This might be too late for ST26, but it might be helpful in the future. I don’t know all of the IF-building systems (there are so many!), so seeing “Dendry” or “Ink” or such doesn’t help me know if this is a parser-based game or a branching-decisions-narrative game (sorry; there’s probably a better name for that latter category).
Would it be possible to make that one of the default tags?
(I know authors can add whatever tags they want; I’m suggesting that site itself list them, since it knows what system the author used)
That’s something that IFComp does (you can filter by parser or choice) so it seems like a reasonable request, yeah. There are way fewer parser engines, so… for this year, I think Inform and TADS are the only parser engines (plus the Commodore 64 game), so probably anything else is choice.
Adventuron and Dialog are the other two parser engines that get a fair bit of use.
I would say that the Dendry game is kind of its own thing, a ''storylet"-style game? Although the base mechanics are indeed choice.
I dunno how you feel about parser-plus-choice games, or how much ‘choice’ you’d need to warrant the tag, but Strings uses Hybrid Choices for conversations. I think I might allow any of the three tags ‘parser’, ‘choice’, and ‘storylet’, and I guess let the Strings authors decide if ‘choice’ was a warranted tag or not. (And I suppose I’d probably tag the Dendry game as both ‘storylet’ and ‘choice’.)
(And now I’m wondering what a parser version of storylet mechanics would look like.)
There’s that one phase (the fifth one?) of You Are Standing… but parser games are inherently storylet-like, aren’t they? You’re writing rules about when things can happen (when you have the spray bottle, you can convince the cat to move off the stove so you can cook lunch) rather than authoring an explicit sequencing and branching of events?
As a rule of thumb, we could say that typing means parser and clicking means choice and both means hybrid. Not always informative, but objective and easy to observe.
Or just let authors tag their games as they think best.
I could add another column to the main table at the top of the Spring Thing play page.
The issue is, it’s not really platform-based, it’s playstyle based, which is why I don’t really like the categorization. For instance, meminerimus is written with Inform and can be completed entirely by typing, but as a short game with hyperlinks it’s very easy to complete it using just hyperlinks. Which category would you put it under? Hybrid?
Enigmart is a Twine game that uses links but also relies heavily on text entry. Would that be choice, parser, or parser-choice hybrid?
We could do 2-dimensional alignment charts (parser engine, choice-based gameplay) or a numerical scale (6 on the parser-choice spectrum).
Should it matter if something is mechanically choice but spiritually parser? The Universal Robot is much more likely to appeal to old-school parser fans than many Inform games out there.
I guess it would be easiest to allow people to self-describe as ‘parser’ as a tag, but we already do that. We could encourage that, but Spring Thing has usually been about experimentation and pushing boundaries, so I’m not sure that asking people to choose one of two categories is helpful. And, frankly, Spring Thing hasn’t been a bastion of traditional parser gameplay for quite a while now, so I’m not sure how much most fans care.
If we do encourage people to categorize games as ‘parser’ or ‘choice’ next year, I’d probably suggest ‘visual novel’ as well, since I think the parser/choice split is more about playerbase cultures and expectations and visual novels, while structurally similar to choice games, have very different expectations than Twine/Ink games, perhaps as different as twine and parser.
I think an open-ended question (perhaps suggesting popular choices, like “choice-based” or “parser-based” or such) would let the authors self-describe (so meminerimus might choose something other than just ‘parser’ since I think people expecting ‘modern Zork’ would be very confused).
I wasn’t trying to nail everyone down to anything specific; just coming from my perspective at not knowing the details of the different IF systems, if people don’t tell me anything, I can be lost on going through the ones most likely to fit. Even just suggesting something like “please consider a tag that describes the play style” or such could help.
I think “please consider a tag that describes the play style” is a really great idea and resolves all the problems I considered above, since it’s author-led, will probably be helpful to players, and gives people options.
Thanks for the suggestion! I plan on implementing this next year.
