There will always be players who mash the button until they see boobs, penises, blood, and/or explosions. I don’t design around those strategies.
What I meant was that it would start off as the player thoughtfully considering which words may be important before clicking, and then will eventually become a trial and error of “What about this one? No? And this one? No?”, and then finally will become clicking every single word without even reading them. As gamers we’re trained to take repetitive tasks and reduce them to the most efficient method. Mashing left-click will be the inevitable result.
Edit: One fix for this would be to create a “penalty” for clicking the wrong word. Like a message saying “you don’t find anything important about that”. Then clicking blindly will become a waste of time instead of saving time, and will force the player to actually read the text.
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Oh, definitely.
This made me think of audio games such as games made for personal assistants like Echo or Google Home.
I noticed EmShort had a couple blog posts recently about them and I have started playing a few of them myself to see what they’re like and if there’s a viable platform for IF there.
Edit- also agree with the point that all types of medium can tell any type of story.
Not to make this a discussion about the subgenres but adding to the above I suppose you could have an Audio Game VN, an Audio Parser-Based IF, or (arguably most popular in the format) Audio Choice-Based game.
One way around this is to conceal unmarked options in the text — the equivalent of “examine,” perhaps. The link is present but formatted to look like plaintext, so the user must read carefully and mouse over every word.
That requires very careful control over the presentation of the text, though, and in my experience often fails when accessed with different methods. As well as not truly being an obstacle to a thorough player, assuming the player is fairly informed of the possibility.
One fix for this would be to create a “penalty” for clicking the wrong word. Like a message saying “you don’t find anything important about that”. Then clicking blindly will become a waste of time instead of saving time, and will force the player to actually read the text.
Or not permitting the player to go back and choose again. That requires a careful weighing of options before making a selection - and the disabling of the Undo feature.
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Another fix would be to make clicking the “wrong” word simply advance the story. So kind of a smoother “not permitting the player to choose again.” (Or a version of what I did in Synesthesia Factory, just not in parser.)
Or not permitting the player to go back and choose again.
Another fix would be to make clicking the “wrong” word simply advance the story.
To be honest, I really dislike the idea of both of these options. To me, it’s basically taking what most people dislike about hyperlink games (the fact that you never know what’s going to happen when you click a link in the description) and turning it into the worse possible outcome. That’s just my opinion, of course.
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I have always speculated about a system which would essentially be SCUMM for text.
In SCUMM games like Maniac Mansion there is a block of verbs, and you make commands by clicking on those and nouns in the graphical environment. I think it would be interesting if all the text was clickable and the player made sentences with the text onscreen instead of typing…which could then be parsed, or “scenery” would just pop up a box like EXAMINE. It would solve guess-the-verb since it would be necessary to write text that included every action the player could take at the time.
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I also thought about a system like that. Although your idea sounds more advanced than mine. My idea was closer to Monkey Island with simple “look”/“take”/“push”/etc commands. I was thinking left-click could be examine and right-click could be the list of actions.
However, that idea doesn’t play very nice with browsers (especially mobile browsers). But it’d probably work well in a non-browser framework (or electron or something). On that note, it’d be interesting to see a Twine game take advantage of what electron offers… 
Hanon, I see you were one of the testers for it, but for others who may not know, Texture is fairly similar to what you’re describing.
https://texturewriter.com/about
It does suffer from a lack of explanation on the website though! They want you to dive in and see for yourself, I guess.
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And if we’re talking about commercial viability, then don’t forget that the cost of producing a visual novel is waaay less than a video game, so you don’t have to sell a million units before you get your money back.
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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