I am probably weird in that I enjoy making games more than playing them. I’ll be over here on the “Naughty Pariah” step.
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This is anecdotal, of course, but it’s been my experience on itch.(io) and in the small internet community. There are all kinds of games, and it’s not always obvious or undisputed that they belong to a specific genre, but OSR was huge for a while, far as I could tell. Maybe it was a stretch to compare them to treasure hunt adventure games in the Zorkian tradition as they relate to modern, literary pieces. The boom died down again in the mean time, anyway, so I can’t point at concrete examples.
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I encourage you to flip this on its head. How would commercial or audience pressures affect the creation of parser games? People who make parser games today can do whatever they like, and most of them do.
What is holding the sonnet back? It is a fine form. Just short enough to force economy and improvisation, yet long enough to have a sense of movement. It is hard to write a good one, which in turn has made it hard to find a good one to read. Having studied poetry a bit, I’d say that it’s easier to find a good parser game nowadays. Still, nobody thinks about formal poetry as a thing “held back.”
Lots of emphasis has been placed on tutorials, instructions, and introductory work that can “teach” command-based play, but wanting to play a parser game, well, we haven’t found the secret to teaching that. & you know, I think that’s OK. How much can we really direct or influence another’s search for joy?
I think that for as long as these games are satisfying to make–I certainly find it satisfying–there will be games and people who play them. But it is a DIY arts scene, like poetry without the academic subsidization. Which is cool. Making things is cool, and sharing them is, too. The absence of gatekeeping institutions is very cool. Parser games are in a great place, unless you are trying to make money off of them.
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There was a recent Economist article about some sort of commercial success in poetry called “Britain has seen an alarming rise in poetry sales”. I have no opinions on the subject.
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Finally! I thought I was the only one!
I just love the way I can sneak in secret things that, later in life, I can go back and reread, but playing other games is usually lost on me.
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I’ve tried to hold it back. If I see someone writing a sonnet, I say, ‘Listen you, you could be creating commercially viable content to slop into a bottomless bucket as we speak! It pays really well!’ But they’re pretty stubborn about it and they just keep writing their sonnets.
-Wade
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all that money on university and my son is just a lousy syllable counter!
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Hardly. A friend once told me I like the idea of videogames more than actual videogames, and it stuck with me. Ironically, it was after I started to publish games under the name of No Time To Play: a joke at first, that only became more true as time passed.
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Of course I think I forgot the main problem, here, which is: in my own experience, people (of all ages, but especially the young ones) in general don’t like to read. The world is encapsulated in 1 minute vertical videos or 140 characters (hastily loosing appeal by the hour). “We don’t have time” is the common answer but the real one is “where can I find the strength?”
This is something I tried to bypass by generally including very short, based-on-shock beginnings to my latest games… but then my excessive prose takes the steering wheel and it’s over. (Also: my latest efforts are all aimed at retro-systems, for people my age or above, so I’m probably trying to empty the ocean with a fork).
To add on the bullet point of tutorials and introductory games: I think the approach of complex (mobile—I don’t have a console anymore) games is to delivery stratification in rules a bit at a time, giving the player the possibility to learn how to do it gradually. Also, there’s a lot of notifications, reminding the player what they should do next every time.
I’m not sure how we can do something like this in parser.
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@Piergiorgio_d_errico I think I should have said “novels” instead of books. In any case, your 360k+ results don’t impact my point: if I include all of published text of the same kind I would say “billions”, today.
This said, please try and “weight your words” when addressing people directly in these forums, as what you did is considerable inappropriate behavior per the RoC. I will flag your post the next time I feel personally attacked.
Try it the American way. If someone’s writing Petrarchan sonnets instead of Shakespearean sonnets, accuse them of hating Earth, being a pedophile, and attacking your civil liberties. You could start a political movement in which you get the Spenserian devotees to push you into office, then simply outlaw the writing of Petrarchan sonnets. You gotta go scorched-earth on those Petrarchans if you want to hold them back.
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It took me a long time to realize that despite really liking the idea of camping, I hate actual camping.
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Hey, I’m new here! I think this might be my first post? Just wanted to jump into this discussion because I see the claim a lot that parser games have a high barrier of entry, but I’m skeptical about it. I was born in Brazil in the 90s and have no childhood experience of Infocom games etc., I’m not particularly savvy at computers, but I was still able to just get into IF parser games in my teens, just by finding them while browsing the internet. I know a few people with very similar experiences. I played The Dreamhold first, which is set up like a tutorial and is great. I don’t understand why people still treat this question of “how to get newcomers into parsers” like it’s some insurmountable conundrum of HCI. They’re easy and quite fun to figure out.
