Yeah, can we please not internet-diagnose people with learning disabilities and then use that as an excuse to insult everybody with the disorder in question? My ADD hasn’t stopped me from enjoying IF or any other form of written fiction, thanks.
(There’s also nothing wrong with liking FPSes, although personally I’m terrible at them. People have different tastes, and all that. The things you like are not objectively superior to the things you don’t like.)
What some people might perceive as ADD I call ‘desire to make media writers actually ply their alleged narrative skills in order to earn my valuable attention’. If I can’t focus long enough to turn more than a page or two (or type more than a few commands), I always blame the writer and never myself. This is a testable conclusion: I open a different book/game instead by an author I know I like and suddenly I find my supply of attention infinite — funny that. I think the willingness to abandon a work of art is the mark of a discerning reader, and that it’s a bit unseemly when writers complain about readers who didn’t find the work interesting enough to continue.
Paul.
Yes. I believe this may be the most important kind of transcript any game maker receives, because it causes them to reevaluate assumptions about to the extent to which your players are willing to blindly follow orders with no positive reward offered, like ‘type ABOUT’. So I should type ABOUT so I can learn? Well, that sounds like a narratively intriguing process: obviously everyone will follow this instruction because they are all busy little player bees that are automatically interested in the process rather than in going straight for the fun results.
See the flaw in this reasoning? It’s a transcript like this that reveals it. I have had them myself; in fact, in my experience few players type ABOUT or even HELP when offered them as an option in the intro; veterans and newbies alike just mostly don’t type it. Veterans might remember to try it later if they get too stuck; newbies largely won’t.
Indeed. The situation is not easy, and we can find a long discussion somewhere here in the forums in response to Aaron Reed’s friendly-parser update (can’t seem to find it).
It is HARD to enter a game that isn’t self explanatory. In my taliban opinion, IF is not the kind of game for casual first-timers. It relies on 20, erm – 30 years of assumptions. That said, maybe there could be a way to help novices entering the system. Bad design mistakes apart (my first release is indeed a game which doesn’t invite the player in…) and knowing that if you say “you’d like to punch his face” the game must accept >PUNCH HIS FACE as a command, I still believe that not all IF should be available to all.
My first post in this thread was NOT to offend the illuminated player, but just to have a couple seconds of fun. You know, like when the geek enters the room and the football boys begin laughing… or the other way around, maybe. It is a good transcript in the way it shows the limits of how I send messages via IF, but I don’t think I’m going to change my attitude on it for this transcript (or the other 620 in the same accord).
I write for IF aficionados. I don’t aim at newbies or full-ignorant people. I don’t want to sell my games and i don’t really need THAT MUCH audience. Just you 30/40 could be enuf 
Oh I know but there was some other talk going around of the blame-the-reader variety that is pretty destructive to the goal of actually improving as a writer. If your first response to criticism is to place the critic in a labelled outgroup (ADD? Hipsters? Philistines? Orcs?) so you can ignore them, and that tactic works for you psychologically, then you will have no incentive ever to improve.
You’ve nailed the problem right there. There are a lot of decades-old assumptions in the world of IF that don’t test so well outside the core playing community. Most of them have to do with how people learn software; they just don’t do it the same way they used to anymore. A modern text game should apply GUI principles of discoverability — which essentially means building in a tutorial to the narrative, for a game of any size.
Well that’s fair enough, but I do wish more authors would aim wider. It seems like well north of 90% of IF games are made according to that very principle. What happens when the 30/40 die? On an individual basis writers should do what they feel, but at an aggregate level the community clearly has a problem.
Paul.
That I don’t support at all
I feel that we should do something about it… but having a tutorial for a ifcomp-long game seems like overachieving to me. I fear it would spoil the atmosphere, the mood. Don’t know. I know that fear is the worst enemy of doing a good job, though.
I think about books. They need a basic know-how. Like reading, for example. But there is no reading lesson at the beginning of a book, afaik.
We are all under 50, so I hope no one dies for another coupla decades.
