Yeah, this is the thing I’m interested in too! When I think about this problem, I primarily relate to it from an author’s point of view – as you say, it feels annoying and artificial to work this in, rather than just describing the landscape and what you see without taking the player out of the story. So I totally see the upsides there. On the other hand, when I’m playing a game, even one with GO TO LOCATION implemented, I usually just wind up typing the directions, since it’s typically many fewer keypresses, with fewer opportunities for typos – like, GO TO BEACH is equivalent to six one-letter movement commands, which is pretty far in most games! And if movement requires moving my hand off the keyboard to the trackpad or mouse, that adds even more friction.
I also recently introduced my wife to some IF, and was surprised that the directional movement system seemed to come really naturally to her. She’s basically played no video games of any kind previously, and doesn’t naturally use cardinal directions when navigating in real life, so I was expecting her to struggle. But after I explained it to her once, she easily was able to pick out the possible exits and move around the map (inside, outside, and enter were harder to figure out). And after thinking about it for a bit, I can see how despite the conventional wisdom that things like GO TO X are more newbie-friendly, it could be that for some people it’s the opposite way round: usually the problem with learning how to play a parser game is that you’re not sure what to type so that the game will understand, and while there are ways of instructing the player in the ABOUT text, and coding the GO TO command to be robust to synonyms, it’s still maybe less intimidating to know you just need to type a direction.
That’s just one anecdote of course, but I think there are many things like this that players experience differently from authors. Like, a similar thing that annoyed me when writing my IFComp entry for last year was the way significant items usually get broken out into their own line rather than being naturally included in the description paragraph. So I made most objects undescribed or wove them into the description, which felt much more aesthetically satisfying. But when I looked over transcripts, I think many players wound up struggling with that and the game was harder than intended, because the idea that the most obviously significant objects are going to get called out separately is a familiar convention, and also one that’s got some real ease-of-use even if you’re a new player completely unfamiliar with the convention.
I remember hearing that Blue Lacuna’s ease-of-use upgrades were based on watching a bunch of people try to play parser games, and implementing solutions that would remove some of the pain points. Having that kind of breadth of data on what works for players, especially newer players, would be super helpful, I think, because I feel like it’s easy to make assumptions, and then second-guess those assumptions. I’m curious whether IF events that might have a little more mainstream attention, like the various itch.io game jams, save transcripts and would be a place to look – the IF Comp ones I think are really helpful, but primarily reflect how experienced players tend to approach a game.