What methods or narrative justifications have authors used in parser games in order to handle switching temporarily from one PC to another? I’m not saying technically, in terms of the code; I’m sure that’s very manageable. I’m thinking more about the literary process. How does it look to the player? Does the character who is no longer the PC just stand there like a wart?
While we’re on the subject, are there good reasons and bad reasons for switching? What do you think?
in Chrono Cross for Playstation you switch bodies with antagonist
My favorite example is Suspended, where the original “player character” is effectively a brain in a vat, commanding various robots to interact with the world. Any time you give a command to a bot, that bot becomes the current PC, and any further commands will go to the same one.
If you can’t come up with a reason for it, your reason for doing it is bad 
Not many games do it; they don’t need to, or don’t have a reason to, or don’t want to. It’s a bigger deal to do in IF than regular prose because of implementation costs and possible expectations of universal mechanical or writing changes connected to each PC.
It can be a lot of work, exponentially increasing both what you have to write and code. And if A and B don’t have distinct personalities that would suggest writing their responses differently, it immediately raises the question, ‘Why do this?’ .. unless they’re clones or robot troops (like puzzle pieces that need to occupy more than one area at a time) in the story, or everyone in the game is Generic Adventurer.
You can have in-game reasons for changing (press button B to switch to robot B) or it could be like a novel where you finish a section and the next section just begins with a different character. The latter is what my entire WIP is like.
In conclusion I’m all for it, but I don’t expect to see it much because most games don’t need it or can’t justify it, or the authors don’t want the work hit, which are all good reasons.
-Wade
I switched the main PC to another character confined to a separate map region except for a container that existed on a backdrop in two rooms. I believe I used Inform 7’s built in tense and viewpoint commands to change them so it served sort of like a flashback - playing the side character’s story taught you where to look for a hidden object (which wasn’t there until the past scenes played out.)
My last three games all messed with player identity and shifting it, but weren’t parser.
I’ve played around with a parser mechanic that allows players to send an animal companion into places they can’t reach or that aren’t safe for them; the PC then becomes to the animal. The story justification is that some things or places would only be accessible while you’re in “critter mode,” either because of your different senses, size, or mobility. The other character would either wait or follow while the critter does its thing (or hide if there was some danger or circle around by a different route, whatever the scenario required), which is mostly what people do in real life with working animals. Gameplay-wise, it seems like a fun way to vary the player’s experience with the environment.
That said, I’ve never put out a game that had this mechanic in it, so whether it’s actually fun… we’ll have to see.
That’s clever. Reminds me of The Last of Us 2, where you apparently switch perspectives halfway through, and spend the second half playing as the villain and growing to sympathize with her. At least that’s what I’ve heard, since I’ve never actually played The Last of Us or The Last of Us 2. I know the sequel garnered a huge amount of controversy because everyone was so mad about how it ruined the story of the first game, or something. I wonder if there are any IFDB games that make you play as the villain for the second half so you grow to sympathize with them.
I’ve also heard a lot of Eastgate IF might have involved perspective switching, but I’m unfamiliar with those games. The scene is long-gone and poorly documented, at least on IFDB, where there are only 4 Eastgate game listings and none have any IFDB reviews. I’m not even clear on what Eastgate itself is, because I couldn’t find anything when I looked it up, besides something about a Japanese real estate platform.
If the old PC has to also be in that room when you switch, either design wandering NPCs for each switchable character and give them all custom responses, or… Well, don’t. But definitely custom responses. It also depends on the style whether you want to have the now-NPCs react to that or not. Anyway this discussion just gave me a really odd but funny idea for a game… Thanks!
This only applies if they’re in the same area. If changing PC means jumping to a different vignette with a different map, this becomes a non-issue.
Huh, Eastgate still exists? I was under the impression that they’d gone under and everybody involved had moved on. Though it doesn’t look like they’ve been active for a while, so maybe everybody involved has moved on. The site says it was last updated 2016.
It also seems like all their stuff is paywalled/commercial, which explains why it hasn’t gotten much attention. Gives me the feeling of a small publishing press for niche literature.
I don’t actually know if there’s any way to access the Eastgate stuff that isn’t paywalled. Twelve Blue has a working “Play Online” link on IFDB, but the color scheme is godawful and nearly unreadable. Blue on blue.
I’ve used player-switching in four published games and one WIP.
In one game, the framing story is that you were hacking into a surveillance system and what you usually saw was what the cameras saw. There were two robot bodies you could hack into. While in one robot body, you could see (and dock into) the other one. Docking was designed to be irreversible to avoid extra details.
In the other three published games, I had flashbacks. Two of them let you see the same place or events from multiple viewpoints; one of them, Color the Truth, had a big office building which I had to write 5 sets of descriptions for which was really stressful. I kept the witnesses from running into each other during their stories to resolve issues of accuracy/free will. For the other one, Never Gives Up Her Dead Chapter 2: Murder Train, I had them all be in different places during past events and only converge at the end. For the last one, Sherlock Indomitable, all flashbacks were isolated from each other and super linear.
