Inform 6 and 7 has the concept of meta commands. These are commands that are performed outside the game world, hence do not cost a turn. Examples include SAVE, RESTORE, QUIT, RESTART, SCORE, VERSION and a few others. I think most other modern authoring systems have a similar concept.
I use ABOUT (or INFORMATION) to give background information about the game, plus credits.
I use CREDITS to give credits only.
I use HELP (or INSTRUCTIONS) to give a brief guide on how to play a text adventure and any commands unique to the game.
I use HINT (or CLUE) to give a context-sensitive hint.
Should ABOUT, CREDITS, HELP and HINT be meta commands?
True, actually… If you really want it, make a multiple use of the hint (3rd time or after) makes you lose points - on MEAN mode. I never look at the turns.
Yes, they should be meta commands. In fact, if I was playing a game that advanced the turn counter after I checked the ABOUT text, I’d think it was a bug.
I think a one turn penalty would take me out of the game, especially if it’s a game with timed events or other elements that make the turn count actually matter. If I’m doing something that’s not part of the narrative of the game, why should time advance inside it?
The obvious exception would be for cases where the hints are diegetic, e.g. you’re asking another character for help. Even just framing it as the player character taking a moment to think about what they should do next would work.
ABOUT, CREDITS, and HELP should absolutely be meta commands.
It seems unanimous. They should all be meta commands.
I didn’t say this up front, but I’m cleaning up the code on some old games and I had noticed that I had sometimes used meta for HELP and HINT and sometimes hadn’t. Probably an oversight on my part. Whereas I had always used meta for ABOUT and CREDITS.
one should also consider in this category VERSION: for some reasons, TADS3’s adv3 put in VERSION things whose IMVHO ought to be in CREDITS, e.g.
version
All Hope Abandon version 2
TADS 3 Library version 3.0.9
TCommandTopic Library Extension version 2.1
GiveTo->AskFor Library Extension version 1.0
LookDir Library Extension version 4
AutoSave Library Extension version April 11, 2005
Duplicate Dobj Handler version 1.1
TADS 3 Spelling Corrector version 1.1
T3 VM (mjr-T3) version 3.1.3
My simple heuristic is: is the player taking the action, or the character? If it’s the former, it should be meta.
This doesn’t work in all cases, because (for example) some games don’t really have this distinction between player and character. But for most interactive fiction is pretty clear that the player is saving and restoring, not the character.
Inform 7 recommends the same heuristic, calling meta commands “out of world” and making them immune to Before, Instead, and After rules that would interfere with in-world actions. So if you have a rule that prevents taking any action during a cutscene (“instead of doing anything during the villain’s monologue”), the player can still quit the game. (This is something Infocom didn’t do, as a rule; both Zork and Sorcerer had rooms that prevent any action, including quitting and restarting!)
Depending on the story, the player/PC/narrator triangle, the sturdiness of the fourth wall and such things, you could integrate as many of those commands into the game world as you please, and treat them as normal verbs. (Obligatory Slouching Towards Bedlam drop here.)
Yeah, HELP seems like the one that’s most likely to be done by the character (though any and all of them might be—see Slouching toward Bedlam again). Maybe you have a device like the Hitchhiker’s Guide that the character consults for hints. Or maybe the help is something like Invisiclues that’s entirely out-of-universe. Or a mix: in Enigma I put most of the hints outside the game, but the character has an in-game map and task list where they write down what they want to be doing.
I struck that in one of my own games. HELP without a noun needed to be meta, but HELP with a noun (specifically a creature or animate object) needed to be non-meta. You can’t have two grammar definitions for the same verb. (This is in Inform 6. Other languages may be different.)
@fredrik came to the rescue. Apparently you can use meta = true (or meta = false) in the action handler, so you can specify a verb to be non-meta in the grammar, then change it to meta in the action handler or vice versa.
It’d be interesting to abuse the “turns don’t advance, no before/after actions” part of the meta commands.
You could have a magic stopwatch that allows you to start and stop time. Using the stopwatch doesn’t cost a turn and either freezes or unfreeze various dynamic features of your game world.
You’d want alot going on to emphasize this effect, freezing time in an empty room is pretty unspectacular, but I think it might be workable.
At the least NPCs should be more responsive in games to increase the effect of a time freeze, right now in most games NPCs appear to be frozen in time already (allowing the player to grab everything in sight, totally ignoring any NPCs present in the room). I would expect NPCs to stop you from stealing stuff, and then a time freeze would allow you to get away with it… yet another seed jotted down
But you gotta be subtle or they’ll notice and go after you… Maybe make them turn around, then freeze time and swap the items. (Split topic at Pinkunz’s post, @moderators ? About time-freezing?)
