Re Porpentine’s style: have you played Ultra Business Tycoon III?
For me it manages to represent that softer, more realistic space with its frame story while preserving the savagely beautiful aspects in its embedded game – which is why it’s probably my favorite Porpentine work (though that’s a contested field).
I haven’t: it’s been on my list, and I certainly will.
I think that’s right, in fact I would go so far as to say that none of the five best-written games were parser games.
However, on the other end of scale, I feel that many of the best-written entries did not succeed as interactive games (with the exception of Creatures, which struck a particularly nice balance between both elements). With Those we Love Alive was beautifully written but boring; Venus Meets Venus was hardly interactive at all. If all future work from the IF community has the same balance between quality of prose and quality of the interactive experience as With Those we Love Alive, they will fail to satisfy the yearning that keeps me coming back to IF. Certainly there are times I am in the mood for static fiction, and the best Twine games this year satisfy that hunger as well as much mainstream static fiction, but when I am in the mood for a more interactive experience, these games are no replacement for Hadean Lands or Hunger Daemon.
Of course it is your prerogative to judge the games by whatever metric you like, but I do want to push back a bit against “beauty of the prose” and “seriousness of themes” as paramount, with “interactivity of the experience,” “instilling a feeling of ingenuity,” and “fun” as afterthoughts. While I think it’s good IF is broadening by including games that emphasize the former qualities at the cost of the latter, I certainly don’t see a permanent shift in that direction as any kind of “innovation” or maturation of the medium.
I wouldn’t use the term “paramount”, by any means; nor do I think that seriousness of the theme or “beauty” of the prose are in themselves enough – a serious theme badly handled is no good at all, and prose can be good without being beautiful. (I happen to think that Hunger Daemon is very well written, but its prose is not “beautiful”.) The metrics you mention are surely important too, though I am not sure I agree with your assessment of interactivity, and I may have a rather broader idea than to do of what makes interactivity successful. It would be a pity if the parser were seen as occupying only a specialised space devoted to a particular sort of puzzle-based entertainment. Or at least that’s how it seems to me. But that was not intended to disparage that space.
Right, I see what you mean. Certainly I agree that the decision to go parser- or choice-based should be carefully chosen based on how well the kind of story and experience you want to create aligns with the strengths of the medium, and not based on blind conviction.
Thank you! I certainly did not mean to suggest either (a) that my observation was a novel insight or (b) that this is not a problem that has been tackled extensively and fruitfully by past authors. Your post provides a very valuable overview of various approaches. I suppose what I’m saying is that I think this is a message that it’s very important to get out, both in order to improve the work of (especially, but not only, novice) authors, and to convince people who do have a story to tell that they might be able to tell it in this particular medium. And also something worth discussing quite intensively, because it remains a hard problem and it very crucially affects the reader’s experience.
Yes, I agree.
I do wonder, though, whether at least some novice authors want this message. I think some percentage of new parser game authors have the explicit motivation of recapturing an experience they had in 1985, and filling the game with puzzles about matching colored keys to their same-colored locks is fundamental to that remembered flavor. If some people want to do that, I don’t feel entitled to say they shouldn’t, even if I myself don’t find the results interesting.
I also feel like this is sort of a golden age for new interactive fiction tools – Twine most notably, but other stuff too, tools that allow us assorted different modes of interaction. That’s mostly really good! (With a few side concerns about archiving and long-term operability in new and/or rare formats.)
But it really changes the calculation for using the parser. Before it was “can I do this thing I want to do in a parser system [because that’s the only kind of tool I have available]?”, and now it’s “what’s the best tool for this thing I want to do?” To compete, parser now needs to be not only adequate for, but actually the best at a particular effect. I think it’s possible still to find specific parser-suitable mechanics that are novel and fun to develop – Fifteen Minutes, say, I think worked well as a parser game, wouldn’t have been as good in another format, hadn’t been done exactly that way before, and explored its concept space pretty well. But I don’t feel like there are so many big fields of possibility space where a) parser is clearly best at that effect and b) no one has done the effect before. (I may well be missing something. It may be that in the wake of Hadean Lands action-chunking is the Next Big Thing, though probably only if someone supplies a library to help.)
Nonetheless, I think the parser space has been much more deeply explored, at least by this community, than any of the adjacent spaces – and some of those spaces offer better ways to do things we’ve struggled with in parser games – so that’s where the innovation-excitement is going.
I keep drafting and throwing away responses to your thoughts on this (not just this specific quote, but some of the past things you’ve said about the desire for more parser IF and the desire to see more of it, by more seasoned authors, in the comp specifically). The following is pretty strongly based on my own experiences, and I’m only speculating about what others think, but:
The comp is not suited for people who work on IF in a pro or semi-pro capacity. That’s fine – it was never designed for them. But it’s not a venue in which you can launch a commercial game or submit a previously-created one, the two-hour limit precludes a lot of projects, and the prizes are appropriate for giving a friendly pat on the back to hobbyists but don’t come anywhere close to paying for one’s time if one is actually doing this kind of thing as a job. As more IF authors have moved into part- or full-time game development, it’s become less and less likely that they’ll be putting their best work into the annual competition as opposed to selling those games on various app stores, entering them in the IGF, showing them at IndieCade, getting them support via Kickstarter or Patreon, etc. The best of a given year is very very likely now to be happening elsewhere.
As more IF authors have moved into etc., they’ve also become more concerned with accessibility for their work; the parser is not great at this. And by “not great” I mean “almost always terrible”.
For those authors who were drawn to the parser IF community because they were interested in doing innovative things with interactive storytelling, that innovation may once have consisted of writing silver-age-style IF; now perhaps it doesn’t.
