In 2003 or so, Simutronics Games (a creator of text-based multiplayer games*) decided to make their flagship game GemStone IV more newbie-friendly by building a mouse-compatible front end called StormFront. There was a working compass rose for movement, and all objects (and players) gained hyperlinks with contextual drop-down menus. Until you wanted to say something to another player, you could play the entire game with the mouse.
It was a massive effort, and exceedingly helpful to current players in some ways. However, to the best of my knowledge, it did not significantly improve the game’s appeal to new players.
[size=85]* Or MUDs, if you prefer that terminology.[/size]
Inheritance for Kindle does it this way, except it’s driven with menus. There’s a menu of verbs. Pick a verb, then pick a noun from the following menu. amazon.com/Inheritance/dp/B0054TZOX0
Though IMO it would be much more natural to do it in the reverse direction: click on an object in the text, which reveals a menu of the stuff you can do with that object.
Techniques like this make “guess the verb” puzzles impossible-ish, which, for all their warts, have the virtue of giving players the feeling that they invented the solution to the puzzle all by themselves.
So you could supplement the menu system with a mini-parser. Click on the noun, which presents a list of obvious verbs, and an “Other” option where you’d get to type in your own verb. (The only game I can think of that did something like this is Leisure Suit Larry 7, a graphical adventure where you’d click on objects and see a text menu of verbs.)
I was assuming you’d use Java Web Start, which also provides a no-installation experience, assuming you have a JVM. But, yeah, JavaScript is the VM. If you like Java that much, you could do it in the Google Web Toolkit, which translates Java to highly optimized JavaScript.
Quest has recently moved to menus, I think; RAGS has always worked this way. And menu-controlled graphic adventures have been around since at least the days of HyperCard. Maybe it’s because the platforms and games I’ve seen rendered in this way have all been very crude, but I really dislike the idea of IF moving in that direction. IF is for people who like text. Interacting with text, using text, is not an experience that can be replicated by menus, even if you functionally replicate every possible parser command. (And, in practice, authors never do. The high bar that the parser sets for authors has a lot to do with the high quality of IF in general, I suspect.)
A combination of parser input and menus is the worst possible approach (at least, for actual gameplay), I think; switching between the two is awkward, annoying and leads to one or the other predominating.
Quest hasn’t “moved to” menus - you can still type, so it’s actually what you describe as the “worst possible approach”!
However, pretty much every other application on a computer is usable with a combination of keyboard and mouse.
I agree that it would be annoying to be forced to switch though - a game that is poorly written may make you use the menus for clues to the verbs you can use, which would otherwise be impossible to divine from the text; then later on it may not have the required verb in the menu. But poorly written games will still suck no matter what UI they’re using.
A well-written game could/should be equally playable using the player’s preference of either hyperlinks/menus or keyboard commands. Or it could disable one or the other - if you want to create a Quest game without hyperlinks, you can turn those off. Or, if you poke around you’ll find there’s a script command that lets you turn off the input box if you’re that way inclined, then you could have a hyperlinks-only game. Or you could even turn both off and provide your own input method (as in the twohalves demo I linked to earlier).
That’s a good point and a good question. There is a real need to come up with a satisfying UI model for IF suited to a post-keyboard world (to borrow one of zarf’s phrases).
Dan mentioned Inheritance for the Kindle which is a promising first step, if a bit awkward. I haven’t played the released game but I was a beta tester, and for the most part it felt just like a “real” IF game.
Erik Temple’s Under Doom has a similar interface. I like it a lot; I need to make something similar for TADS.
Both let you input a complete command in just one or two keystrokes. Neither one gets rid of the keyboard dependency entirely; I’d be interested in seeing a game that felt like IF but used only mouse or tactile input. I am skeptical that such a thing is possible without resorting to menus or lists of verbs, but I would love to be wrong.
You might be interested in FyreVM and its Channel I/O model. In broad terms, it defines a list of output channels that interpreters might implement, and specifies a format for sending data to those channels. Then the interpreter can render that data in whatever way is most suited to the device or platform on which it runs.
I think you would find an audience for an implementation of the Glulx VM (e.g. ZMPP2) that used Channel I/O instead of Glk. David Cornelson may even have something like that already. I believe he’s talked about making the Textfyre titles available for Kindle, which would imply Java + Channel I/O.
I’ve been reading this thread with a mixture of bemusement and puzzlement. Let me see if I get this straight.
I’ve seen adventure games that were 100% mouse driven, like MYST, Riven, and that weird werewolf game from the 1990s.
Then there were the games that were text, but had some graphic elements, I think Beyond Zork had that, and there was something that I think was called Adventure Game Toolkit from ages ago.