I also don’t think choice-based games can be thought of as “like parser, but newcomer-friendly”. I find most choice-based games quite boring and find the experience of playing them fundamentally different from the experience of playing parser games. Figuring out the rules of a simulated world by typing commands is very different from clicking on options from a list and seeing which story branch you end up on. The only thing they necessarily have in common is they’re text-based.
I do, however, think that a lot of people who could enjoy parser games aren’t attracted to them because of how they look. A cool-looking interface would make the exact same mechanics much more approachable to a wider audience.
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First off, welcome! 
IF can be as different or similar to other IF works as an author wants them to be. That’s kind of an issue because interactive fiction is almost like it’s own medium and there are a lot of diverse genres (gameplay and subject) within IF. For example, I’m not a fan of flowery, poetic prose so I’ve gravitated towards choice-based that play more like traditional videogames (seedship or a dark room). I like the freedom and exploration that parsers afford, but I’m not always a fan of typing to explore in and of itself.
Interactive fiction is a nebulous concept and there is so much room for authors to create unique and satisfying content. There’s even quite a good sized group of those who like to create engines for others to use. The biggest barrier for new users is that IF is not a genre of game. It’s so all over the place that people don’t know where to begin. It’s so obscure that quality works are undiscovered by seasoned players. I think it’s just as crazy when trying to create IF. There are so many tools.
So when someone plays an IF game and says, “this is not for me” it’s probably a wrong conclusion. The tricky part is finding what you do like and finding similar works that scratch that itch. It’s tough to navigate this landscape, I feel.
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I agree with every single point you made except this one. To be frank, I don’t know which is actually harder to learn, but that’s almost beside the point. If I were to release one of those fancy, fangled 3D shoot 'em up thingies that everyone plays nowadays, I wouldn’t worry about how hard it is to learn precisely because everyone already plays them. There is no learning curve because most players already learned the ropes elsewhere. Whereas, many if not most players have emphatically not played a parser game in the past, which introduces a barrier to entry that doesn’t exist with 3D shoot 'em up thingies. Given someone who hasn’t played either, like, say my archetypal Great Aunt Gladys, then, yes, you’re right; surely both unfamiliar interfaces will take some effort to learn, perhaps even more for the 3D shoot 'em up. However, most modern players have played some form of a 3D shoot 'em up since Doom changed the videogame market in the mid-nineties, basically 30 years ago.
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Good point!
It is the older generation’s world with parsers. My son is in college taking a videogame programming concentration (way to go, boy!) and he has never used a command prompt in his life. Just to get a game to run in the DOS days, you had to configure the autoexec.bat and config.sys files. I mean, how else were you going to have the sound card, cd-rom drive and mouse all load into the memory?! So typing to do things was second nature back then, if you used a computer. Now, everything is clicking with a mouse… or touching the screen… or voice command… or thoughts. I always liked that scene from the second Back to the Future, when Marty shows the kids how to play the Wild Gunman arcade game and the kids reply in disgust, “…you have to use your hands?!”
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Except for the fact that everyone texts all the time now. People spend all day texting little snippets of type back and forth. People reluctant to play parsers tell me they hate the typing, but I can’t square that with all the typing they do.
My husband won’t play because he hates typing, but he has no trouble firing a zillion texts off every day. I can’t understand the difference.
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This thread (and similar ones in the past that I’ve seen) is fascinating to me, who’s arguably an IF outsider and definitely not a big fan of parser games as a whole. I don’t deal with that much IF, and most of it isn’t parser games. Ironically I’ve mostly found this community because I was academically interested in the idiosyncratic tradition, conventions, design considerations, game mechanics, etc. of parser games as well as “the Inform tech stack” (as an upcoming Narrascope talk calls it). But by now I’m pretty sure I will never really get into playing or authoring “typical” parser games. Why is that?
