If a CYOA choice leads to a “That was fruitless.” and loops back to where you were, it’s kinda rejecting your input.
Alter Ego is a choice-based game that usually lets you select a “mood” and an “action” simultaneously, but if it doesn’t like your choices, it will reject the selection with an error message.
In the opposite direction, I’ve frequently mused about building a parser-based game where the game tries to “fake it” if it doesn’t understand what you mean, like a chat bot. The “blue flashes” montage sequence of Blue Lacuna does that a lot, and I thought it’d be cool to build a whole game like that.
I’m a fan of just using “the player must type; voters will know a good parser game when they see one” as the guideline. It’ll be fine.
Philosophically speaking, this is a Chinese room puzzle. (And I’m not just saying that because of my previous game.) Can a sufficiently complex set of mechanical reactions in a choice game lead to a game which appears to be interpreting and understanding player input? And if it appears to be doing so, is it actually doing so? Does a sufficiently complex AI have consciousness? Is understanding or consciousness simply the product of a sufficiently complex hierarchy of self-referential loops? What are birds? We just don’t know.
Which is to say: your definition is pleasingly strange and productive to think about!
But I stand by the point that I think ParserComp will be a better comp if, at heart, it doesn’t say “This isn’t what we want, so don’t submit that!” but rather “This is what we want, so have fun with that!” Or, to put it another way, if the invitation focuses more on the garden and less on the fence.
(this is not to say that anyone is being all fencey or to attack ideas here and all in support of the comp &c &c &c)
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Yeah. We all know what the prototypical parser game is. Let the voters decide how removed an entrant is from that.
That is a brilliant definition, that even exposes the core difference in gameplay and design between parser and choice-based games. Well done!
Just for the sake of argument, what about Suspended, then, which makes parser errors “in-character”: when the player types a bad command, the player character says it anyway, and the FC in the game is the source of the failure message.
What’s silly is I think we all know what’s a parser game and what’s a choice game. This talk is so superfluous.
Just to be clear, what counts as staying within the window and what doesn’t? No coding, no making notes, no thinking about ideas until Nov. 1? It’s hard to read about an upcoming comp and not think about the possibilities. A theme would make it easier to wait, but if it’s not required…
Also, were you thinking of encouraging pseudonyms at all? People seemed to enjoy that in Shufflecomp.
I was just thinking that. Sometimes it seems people just like to debate everything.
It’s OK to like to debate things. Particularly when it’s as benign as exploring the definition of a parser game.
The reject a command definition is pretty good, though I wonder if it’s too simple. Caroline in this year’s comp can reject your command, but I’d still consider it CYOA and not a parser game.
Renga in Four Parts rejects input that is not single words. I would definitely not call it parser.
I don’t think it’s POSSIBLE to not think about ideas! (Heck, I was doing that for ShuffleComp before I even knew my song. They turned out to be useless ideas, but still.)
Same as Ectocomp - you’re on the honor system, don’t get your code on yet.
Re: having a theme: I wanted to have a theme, but I figured there would be more participation if the theme was optional.
Are there people who would be more likely to participate with a mandatory theme? If so, maybe I should reconsider.
Pseudonyms are fun! Anyone who wants to submit under a pseudonym can certainly do so.
But I think the discussion plan (you can talk about your own game, but not other people’s) is a good one for this competition, and having mandatory pseudonyms would interfere with that (since talking about a game would instantly reveal that it was yours). So I think they should be optional.
A theme probably wouldn’t encourage participation, which is why I like the idea of it being optional. Though I personally like themes because they can help me explore ideas and be more focused.
In SUSPENDED what you described is still a parser rejection dressed up so as not to break fiction.
With the aforementioned Comp game, typed input is not being rejected due to parser interpretation of a ruleset, it’s being rejected because what the player types doesn’t match any of the choices the author set up. There are still only two choices which directly map mechanically to two pre-defined responses.
In a parser game, you can input a a legal command correctly EXAMINE BOOK and the parser can decide to reject it based on its interpretation of the rules and the world state. “Is there a book? Yes. Can the player see the book? Yes. Can the player touch the book? Yes. Is the player affected by the spell which makes her temporarily illiterate? No. Is the room dark? Yes. Is there any visible light source in the room? No. – Rejected.” “It’s too dark to see that here.”
So perhaps less comprehensible but more specific: “The player input is not strictly predetermined, is interpreted according to a ruleset, and may be accepted or rejected based on varying world state.”
This discussion might seem frivolous, but hey…it’s discussion of game theory/philosophy. Would we prefer silence unless someone has something “significant” to say? [emote]:)[/emote]
Looks like we’re back to: is typed, is parsed, has a world model. [emote]:)[/emote]
I didn’t mean to suggest making the theme mandatory. As for me, I’d be more likely to participate if I could think of an idea I really liked. In general, plenty of time to think and plan probably makes that more likely. An ability to incorporate ideas I’d had before but hadn’t put into a game might also make it more likely. Making the theme mandatory wouldn’t necessarily help me, though maybe it’d help others, I don’t know. The possibility of someone submitting something really good because they’ve been thinking about it longer isn’t necessarily going to discourage me. I’m more concerned about whether I’ll be able to come up with any idea at all that I’ll be excited about, theme-related or not.
I suppose a theme is more suited for speedIFs. Although a theme would move people otherwise with no idea ready.
Well, you could post something like “ParserComp thoughts part I: Sam Handwich is previously unknown to me but from this game appears to be truly brilliant, caring, and devilishly attractive. If she or he had a thought process in planning this masterwork it would probably be… more thoughts on the other games to come!” and then never follow through. It’s no more devious than, say, listing yourself as a beta-tester. [emote];)[/emote]
Snerk. Touche.
So, is Parser Comp going to be announced on Nov 1?