I think it’s definitely possible to do fun, highly interactive, and/or ingenious-feeling stuff in the choice space. But I think if we want to see the parser qua parser really flourish, we need either to make the interface a lot more user-friendly and get over the accessibility problem, or to discover new pockets of parser-specific innovation to pursue – preferably both. While there are plenty of people around here with the craft skills to crank out more classic puzzlefests, that doesn’t mean they’re motivated to do so.
As for getting the best-of-year-level output directed to the comp, I don’t know that that’s doable without basically totally changing what the competition is and how it operates. (I for one do not advocate doing this.)
(Also, I should clarify, on rereading what I wrote here: I don’t mean there wasn’t some really good work in this competition, just that these days the comp is not going to be a net big enough to catch all the year’s best stuff.)
A question (I don’t want to sound harsh but I’m writing in a phone and it’s stressing) : why is it so Important to reach novelty? Why do we have to do something new? Static fiction has been delivering the same 7 tropes over and over without even taking a chance at break-through concepts and/or delivery and nobody seems to suffer from it. Why text games should worry so much?
If it’s for the audience reach, I can’t see IF as a major media happening, anyway.
Maybe it’s not important for everyone. But at least for me, much of the appeal of working on IF at all lies in the capacity for large- and small-scale invention: to work on new design or storytelling challenges in each new piece, to try to advance an art form still in its infancy, and to communicate with others who are doing the same.
I understand.
Evidently, I’m much more interested in storytelling. That’s why I don’t invest too much time in puzzle design.
But there’s absolutely something to be said for solid craft that builds on established techniques. We need that too. If a medium becomes Nothing But Experiments Forever then it becomes every bit as irrelevant as a medium that totally rejects innovation. I don’t want everyone to be focused on innovation.
In relation to the parser and accessibility, I was impressed by the interface in Sigmund’s Quest. Ignoring the graphics, it translates the parser interface into a hyperlink system where you click a noun and then select a verb from a verb coin. Packaged in web distribution I feel this is a good alternative interface to the parser for parser-style games. Not sure if it could be implemented as an Inform extension to add an extra output format for Inform games.
All good points. I would mention, I guess, that theoryclub was originally formed in part in response to a request specifically for IF-related discussion that was not craft discussion about how to do something, discussion that would be accessible to non-authoring players (as this person is one).
There is some discussion of WIP problems on the #craft channel on ifMUD, but it’s fairly ad hoc and just turns up when someone decides to ask something.
I know that, while writing Ugly Oafs, I realized I was going to miss something big. Because I couldn’t ask directly about this. My testers helped give me good ideas how to hint better, but the more people that give ideas, the better.
On the one hand, you can go to the testing forum and post, but on the other hand, testing seems like more of a commitment than “does this puzzle work?”
I’d love a closed subforum where people can talk about in-progress works or if a puzzle works. I’d be glad to help other authors. The only problem I see is, most people who’d apply to that subforum would be the people who regularly post here, which would lessen its privacy.
I’m convinced there’s a middle way (or ways) like dfabulich listed above so that people who want to write interesting puzzles can do so, so they can be robust and challenging, without any of the unfairness we authors don’t want to dump on players. It may be simple once we see it but it’s not trivial.
I think another problem with posting a puzzle is, you can worry someone will jump and take it for their own.
Sure, this makes sense, although as a downside this shift has decreased the visibility of that work – at least to people like me, who periodically check Steam, and the IF Comp, but otherwise aren’t plugged in to the indie game scene.
I was aware of Hadean Lands because of its prominence as the first Kickstarter-funded IF project, and very much enjoyed it (I consider it a steal at the price Andrew is offering it). Have there been other recent commercial IF projects with puzzly gameplay in the same vein as Hadean Lands? If so, they are missing out on at least one willing paying customer…
No recent commercial IF project has been as puzzly as Hadean Lands, IMO. I’d even go so far as to say that most commercial IF has avoided Hard Puzzles™. (Certainly our stuff at Choice of Games focuses on hard choices instead of hard puzzles.)
On iOS, Device 6 has some gentle puzzles and gorgeous typographic art design. 80 Days is built around a route optimization puzzle. Inkle’s Sorcery games have puzzles, at about the same level as Tin Man Games’ Fighting Fantasy games. Blood and Laurels has some tricky achievements that will require some puzzle solving.
(Of course, there are plenty of graphical point-and-click puzzle games out there, too, but that’s even further out of scope. I just have to mention Kentucky Route Zero, The Room, Broken Age, Superbrothers, Dominique Pamplemousse, or anything from Telltale or Wadjet Eye.)
It’s a very different type of puzzling, and a graphical interface, but Long Live the Queen is proper fiendish and a wonderful storyworld.
CYPHER was… reasonably puzzly, wasn’t it? At least that’s the impression I got, I didn’t play it.
Ultimate Quest may be on the borderlands of commercial IF, as an advergame rather than a game that charged you in anything other than access to your Twitter account, but it certainly was puzzly parser IF.–Actually I think it really should count as commercial IF, a lot of commercial games are free-to-play supported by ads (though I guess more of them are supported by in-app purchases or something). Though I still don’t know what it was advertising.
I played Broken Age. It was a gorgeous game, with a very well-executed ending, and I don’t regret buying it… but it left me disappointed, in large part because it was hyped as a puzzler, and ended up being puzzle-light.
I’ve heard The Room come up several times now and will have to check it out. Originally I thought it was only for mobile platforms, which is a deal-breaker, but it seems it’s also available on Steam. Long Live the Queen also sounds intriguing.