Good question. I have had discussions about this with the person who taught me INFORM 7. Her big negative is that there was no commercial opportunity for text-based games: the customer base is too small and the author base is even smaller.
Imho, IF 7 products tend to be games instead of stories because reading has been mostly replaced by video games. It takes a lot of work to make a good IF 7 story. After all, the author is programming the story, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Then, after all that, it is hard to get someone interested in reading/playing it.
To a lesser extent, IF 7 has a steep learning curve to produce something significant. (I am still learning new things after three years of using the language.That makes it harder than the Java programming language.) If I wasn’t a programmer and use to frustration, I would have given up a long time ago.
On the other hand, I am proud of the few stories I have produced, and especially appreciative of the great support I get from the IF Forum. They have been great!
Commercial opportunities don’t matter. Most mainstream gamers will not ever play an IF game in 2024, we are ultimately a niche community. The IF scene today mostly consists of up-and-coming writers or game devs who want an easy, budget-friendly way to share their ideas with the world and get feedback. You’re not expecting to get any money out of it, it’s the satisfaction of publishing your own game and seeing others play it.
Why isn’t parser used now? Because most people aren’t in the know about it. A vast majority do not know that these games are even still being made or that you can play them on a modern PC, I sure didn’t until I looked up Nord and Bert. Parsers have gotten their stereotype as “those old games where you type in commands that never work” with dated, unfair game design. This hasn’t been a problem in a good two decades, but this idea is far and away what the average person will think of when they hear a parser game.
And parser vs. choice… why can’t both just exist side-by-side like they have for years? If you want to learn Inform, there are decades worth of games’ source code available to study, and a fully documented book of examples. Twine is probably easier to learn, and more resources are becoming available for it by the day. The author’s choice of platform depends on what they think suits their story.
If you want a mostly linear narrative with emphasis on your prose writing where the player can experience the whole thing without possibly getting stuck, go with choice-based. If you want a more immersive, “game”-like experience where players can walk around in and interact with your world, doing things outside of a scripted specific order, go with parser. Accessibility is another thing: choice-based is easily portable and playable on PC or mobile, and readers will be more familiar with how to play it at first glance than a CLI interface.
The only question is, do I think my story would work more as a parser or choice game? Hobbyist game devs who are releasing their stuff for free don’t care about catering to what they think will “sell”. There are still games coming out that will appeal to you no matter which you’re a fan of.
I can’t see how I have attacked you, and I’m Italian… and seems that the humorism of "weight your word is lost in (double ?) translation.
(Italian mode ON:)
Assumendo dal tuo nome e cognome che sei anche tu Italiano, ti spego quanto è andato perduto nella traduzione, come sai (e non è traducibile in inglese…), traduttore = traditore…
Quello che volevo dire era il classico “ocio che…” umoristico, e questo colloqualismo, un modo scherzoso per far rilevare esagerazioni, a quanto mi risulta, non è traducibile direttamente in inglese; forse mi sbaglierò, ma la forma alternativa che ho scelto mi sembra una cortese, ma evidentemente mi sbagliavo, e di questo me ne scuso… ma definirlo “comportamento inappropriato per le regole del forum” a me sembra, onestamente e francamente, un cicinin esagerato, non ti sembra ?
[Italian mode OFF]
My apologies for everyone else, (and Marco if he has only the Italian name and surname and don’t actually known Italian) for having explained my wievpoint in Italian, because I feel that the issue stems from a loss in translation.
This is similar to the Doom modding scene. So many people who love Doom—especially given its popularity in the 90s—don’t play it today because they don’t know that it’s possible. They depend on Bethesda to experience it when you can just use GZDoom.
This is why my dad doesn’t play parsers and never introduced me to them; I had to stumble upon them on my own. His experiences with them were so frustrating that he also doesn’t want to try modern ones either.
“Ocio a cosa dici (weight your words) in the presence of an historian” is easily received as an insult, a rising above a podium to belittle the other and, in general, denotes at the very least arrogance. Not the way to interface with others, in my humble opinion.
This is regulated by the chapter “ Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree” in the forums CoC.
Also, your post made no point that I can see and added nothing to the thread imo.
