I don’t see us losing confidence in the words. I see questions about how to bring more people into the fold, which means compromise to some degree with a few well-thought-out gauntlets thrown down. Not changing the medium, but adding to it.There are so many readers and puzzle-solvers out there! They should be ours! There’s an unfortunate configuration of circumstance that prevents them from finding us and falling under our spell. How do we bridge that? And if someone made some money (unlikely, but folks can dream and weirder things have happened) along the way, awesome. But the primary goal should be to seduce the people and bring them into the fold.
If more people discovered IF and played our free games on IFDB, we’d all be happy even without a dime. But there must be baited fishhooks if this is ever going to happen.
I do not know about others, but I very much believe in the power of words.
THIS. (Okay it was not a parser game, but the effect would be similar if not the same if written as parser.) And when I read through the reviews of my One King entry for IFComp, I definitely made an impression . I do need to work on my grammar skills and try to write more succinctly.
I’ve been working the street corners during my lunch breaks, but people keep giving me dirty looks. I’m at a loss too. There’s one creepy fellow that looks interested, but I’m not sure he actually wants to play interactive fiction.
I know some lady who used to paint and place rocks to promote reduce, reuse, recycle. Maybe we 3D print a stencil for a QR code for the IFDB. Then we can covertly graffiti bomb IF messages IRL.
ETA: Before Zarf sits on me, I say this in jest of course.
What an alarming image. I wasn’t aware this is how Zarf punishes people.
Seducing people means giving them what they want, priming them to want more, and then showing them the way they can have more. Onboarding.
So we need to give them what they want, which is cheap/free, easily accessible, pretty, user-friendly games that are right in their faces (meaning advertised and pimped by authorities and on platforms that our targeted audience uses). Meet them part way to prime them. Every example that’s been given of modified parsers has been decidedly retro. We don’t want retro. We want sleek, modern stuff. Not that there’s anything wrong with retro. It’s just not the way to get attention.
Actually, I don’t want sleek stuff. It’s bound to be more complicated that its worth. Of course, I’m a chess player. Look at board, click here, click there, and done!
Modern chess UI kind of turn me off. Same with IF.
If you want fancy stuff, I don’t object, but give me a simple alternative way to make my moves, or I won’t be enjoying the game.
Really, there’s nothing wrong with 2-clicks/drag-and-drop UI since that’s universal. IMO.
If you want to get them young, you want simple. 5-7 years old aren’t interested in fancy stylings. Once past puberty, it’s probably too late. Too much FPS, and unless the interface shows that, they probably aren’t interested.
It took me a very long time to warm up to Visual Novel, just because I’m unfamiliar with them. Even now, I’m incredibly picky about what kind of VN I would be willing to tolerate.
TALP is on that task. I think our task should be to attract the many, many adults who like to read and solve puzzles, and who are big buyers of interactive books, PnC games, and word puzzle games.
Let me illustrate generation gaps.
One of my beta testers lost his game because he assumed that all IF stories will autosave, because all (video) games he played Autosaved. I had to put in an opeing warning that IF stories do not autosave, and explain better how players may SAVE/RESTORE their games.
Since I grew up with text adventures, I didn’t even think about this feature.
My partners were talking about this recently. Something I apparently have missed entirely is that autosave has become near-universal. Maybe I didn’t know this because I’ve stayed buried in the indie scene? Idk, but it was surprising for me to learn as well.
In our little IF corner we have some (near)native autosave
Autosave is kind of a thing in Twine. Harlowe has autosaving (in your cache) as you play through (makes trying to start the game back to the first passage a bit annoying if there’s no link at the end), and SugarCube has API to enable it (also has save slots made obvious from the start).
. I do need to work on my grammar skills and try to write more succinctly.