Never Gives Up Her Dead Chapter 4: Spell Caverns, has you pilot a different body, and it ends with you finding the original PC who is, in fact, standing there like a wart, but it makes sense (it ends with a clone realizing they’re a clone and slowly dissolving).
I’m continuing to add player-swapping flashbacks to my current WIP because I think it’s the most fun way to do flashbacks in a parser game. I’d rather act it out than read a page of text about what someone else did.
In my oldest WIP (Green Elephant, aka “the zoo game” to some friends here) the PC is one of a twin (brother and sister) and the player can switch between the characters (when physically adjacent) by “tag, you’re it!”. Each character has different strengths and weaknesses (otherwise the switch would be unnecessary). The character NOT controlled by the player will tag along unless otherwise occupied and generally acts like an in-game hint giver if the player is stuck. (I much prefer an NPC helping out the player instead of a faceless “game master”.)
Of course the idea is totally not original (I found out the hard way when I came across the “Earth and Sky” series which uses the same mechanic), but I will not give in to temptation and now and then still work on it (main roadblocks are related to my Inform7 inexperience in handling game mechanics the way I want it to.)
I also use a player swapping mechanic to implement travel to another time period in my current WIP, but that is more related to the player playing a younger version of the PC, and the player does not swap the PC with an NPC in the same time period (basically the “player-swapping flashback” as Brian mentioned above.)
Statue, my old IntroComp game, switched player characters between each chapter. It’s been a while, but IIRC there are six PCs in the entry. The justification for this was in service of the narrative, progressing the story through events the main protagonist couldn’t witness.
What many people don’t know is that Infocom’s “Shogun” (which is generally regarded as one of their least innovative and interesting games) initially had a much more interesting approach than the linear sequence of short vignettes that ended up in the final game. Dave Lebling planned to switch the player character with each vignette, giving each also a different motivation to get out of a situation. Some scenes would even be duplicated, but played from different point of views. Even the actions of the main villain should at one point be controlled by the player, trying to cause a betrayal that most of the other instances of the player previously tried to prevent or uncover.
IIRC, this was supposed to be the one innovative point in this late stage Infocom adventure during early development, but unfortunately, as we all know, things ended up being quite different for various reasons.
In my game Murderworld there are multiple playable characters, though not at the same time. You chose a character each chapter, and at least in the first part, the characters not chosen are NPCs in the world who move about on timetables and in response to player actions. There was a brief period when I considered implementing the ability to swap between player characters mid-run, but it simply wasn’t feasible for IFComp.
Design-wise for a game where the player could switch mid run, I imagine each character would have a list of “quests” they’d pursue when they were switched into NPC mode. When the player switches, the game waits a couple beats, especially if the two characters are in the same room, and the new NPC would move toward whatever quest is next in their list. These could largely be textual, but it would be fun to have those quests be mechanically or puzzle driven as well.
The earliest example of character switching that I remember was Questprobe #3 featuring The Human Torch and The Thing by Mak Jukic and Scott Adams. In this Marvel-inspired game, each of the two player characters are super heroes with their own super powers. You need to change characters in order to take advantage of their super powers to solve some puzzles. In some cases, they need to work in cooperation.
Questprobe #3 was released in 1985, which was later than Suspended, but Suspended used a different mechanic. This was more character control than character switching, but both games relied on the alternate viewpoints of different characters having different abilities.
I’ve used the Questprobe #3 model for a work-in-progress, whereby four characters have their own personalities and their own abilities. In some cases, the characters solve puzzles using their abilities, in others, they need to work in cooperation. Apart from changing characters, you can give things to another character or take things from them, and ask them to do things.
Continually changing and moving characters independently would be a real pain, so you can get or drop characters to form a team, and join or leave to join or leave someone else’s team. Teams move about as a unit, so if one player in the team moves, then all the other players in the team move with them. This seems to work fairly well, so you can build your team, then move about as a team until someone needs to leave the team to act independently, then rejoin the team later.
You might also look at these polls on IFDB:
Thanks for the links to the polls. I added a few to the second one, then realised there was considerable overlap between the two.
Blue Lacuna has some brief switching in the dream sequences early on. Maybe it gets more extensive but I haven’t gotten far in that game.
There are various old-school text adventures which featured multiple player-characters…
They mostly fall into two distinct categories. Ones where the different PCs have different abilities (and part of the puzzles involve working out which character to use where).
And games where each character has a distinct map/adventure they are exploring with some interaction between the sections (e.g. trigging an event in one location causes something to happen in another location, or where you need to cleverly use a shared location to pass objects back and forth between characters).
There are some interesting examples on the list. Tom Frost’s games had a unique double window display and he experimented with some interesting mechanics. Diablo had multiple characters who had some independence (and could get themselves killed) when you weren’t playing them. Games like Oldorf’s Revenge are almost pre-cursors to party-based RPGs.
I don’t play modern IF, but I imagine there would be a lot of mileage using multiple-playable characters to explore different perspectives and points of view.