I’m probably overreacting to a case of translation or written vs spoken text, so no problem, let’s move forward.
Let’s all live happily ever after.
I completely agree. Aside from a few key commands which newcomers need to be made aware of - LOOK, INVENTORY, TAKE, DROP and the cardinal directions - playing a parser game is as simple as understanding the syntax VERB NOUN. That’s it. It’s hardly rocket science. I first discovered parser games aged 13, and I don’t remember having any difficulty learning the ropes. I introduced my nephew Max to them aged 8, and he got the idea almost immediately.
It’s true that a lot of games players don’t like to read, and an even greater number don’t like to type. A flashy interface is probably not going to make any difference to those people, and let’s face it - they’re not our target audience. Parser IF is niche, it always has been and always will be.
It’s what VERB NOUN combo to use that is hard. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve seen people try things like WALK TO THRONE when the throne is visible, which yields “You can see no such thing” unless the author has turned off WALK. Or FIND DOOR. Or LEAVE ROOM. Things that immediately turn people off because they don’t have a good grasp right off the bat of the conventions. Or they’re trying to play some sophisticated game like Counterfeit Monkey as their first game and can’t figure it out and decide, “Screw that.”
Which means that people either need a human guide their first time, or we need to start taking tutorials more seriously. I’ve long been thinking about writing a short one-room tutorial to just plug into the beginning of every game, but have never gotten around to it, because writing a tutorial is bloody hard. The only one I did, for a TALP game, was one of the worst writing experiences I ever had, and I don’t think I did it very well, but I have few ideas for how to improve it.
That’s exactly what a friend of mine tried when I showed him my game once. He saw a table and typed “go to table” because that’s how it works in graphic adventures. Luckily I was there to explain the difference, but he got frustrated and/or bored very soon after that and gave up.
Sure, we all had to learn text adventure conventions, and did. That’s how we’re here today. But they’re not intuitive. They only seem that way to us after decades of practice.
One failing of many (most?) games is failure to provide instructions on how to play. An in-game tutorial only goes a small way towards addressing that. All my games have instructions on the game page and a brief reminder of how to play in the HELP command. We all know that no one reads instructions, but at least it’s there for those that care to read it.
itch.io page. There is no provision for this on the IFDB page and that’s one reason why I prefer to direct people to the game page so that they can get the full experience - read the doco, play online or download the game.
Parser games are unpopular because they still resemble the Unix console. For those who aren’t extremely dedicated, this is off-putting. You also need to understand how you can play them. The user interface is unrefined, a far cry from what any successful indie game can offer. In 2024, parser games still lack a professionally looking map! For a miniature hobbyist scene, that may be okay, but how can anyone be surprised that they aren’t commercially successful?
There are successful games that demand extensive reading, but they present a nice and modern user interface, for example Shadowrun Trilogy, Disco Elysium, 80 Days, Citizen Sleeper, The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante, Roadwarden, Suzerein or Vagrus.
I do not consider those to be text adventure games. Maybe Roadwarden, but otherwise, I’d sooner claim Visual Novels to be text adventures than those games.
Just because they have lots of text, doesn’t mean they’re not RPG or board games or simulations.
Pretty much. I literally wrote a book about text-based games, and never realized it until this conversation happened. Interactive fiction started out as a natural extension of command lines (over teletypes, no less!) and was first embraced by programmers. This has remained a theme throughout the genre’s existence. Of course it will only appeal to some people. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but for mainstream success, (potential) authors might want to look elsewhere.
Some of them are choice based IF, some of them are rpg that border interactive fiction genre. But the main reason why I mentioned them was because there was this misguided idea that kids these days don’t read.
I’m not that familiar with visual novels, so I cannot speak much about those (I’ve played only Umineko When They Cry).
Oh, absolutely. Two of my best games are made in Twine (or rather Tweego), but they’re hack&slash RPGs with procedural generation. Basically digital gamebooks where you mostly just wander around running into enemies to fight and challenges to overcome. And then there’s Eamon, or Kerkerkruip (very different things, I know). Question is, can another game genre be more successful today than interactive fiction while still using a parser?
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