But I understand your thought. And think you’re right.
So, what now? What do we do? (And I don’t mean you and me…)
A tutorial extension is improbable. It wouldn’t work. We should add something custom in each game, so to lure the more and more gamers into IF. 'Cause IF is great. It’s just that people don’t know…
(Yeah. I’m frankly not in accord with myself. It happens. A lot.)
Why? This seems like a difficult but appropriate task to tackle. IF isn’t a book. It’s software. Software that requires a rather peculiar and specific set of inputs to run than most potential users aren’t going to be able to figure out without assistance. The software usually does not come with a manual, and when it does, the manual is often about the general category of software, rather than the specific instance.
I think even initial, minimal guidance (how to move, how to take inventory, how to look at surroundings and objects, how to ask for help, how to phrase a couple specific commands) would get most people most of the way there, and while not the easiest programming task ever, is significantly less difficult than many of the things I see people asking for assistance with.
People should, of course, feel free to write what they want, but as it stands now, any nod towards new players is a bit of a novelty, and I don’t like what that says about the IF community.
I’ve no idea where this 30-40 number comes from; any reasonable estimate of even the core community would be several times that. There’s a persistent habit of assuming that, because we don’t have a reliable way of estimating the size of the IF audience, it must be the lowest plausible value (or, often, much lower.) The idea that we’re this stagnant, obscure pool of hyper-specialised enthusiasts pining for lost glories and never getting any new blood is just flat-out false.
We could certainly do a better job of attracting more (and more diverse) people, but we are not doing a terrible job right now; don’t catastrophise.
Would that it were so. For the record, not everybody who plays IF is under 50; since real life has neither a save/restore function nor an undo command, I, for one, will, alas, never see 50 again.
Robert (the old fart) Rothman
Yeah, of course not counting the old farts.
I was just counting peeps in these forums who actually write something every once in a While. Then maybe 30 is too large a number.
I’m considering adding a tutorial mode to my next project, but the opening sequence just won’t welcome it. I need advice. Who volounteers?
[Edit to add:]
Really, I’m not joking. My opening sequence is made of
looking at what you want, interacting in a very basic way with what you want, doing something unusual like “look west” and talking, five times in a row, with an NPC.
Doesn’t seem like a good starting point for a newcomer, imho. But any suggestion is welcome.
I was just parrotting the 30/40 number rhetorically — I didn’t mean to lend any kind of weight to its accuracy. In any case, there is no doubt that the real number is small by pretty much any standard, so I didn’t feel it was particularly relevant as a point of debate.
The rest of your straw man does not really resemble anything I said. I would replace ‘stagnant’ with ‘narrow’ because the two aren’t the same thing. Similarly, IF is not ‘obscure’ b/c people do know OF it; they just largely don’t want to actually play it and the validity of some of their reasoning can’t be denied. As for ‘hyper-specialised’ and ‘pining for lost glories’ these are merely opinionated bits of baggage that you brought to this thread — I certainly do not believe them so you must be reacting to someone else on that score.
And with ‘new blood’ the issue is not whether it exists, but whether it persists.
Paul.
True, but basic reading literacy among one’s peers can be assumed in the industrialised world in a way that IF literacy cannot. When in practice the difference is 99% market penetration vs. <1% market penetration, it doesn’t really matter that, as you point out, in theory in the two principles are the same.
It wouldn’t work simply, but it could work. A tutorial extension could define certain standard types of exposure events like being exposed to takeable objects, having cardinal exits available, being exposed to a container, being exposed to something wearable, et cetera. Auto-detection would be nice, but even without it, providing a hook for a dev to just notify the extension that ‘this moment is the player’s first exposure to this type of object’ could allow a tutorial extension to do the rest of the heavy lifting. By varying where they define their learning points to be, different game designers with very different types of games could make use of the same in-game tutorial system. Perhaps something similar already even exists. I haven’t checked – I have my own experimental teaching system, not sure if it works that well yet, we will see.
Paul.