But then there’s products like Quest and ADRIFT, that have a certain amount of fill in the blank using popups and menus and so on.
But the original debate - wait for it - is that we’re using technology from the 1980s to make our games? Well, so what? Arent we using PCs derived from the x86 chipset? Wasn’t ethernet invented in the 1970s? We just celebrated the 20th anniversary of the first web page, should we throw out the web because it was invented in 1991?
Text adventures are about the imagination. They are about verbosity, not interfaces. I would rather play a text-only game written by a pulitzer-prize winning author than a point-and click that had pretty graphics.
I’m not sure whether I believe in the so called “post-keyboard world”, but there are definitely some things we could try to make it a little easier for mobile terps, like double clicking on a word to add it to the input. For keyword games that would be especially useful!
Adrift does this (with a single click, I think), and also has a (somewhat limited) autocomplete. I find that it’s more useful in Adrift than elsewhere, because Adrift authors don’t tend to be very good at including noun synonyms, and have a habit of implementing entire phrases as unique commands. And Adrift is (or was; I don’t know if this is true of version 5) persnickety about adjectives.
It’s true Adrift does that, but it’s unfair to color authors in that light. Any game author can have flaws, no matter the development environment. As far as autocomplete and other stuff goes, I tend to disable those features in the Adrift games I’ve written.
Well, I suspect that the internal architecture of modern PCs would largely be recognizable by Von Neumann and Turing. Or even Babbage, of you want to go that far. But computing doesn’t work like it did in the 40s, and the Web isn’t like it was in the 90s.Things move on. You don’t have to throw away the old stuff on a whim, but that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from the new. Ethernet may have been invented in the 70s, but do you remember that inch-thick yellow cable you had to screw a spike into to make a connection? We don’t have to do that any more.
Looking at it from outside, my bafflement about the IF world is not that would be recognizable to a person working in desktop computing in the 1980s, or that it’s derived from 1980s technology, but that it is the same as it was in the 1980s. A lot of what has happened in the desktop computing world since then is, I think, frivolous and trivial. But not everything, surely?
It annoys me that I can’t find out how to change the typeface size in Gargoyle, or if it’s even possible to. I presume there is some configuration file or something that will allow that. Or maybe it’s easier than that? Who knows? I don’t know of any other software that I routinely use that doesn’t expose basic user configuration stuff in an accessible way.
I presume that’s by design, because that kind of thing isn’t hard to implement.
Well, so would I. But, realistically, does the genre attract many Pulitzer-prize winning authors?
It did once (Thomas Disch, Douglas Adams, Robert Pinsky, Mike Berlyn). Maybe we should ask ourselves what is there about IF that used to interest these writers and no longer does. Maybe the genre has become too fixed in a format writers don’t like, maybe they’ve realized how much more complex it is to write IF than a novel, maybe it’s just that the “fad” for text games was high enough back then to attract those authors, just as the fad for graphic adventures was enough to, say, bring Hollywood voice actors to King’s Quest VI and Gabriel Knight 1.
However we do it, we’d better be ready to have a programmer ready to accompany whatever author becomes interested in the genre, and willing to either a) explain patiently why it’s necessary to write such a huge amount of text a given player may never see, or b) bite the bullet, write it yourself and hope the isn’t much of a clash.
Then again… we’re talking about drawing people who are not drawn to IF. People who ARE drawn to IF play the games, read the articles, know about Crimes against Mimesis and The Craft of Adventure and the Player’s Bill of Rights, and have experienced what makes good and bad works of IF. It is possible that instead of going “I would like it so much if So-and-so would write IF!” we should be going “Wow, we have such great writers already!”. Because they do know what they’re doing.
Though I’ll grant you, to occasionally have someone else come in and shake things up a bit has proven to be a good gamble. All the authors I mentioned in the first line of this post made history - Amnesia, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy/Bureaucracy, Mindwheel, and well, we all know Berlyn…
EDIT - I only now noticed that as I thought up authors, I started losing sight of the “pulitzer-prize winning” bit, but my point still stands.
Right, the settings are buried in garglk.ini. A file of that name will get sourced from a number of locations, starting in the game folder and working up through the $HOME directory and on to the packaged configuration file.
Menu-driven settings were high on my TODO list back when I had more time to devote to the project. Less so now that I am behind a Glk iteration and several interpreter updates.
Anyhow, it does a disservice to the community to mistake Gargoyle’s unfriendly UI for a shared design ethos. Or an individual one, for that matter - the other IF player from that developer (Spatterlight) has a much more conventional UI.