Part of it is just a matter of taste (e.g., I have an ambivalent relationship with puzzle games in general). But a lot of things mentioned by others, speaking in third person about the experience of new players, ring true. I’ve sort of gotten over the hump of learning the most common verbs, some shared expectations about how to use them, and some tropes of the genre – but it wasn’t easy and happened over a long period of time. Many decisions on UI and game design could potentially reduce that initial hurdle, including but not limited to “tutorialization” in some form. But even now that I have the necessary background knowledge, I’m often frustrated by the basic experience and affordances of many parser games for reasons that have been discussed a lot over the years, such as the many facets of “guess the verb/syntax” and the paper-thin illusion of being able to try “anything” with open-ended text input. I know that these things are sometimes intentional design decisions and part of the fun for quite a few players, and that’s good for them, but that doesn’t make it any more fun for me to deal with.
More generally, even in obviously well-crafted parser games, I often feel like a fish out of water because I my brain has not been shaped by playing dozens of them. This is unlikely to change, since I don’t see myself ever getting that into parser games. @HanonO made good points about what this entails, but personally I have to disagree somewhat with Counterfeit Monkey as example. I played it and greatly enjoyed it in part because of the “gimmick” – it’s a fun and clever way to pose puzzles, and one that obviously wouldn’t work in a graphical game. Plus, it’s a more intriguing pitch than a lot of blurbs I’ve scrolled past. While narrative is obviously very important to most or all IF, the parser(-ish) games most likely to catch my eye are those that also do something interesting with the medium. It just has to be self-evident to me, an outsider, why it’s interesting – and then the game needs to avoid turning me off with “unnecessary friction”. I count Counterfeit Monkey under this, but here’s two other examples that I enjoyed:
- En Garde initially presents a bizarre and inscrutable UI. You could argue about whether it’s technically parser game at all, but that’s part of why it intrigued me in the first place! It’s not a game that I think has any potential of being popular, so in that sense it’s off-topic, but I like it as an example of breaking out of the parser mould very effectively with minor technical changes (it’s just Inform with a little sprinkle of Vorple).
- The Wizard Sniffer subverts text adventure conventions by having a pig as player character and giving a very limited set of verbs. But you don’t have to be familiar with those specific conventions to appreciate the mental image of solving puzzles by walking around and manipulating an idiot knight who will swing his sword at whatever objects you sniff with your cute little snout. It’s also a well-crafted puzzle game, but I only stuck around to discover that because the game elegantly side-steps “guess the verb” problems and includes in-game hints.
This is not to imply that more parser games should be like that to be more “popular”. I don’t think my taste and preferences can be generalized, and it’s not like I only want parser games that aren’t, uh, parser games. Both Counterfeit Monkey and Wizard Sniffer are well-regarded, as far as I know! However, the things about them that appeal to me are largely not directly related to being parser games. They probably wouldn’t or couldn’t exist in any other format (CM in particular), but I still feel like interacting with them through a parser was at best neutral, and sometimes detrimental to my enjoyment. I really don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade about playing and making parser games for the sake of parser games. Still, when I talk to other people about the parser games that I like, I often find myself spending a good part of the time detailing and excusing the “hurdles” (from my POV) imposed by the medium. I’d rather focus on what’s cool about the game in question, but the various “hurdles” are ever-present when I think about introducing someone to it. It’s probably not a coincidence that I’m not very successful at getting people to try these games 
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Speaking of which. Forgot to mention, but the usual counter-argument to this is that “kids today” are used to typing text into a little box – in chat apps. Except it’s not the same thing: text adventures really have a command line that only pretends to be a chat box; a difference that needs to be learned, and accepted if not embraced. Which people definitely still can and do! But it’s something to keep in mind.
Edit: ha ha, we were all typing at the same time. Oh well.
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I would guess that typing one’s thoughts (texting) and controlling a game application (with multi-step commands) are two different modes of thought. Parsers have their own computer language that must be learned and the paradigm is definitely something familiar to people to have used command prompts in the past. Not saying that there’s no grey area, but unless you are determined to play parsers, no one casually stumbles in the parser gaming genre.
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It’s a question of UI/UX. Everybody is different, but I can tell you that the slightest inconvenience repeated over and over will cause me to drop the game.
Texting, and to some degree, posting this message on forums, is fine.
Playing Inform games on the phone is extremely painful! And times that I don’t turn on my computer for days, and so I’m dependent on my phone to play IF.
All said, as much as I like parser, I gravitate toward Choice as convenient lifestyle.
Let me know if Parchment and other Play-on-browser interpreter have convenient ways to do it. Also, what do you think about the UI on the new Infocom game? Should this be adopted as standard?
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