I feel like the salient structure of storylets is that you play through the exact same setup multiple times, possibly choosing different options each time, and levelling up your stats as a result. A normal parser game (and for that matter, a normal choice game) just has you go through each scene once; there’s not typically a way to repeat exactly the same thing a different way.
Has anyone tried to make narrative sense out of a full storylet playthrough? There’s definitely a nod to one-offs for scenes that are too unique to quite work as multiple runs in a single playthrough, but a lot of the ones that you can re-run often seem pretty unique, and wouldn’t literally be a thing that happened more than once ‘in real life’. But somehow the structure makes it seem like it doesn’t matter.
Anyway, total side-tangent. The upshot is that for me, storylet-based games feel different from both choice and parser games, though there’s definitely some overlap. I would expect an experimental-focused Spring Thing game might try to blend styles in interesting ways.
Storylet is a design strategy. Parser and choice-based are UI models. You could in theory match them up either way, although it’s true that storylets came out of the choice-based tradition and in some ways fit there better.
Storylets aren’t necessarily stats-centric, either. Fallen London is, but 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault mostly aren’t. (They both have a couple of stats – Fogg’s opinion of you, e.g. – but gameplay isn’t about farming them.)
This kind of becomes a reflex as you’re more familiar with IF - in general most new games are going to be choice-based unless they specifically mention parser, or are done with one of the known parser systems - commonly Inform6/7, TADS, Dialog, ZIL, ADRIFT, Quest.
There are very few true choice/parser hybrid systems - Gruescript is one. Texture is listed as hybrid but is basically a unique drag and drop choice system without a parser. Quest has both parser and choice “modes”. Dialog is mostly parser but an author can make hyperlinks that issue parser commands so may be the most comprehensively extensive “hybrid” system, however you’re probably not going to make what people consider a true “choice narrative” with it without doing a lot of work.
Dendry is a unique case - it was built basically to replicate functionality of a defunct online system called Varytale which featured an Emily Short game (Bee) people still wanted to play, so it’s an open source version of that. Varytale/Dendry is a “light” QBN system as opposed to Storynexus/Dendrynexus which replicates the Fallen London type of game-system and the also defunct Storynexus.
Yes. You’re speaking of QBN gameplay which for all practical purposes is choice-based, however QBN is less linear than a branching choice-narrative usually due to a “deck drawing” mechanic which has a lot in common with simple or complicated board and card games (Mysterious Island, Betrayal at House on the Hill) which are randomized but still can support a narrative. Fallen London is the ur-example. The “one-off scenes” “re-run often” is a writing style often referred to as “fires in the desert” - there are unique narrative and gameplay nodes and events which can stand alone and occur in any order - the metaphor is a desert at night with many campfires visible dotting the landscape. The player can approach any campfire for story, but the connective tissue (darkness between the fires - “how you got there”) is less important and left to the player’s imagination. It’s similar to a hard-cut or fadeout/fadein in a movie that time-jumps or leaves out the transitional scenes characters traveling to a location where plot happens. Also similar to how Chance and Community Chest cards in Monopoly provide random bad or good encounters and might suggest plot emergently “Oh no, Luxury Tax for the third time, the government is auditing your shady purchases!” or passing GO! increases your $cash “stat” alluding to the passing of time between regular paychecks.
Where Chance/Community Chest like “encounters” are random events and don’t branch the plot, A QBN can have cutscenes and strictly narrative sections which only occur once in a play through, often managed by a plot-tracking stat/quality. In a boardgame like House on the Hill, this presents as something like a rule “when the turn counter reaches 8, roll the dice and read the corresponding passage below for an event which will change the rules of the game and everyone’s role in it; flip over any room cards in the house marked ‘gloomy’ which are now more dangerous.” or something to that effect.
I recently recreated Cloak of Darkness in ChronicleHub which is a QBN system and a quite linear demo game with a narrative (slim as it is by nature).
Now we’re getting into hybrids of hybrids! Sort of. I mean, I would argue that it is a sort of Storylet, because you can choose which path you take, but that feels like it also leans into generally choice-based games. There’s always an outlier.