Some Musings About Parser Interfaces and Generational Technology

Authoring General Design Discussions
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I have no sources to cite; this is all conjecture.

There seems to be a general trend (but not an absolute truth) that parser audiences lean older. (We see you, @SomeOne2)

I’m certain the cynical among you can think of all kinds of rude stereotypes regarding millennials and zoomers and attention spans, which I would love to not see in the replies.

I feel like there might be a learned skill that is taken for granted in parser audiences, which goes beyond “how to play parsers, and we might not have done the best job in passing that down”.

I’d like to get some data while I talk:

For those of you who enjoy parsers games:

  • I grew up with a command-line operating system
  • I grew up with a graphical window-based operating system
0 voters

For those of you who do not enjoy parser games:

  • I grew up with a command-line operating system
  • I grew up with a graphical window-based operating system
0 voters

I’ve been learning emacs over SSH recently and have been noticing something.

A lot of modern games and interfaces—if we ignore the visual appeal for a moment—deliver a constant environment awareness. You always know where files are, and what options are available.

Meanwhile, a lot of command-line environments require you to have a sort of memorized mental model of your environment, and limited opportunities to remind yourself of things.

I feel like parsers seem to also have a lot of the latter kind of awareness. Players are often asked to remember the available commands, what objects are where, how the rooms are arranged, etc.

I wonder if there is an additional unrecognized skill that a lot of parser players have, which goes beyond just familiarity with the medium. If my guesses are correct, and a lot of parser players grew up with command-line operating systems, then the operating system might have trained the player’s memory abilities for the kinds of environments explored in parser games.

I grew up with graphical window operating systems, and there’s a sort of dizziness that command-line and parser environments give me, even if I prefer to player parser games. It’s always a major task of familiarizing myself with a new environment, and I find myself constantly taking notes every time I play any game because of this.

Thoughts?

(I wrote this with very little time available so it’s not perfect)

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There’s been a lot of ink spilled over the years about the differences between command-line and graphical interfaces, and yeah, I think parser games do assume a lot of that “remembering where things are” ability. More than that, there are a lot of ways to make command-line interfaces (somewhat? slightly?) less intimidating and I feel like parser engines have, if anything, moved away from that? Consider Legend Entertainment’s games from the '90s, where you could have a list of nouns and a list of verbs for help, or you could turn it all off and just have a bare command-line. I don’t think they did tab-complete but IIRC some of these systems (maybe not Legend) moved toward point-and-click where you could click on an object in the graphic to insert the noun into the command.

93436-Gateway_2_Homeworld_(1993)(Legend_Entertainment)-1493782174

I also don’t know that it’s just command-lines, though. You couldn’t just tell your phone to take you where you wanted to go, you’d have to look at a paper map and maybe take short notes that you could glance at while driving so you wouldn’t have to pull over and consult the map again, re-orient if you got lost, etc. And I feel like there are a bunch of little places in our lives now where we no longer have to practice those skills because we have computers to keep track of stuff for us… I’m sure that’s a good thing overall even if I’m a little “kids these days” and keep on stubbornly doing a bunch of things manually because I like having those skills…

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I have a hunch, if I may:

For those of you who enjoy parsers games:

  • I regularly used paper maps and/or written/printed/verbal directions to navigate in my life before converting to GPS aided directions.
  • I have always primarily used GPS aided directions.
0 voters

For those of you who do not enjoy parser games:

  • I regularly used paper maps and/or written/printed/verbal directions to navigate in my life before converting to GPS aided directions.
  • I have always primarily used GPS aided directions.
0 voters
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I think the command-line connection is very astute. Coincidentally, I do remember on more than one occasion wanting to go back to a previous room I was in and typing CD.. so either you’re right or I’m losing it… or maybe both.

Maybe those who enjoy text adventures have a more spatially aware mind? Being able to visualize complex systems and the connections that happen within (both tangible and abstract) is probably something most parser players have in common.

Just thinking out loud though.

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You might be on to something. My phone just does talk and text (it’s too old to run Google Maps properly). Anyway, before I go out to a place I’ve never been before, I bring up the map on the desktop computer, take out a pen and paper, draw the map and label the streets I need. 9 times out of 10, I never need to look at the map while I drive.

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I use GPS aided mapping while driving, but I still keep a 2018 road atlas plus a half dozen state maps of various dates in my vehicle. I feel comfortable flipping to a paper map if I need to. I didn’t start using GPS aided mapping until roughly 5 or so years ago. By then, I had been driving for over a decade, including as an EMT, a newspaper courier, and, briefly, an ill-fated stint as a cabbie.

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Back before GPS was a thing, I’d get general directions before setting out and then relied on my internal mental model to navigate. It usually worked out and I enjoyed exploring while driving. I look back now and wonder how I ever got anywhere. I also rarely or never used paper maps with parser games, just a mental model.

There may be some similarity between parser games and command line operating systems, but GUI systems aren’t always as intuitive and helpful as one may like. There’s this great and funny video that came out when Windows 8 was released that actually touches on some of this.

