The feature I’ve always dreamed of is of having links reveal themselves when the player presses SHIFT or some other key. That way the presence of a link in the text doesn’t upset the rhythm of the language when the player first reads it.
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I think that in general punishing players is a bad idea. They’re playing these games for fun. If we make finding the options tedious then we’re reducing the fun quotient.Now if we had a page full of random links, one of which is the answer to the riddle at the top of the page, that would be different. (Though I’d still want to include some funny comments and easter eggs in the wrong answers.)
Darn, I seem to be spamming this thread, sorry.
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That would be an interesting experiment! I’ve never done much with Twine, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to implement with a little bit of JavaScript. I’d be curious to see whether players find it useful or annoying.
It would make the game completely unplayable on mobile though.
I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I always try to make my games playable on a mobile device because I really think mobile is the best platform for hypertext fiction. But nobody ever scales their page to adjust for a mobile screen or considers whether features will work on mobile or not, so I really do seem to be in the minority in that opinion.
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You’re not alone here. I’ve also thought it would be an interesting feature to try. And Mark Bernstein has it in Storyspace and argues for this approach:
The underlying problem is more serious: typographically-distinguished text is usually emphatic. Titles, italics, bold fonts: all draw the eye. They literally underline a passage to demand attention. Emphasizing links is occasionally useful, but some links have no need for urgent, immediate attention: we want people to read and reflect, and only then to choose a link.
…
Other Storyspace hypertexts disclose text links only while the Command and Options keys (⌘⌥) are pressed.
–Josh
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Could you include a special button for it on a mobile version? Maybe a toggle so you don’t have to hold it with one finger and click the link with the other?
Maybe. You’d probably have to have it stay in a fixed position on the screen or something for convenience though. Maybe other alternative is to have the links toggle when you click directly on a paragraph. That would work for both mobile and desktop.
I think it would be only polite to offer a style choice of “always reveal hyperlinks” both for people who found having to reveal the links annoying and for those with either technological or motor-muscle problems.
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And maybe an option like “press space to toggle links on/off” instead of having to hold some modifier, too.
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Yes, so the default would be to hide the hyperlinks so that the text read normally, without the visual “noise” of the links messing up the initial reading.
Either holding down the modifier key, or touching the text once would reveal all the hitherto hidden links. Clicking on one of those links (either by mouse or by fingertap) would open that link, but all the links would revert to being hidden. (If the player was still on the same page because the link had just added another paragraph, I don’t think it would be a problem: most people would be able to recall that say, Mr. Proctor, the tree and the mysterious stone had all shown up as links, and could directly click on them, although they could still use the mod key or touch to confirm if they wanted.)
Hitting the spacebar would permanently toggle links as visible/hidden. What about mobile/touchscreen users? Two-finger tap to bring up the alt-menu on any link and select “keep links visible”? I don’t know enough about the different capabilities of iPhone, Android etc. to guess what would be simple to implement and what would be impossible.
I feel like this discussion has moved into a shaky design area.
You’re imagining that a player would read the text as text, then use the modifer to highlight links. But why do you think a player would do that?
You’re making the player do extra work to see what’s going on in the interface. I’d say a lot of people would keep the highlights visible all the time. Does the game play well that way? If the answer is no, are you going to try to prevent the player from doing it? If yes, why not make it the default and avoid this whole swamp?
The underlying assumption seems to be that finding links is tedious but it’s also the core action of gameplay. All this messing around with highlights feels like trying to paper over that problem.
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I think this originally started because people dislike having the answers given to them about which items in the story are important and which aren’t. They miss scouring the text and examining every noun. But to me, that’s just unnecessary busy work.
When I see a room description in a parser game, you better believe I examine every noun, and then every noun in the examine description, until I run out of things to examine. Hypertext is just streamlining that by making them clickable links. The sense of discovery and exploration is from reading the description, not monotonously scouring the text for objects. Not to me anyway.
Whenever a point-and-click adventure game lets me toggle on highlighted objects in the room, I do it for the same reason. Nobody enjoys pixel hunting unless it’s a hidden object game.
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Has Texture been mentioned? The words that can be interacted with are not highlighted until a verb has been grabbed at the bottom. I think it works really well with this system of draggable verbs.
But for regular hypertext IF, it may not work as well.
(We’re going a bit off the original topic, aren’t we?)
Ah, I missed that. The design issue I was thinking of is that links are distracting in the same way that footnotes are. You want to go see what it’s referring to right now and it breaks the flow of whatever you’re reading. So if you have a piece of text a player might prefer to digest without distractions…
I guess putting all your choices in a menu after the text also sort of addresses this issue, and lets players skip the body text and read only the choices without having to muck around with extra controls. 
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That’s kind of an issue with the player, not the system though. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone discuss a method of preventing parser IF players from examing objects in a room before they’ve finished reading the text. It’s just up to the player to show a little self-restraint.
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The thing is that a block of hypertext is doing two things. Firstly it’s giving the player the story readthrough, and then, after that, it’s giving the player the navigation interface – the links. My own personal experience of reading hypertext is that it’s fine for technical reference (where having a list of sub-references visible as I’m reading it is useful) but fails as a story delivery medium because the links mess UP the rhythm of the prose. I’m distracted from appreciating the story because the navigation interface keeps butting in.
Sure, I don’t doubt that many other people would elect to keep the links visible all the time – that’s their choice. But at present I don’t have the choice of suppressing the visual elements that I find distracting, except by styling links to be indistinguishable from the ordinary text. Doing that introduces the (to me) unacceptable cost of turning the game text into a pixel hunt.
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I guess we’re just going to have to agree to disagree on this one, because I don’t see how a couple colored words makes something fail as a story telling medium. I will agree that some (like default Harlowe format of Twine) present the links in a really jarring way though. That’s what CSS is for.
Edit: Decided to remove my example because I’m sure nobody cares about my stupid game. 
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I can only report on my own idiosyncrasies here, but: For me, since the command prompt is at the bottom of the text, I tend to read through the text that has printed before I type my command. (And sometimes I get snarled because by the time I type the command, I don’t have all the text inside anymore.) But since links are often in the text, I go straight to the link and may not completely absorb the text as something to read.
I’m not saying people need to design around that, and maybe as you say that’s an issue with me rather than with the medium, but I do see why some people might want the links to be recessed a bit so they would be more encouraged into a read-everything-first-then-find-the-link sort of loop.
Jay Nabonne’s Spondre actually pulls off “you can click on any and every word in the text” and it’s a fascinating experiment created in Quest. Some of it is probably default random responses, but otherwise clicking an interesting word pulls up potential interactions.
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Fair enough. Different people find different things annoying to different degrees. For example I find the conventions of opera intrusive to the point of ruining my enjoyment, but obviously all those opera fans don’t! Thanks for an enjoyable discussion.
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