, when the question just cannot be delayed anymore, the answer has happened to be something like “yeah, sure, numbers and quality don’t correlate… so please, guys, don’t make a big deal of it” and then putting the emphasis on “after all, less parser works equals to less carppy-trolly-untested stuff, so we should rejoice…” …which means that since now everyone should take for granted that any incoming parser work is going to be considered as untested, crappy and trolly as a default (with some uncertain chance of being redeemed later), which also lead us to… well, parser-works biased guys indeed making a big deal of it. [emote]:)[/emote]

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