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And/or filtered for people whose brains find that easy, and put others off using computers (and possibly also IF) while those operating systems were dominant?

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Okay, I get I’m probably not the best person to vote, but I still did, and graphical window people are still losing, so yeah.

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Honestly, we dunno how much we enjoy parser games yet. We’ve not played that many. But we are making one, and we like the idea of them. We grew up on point and click adventures (Myst and the like), and we grew up on Mac OS9 (though we now use Windows 10 on our desktop and Linux Mint on our laptop, lol) so we’re often biased towards visuals, but we also have been coding for a long time.

We can’t recall using paper maps much as a kid, but we also never really had a good sense of direction. We have fond memories of wandering forests near to relatives’ houses though.

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I hate most GUIs most of the time. I like CLIs. The basic reason is determinacy.

The thing we all want out of an HCI (human-computer interface) is to do what we mean. There are two obvious and opposed directions one can go in pursuit of that.

  • offer a means by which a human can say in detail exactly what they mean, and have the computer do exactly that: require the human to become better at talking to the computer
  • make the system better at anticipating what the user wants and doing what the user means, even, potentially, going as far as to ignore what they said in preference to the guess at what they meant: require the software to become better at talking to the human

I can do unspeakably complicated things with command pipelines involving Perl one-liners in a shell, but I typically can’t go longer than two minutes using a Mac without wanting to throw it through a window. I feel it obviously relates to neuro-atypicality on my part: I’m baffled by what is supposed to be “intuitive” in all of these so-called “intuitively obvious” systems.

What with not being able to read others’ minds, and having no way to ever really verify this, I suspect another aspect of my neuro-atypicality is internal hyperverbality. I don’t think in pictures like many ASD people (but neither am I aphantasiac: I navigate by visualizing maps and I do pretty well with mental 3-d manipulation problems). When I speak, I’m writing complete sentences in my head and then saying them aloud. Sometimes there’s a slight, perceptible pause in my responses and people have sometimes been antagonized by it. I’ve had to bite back replying that thinking before they spoke is a thing they might consider giving a whirl some time.

Reading is among my earliest memories. I don’t remember being unable to read.
I’m excellent at spelling, and grammar, and, when I want to be, tediously correct English usage, even according to guidelines that went out of vogue a century ago. It takes effort for me to use “impact” as a verb.

Luckily for my employability, all this carries over to being very good at learning the syntax and semantics of programming languages and other formal systems with which one interacts with computers. I’m good at learning how to say what I mean with painstaking rigor. I want to be able to do so. It’s fricking exhausting trying to read the minds of designers who don’t think like I do so I can try to reproduce what guesses they made about a what a typical user would think.

I deeply imprinted on Adventure when I was very young. It was very likely the first computer game of any sort I’d ever seen. It seemed like the coolest thing ever. That’s never left me. My IF mental home is likely to always be parser-based games.

But I’m also routinely frustrated by them in practice. I think the execution continues to fall short of their promise. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve thought I’d figured out the approach to an obstacle and have tried to enact it with every obvious command I could think of and several less than obvious ones, and none of them worked and I gave up on it as the wrong approach, only to find out later that my idea was right all along and I just never struck upon a command that corresponded to exactly what the game required. I had failed to read the author’s mind regarding what they thought a typical player would think.

So far as the kind of determinacy I talked about above goes, it’s choice-based games that have more in common with CLIs and parser games that have more in common with GUIs.

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I would agree, although I would argue the need to hold a mental worldstate flips the two. I guess it isn’t as clean of a correlation as one could hope for.

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Oh that’s a really interesting perspective! We kind of agree with you on the determinacy thing, it’s always infuriating when a computer does something arcane because of under-the-hood attempts to understand you; though we ourselves could never do everything from the CLI.

It’s also interesting how different our neruodivergent experience is from yours. We often think-before-we-speak even less than neurotypicals do lmao.

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So just checking for understanding: It might not be that command-line operating systems happened to train people for parser games as a side-effect, and it might instead be that there is a section of people who are simply more comfortable in CLI/parser environments, even if they didn’t use CLI first…?

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Self sorting instead of learning?

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I may be an anomaly, but I have no sense of direction; I get turned around all the time, even in familiar places. The only way I can learn how to navigate a place is by memorizing a map of it. I love parser games, but damn do I get mixed up in them just as much as I do IRL. Anyone who’s looked at one of my transcripts has probably seen the evidence of this. Constantly trying to go east when I mean west and having to backtrack…

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What’s a command-line operating system?

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Think MSDOS.

Ms-dosdir

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OK. I don’t know what that is, either. I know it’s a computer thing, and that’s about it. Which probably means this is not a thread that needs my input.

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A CLI is basically an interface to manually type in instructions directly to the operating system. Whereas a GUI (Like Windows) you click on things that visually represent stuff on your operating system. Also, your input is always welcome, as far as I’m concerned.

The comparison is that a parser game also has a command line. That’s the parser. You’re manually feeding it directions. Whereas a choice based game uses links, which is a form of a GUI.

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