I’d say IF requires that text be the mechanic for interacting with the game/story, not simply the means of consuming it. So typing text, clicking on linked text, clicking and dragging text, or selecting a radio button next to text are all qualifiers. Using a controller or the arrow keys to move graphical representations, clicking on and/or dragging pictures, or any other means of controlling locomotion or action that doesn’t involve text would be disqualifiers.
I haven’t played Sunless Sea, so I can’t say whether this fits or not, but judging from the other comments I’d say it doesn’t!
This must be an interesting discussion because I’m not sure what I think.
I think of 80 Days as mostly IF – though not entirely. It’s not just the map, but the process of chatting with NPCs for map routes (which is distinct from the storylet-based CYOA mechanic).
I think of Fallen London as more RPG than IF. The distinction there is not the mechanics (any given node looks exactly like a ChoiceOf story node) but the overall shape of the game: you spend most of your time grinding for resources. That is, you visit nodes repeatedly and thus stop reading them.
This is a subtle distinction and I’m not sure I can support it in any consistent way! (After all, in most parser IF, you spend most of your moves zipping through rooms and not reading the room descriptions. Or typing GET or DROP commands which produce stock, narratively empty responses. Or re-reading your inventory list, which is almost always exactly what you remember it to be.)
Now, Sunless Sea takes the Fallen London mechanics and adds real-time travel and combat. But, interestingly, it dials back the grinding quite a bit. You can find profitable trading circles and repeat them (some people on the MUD are talking about it right now) but the game is heavily biased towards exploration and completing single-pass narrative threads. Those are the big rewards.
Usually I say that videogame genre is all about interface, but the question of repetition versus unique outcomes is really a different axis.
This is an important point. I don’t believe that if we start including graphical games we have to include them all.
The unspoken assumption here is that most of the people entering IFDB entries are at least somewhat in contact with this discussion. The last time that came up was with the, what was it, ADRIFT site that was auto-entering games into the database. Which was a problem, not because one entry was breaking the rules, but for basic-center-of-the-community reasons.
Is Fallen London different from all the other Story Nexus games? Because until Final Girl I hadn’t seen anything using Story Nexus that I’d consider close to IF. Scattered vignettes written in text doesn’t make the cut.
Depends on which StoryNexus games you tried. (Be fair here, there are well over a hundred.)
Fallen London is more of an exploration of a setting than anything else - a setting with many storylines and hundreds of thousands of words of text, but (as Zarf noted) a distinct grind requirement of repeating sequences in order to progress. You complete storylines (often repeatedly), open new areas and storylines, and then complete those storylines (often repeatedly) in order to progress again.
The setting, to be fair, is perfectly fascinating, and many of the storylines are well-written and interesting. But if what you’re looking for is a cleanly told story, a la Choice of Games or Final Girl - that isn’t what Fallen London is about.
Do the storylines have more than one page/node? Because the ones I’ve experienced in other StoryNexus games usually had at most a couple of paragraphs followed by the final choice.
Yes, they do - quite extensively at times. When I was heavily into Fallen London, I was often midway through multiple storylines at the same time.
However, progressing through storylines is often bound to passing stat checks or gaining certain items, so you can often only progress through one or two nodes at a time (unless you get lucky on the stat checks.)
It’s also a recent feature (relative to the system as a whole – it’s been there a while now) that one storylet can send you directly into another. Some more recent FL storylines and several of the Sunless Sea stories use this method to produce a multi-beat arc before dropping you back into free choices.
hm, totally confused by that. 80 Days’ map is quite pretty, but it adds nothing whatsoever to gameplay that wasn’t there in ADVENT: there are various locations in the game, and you can get to only some of them from where-ever you are now. What’s new in that?
zarf comments elsewhere on this thread that 80 Days’ NPC interactions are novel, but I’m not buying that either; how do they differ from any CYOA game?
Mind you, I completely love 80 Days. But it sure seems to me that you could build it as pure text and have substantially the same gameplay, if not the same aesthetic experience. The only thing that’s not in the traditional IF lexicon is that you sometimes have a limited amount of real time to make a decision, and that surely has been done before too.
I think that you could take the map out of 80 Days and have it still function, but it’d do serious damage to a core strength of the game.
I talked about how 80 Days relies on the map over here, but the tl;dr version is that the map provides information that the text doesn’t, which the player relies on regularly in order to make mid-range plans, and that those plans form a huge part of the game’s strategic interest. (Whereas in Counterfeit Monkey the map is just a way of organising geographical information that the text already provides.)
If you never really think ahead about your route in 80 Days, the map’s just pretty - and maybe some people play like that? But I think that’d be ignoring a major part of the game.
Is that reliance on the map fundamentally different from the way Suspended uses its map, though? (Full disclosure: I have yet to play either.) It seems to me that the way you’ve described 80 Days the map is kind of like a feelie, and Infocom games made you use the feelies sometimes–as copy protection, often, but Suspended seems to go beyond that. OTOH maybe Suspended is a borderline case anyway.
No, the map system in 80 Days is not a feelie. You could describe the map display that way, but that ignores some of the system.
I didn’t say they are novel, I said they are not like typical IF interactions. They are much more like board-game interactions (a comparison I think maga has made).
You have a random NPC encounter – distinct from a story-based encounter – and you have a certain number of actions (turns) to query for routes. If you hit a positive response, it’s added to your map. Certain resources (whiskey, etc) can be used to gain more turns.
The text responses in these bits are somewhat randomized, but there’s no attempt to pretend that you’re advancing any storylines. It’s a utilitarian session of fishing for routes.
(Compare “Ten Days in Africa”, where you turn up tiles to gain new travel options. Not the same mechanic, but the same feel.)
What’s notable is that this feels like a separate game element from the story-based encounters, which play out like ChoiceOf storylets.
