I thought it might be nice to have a thread where people can post new tags that they’ve come up with so that others can mention games that match.
As an example, I have made some use of the pre-exisiting tag ask/tell conversation, but I’ve also added a new tag – prompted ask/tell – that’s intended to mark games that prompt the player with a list of relevant topics to use for asking and/or telling.
The only games that I could think of with this feature are Lost Pig (the earliest example of which I know) and The King of Shreds and Patches, but surely there are others. Do you know of any?
Anything with the Threaded Conversation extension should do that: off the top of my head Alabaster was the first, but also Counterfeit Monkey, Scroll Thief, Bureau of Strange Happenings all use that same extension.
I see someone tagged Miss Gosling’s Last Case with “dumbwaiter”, which amuses me—I added it to Curses also, but I’m sure there are plenty of others. Dumbwaiters are a parser-IF classic.
The meaning of this tag might be clearer to others who come across it if you include something about suggested topics in the tag. To me, “prompted” could just mean that the game prompts you to use the verbs Ask/Tell or something like that.
Indeed, my first thought when I saw this was the rather unsubtle conversational prompting in 1-2-3 from IFComp 2000:
> ask bob about murder
He smiles an empathetic smile. “Don’t you want to ask me about the victim, Riessa?” he asks.
(Note: I don’t particularly recommend looking up this game, but if you do, please check the IFDB tags first, as this predates the time when in-game content warnings were a common thing.)
My original idea for prompted ask/tell was for marking games that have output like “You could ask about…” when conversing with an NPC, not things like a topic inventory – but how could anyone know that unless they happened across this thread?
After considering the question for a few minutes, I think the most important use for the new tag is distinguishing versus the old-school “blind” ask/tell paradigm in which the player has to engage in a game of guess-the-keyword, and that’s the meaning that I thought would be most reliably carried by the phrase (though other responses suggest this might not be the case).
As the tag system is, I accept that you (and others) might interpret and use the phrase differently than the way I had in mind.
Gestures Toward Divinity is one, and I went to add the tag to it and found that there’s an existing tag called prompted conversation, which might be referring to the same thing? I haven’t played the other two games with that tag, though, so I’m not sure!
Edit: Actually, reading the post immediately above, maybe I’m not thinking of it the way you meant it! GtD has a “topics” listing, so I might be thinking more along the lines Brian was.
Similar to the dumbwaiter tag, there are also tags for well and fountain, two other relatively common tropes in IF. (I think David Welbourn made a comment to this effect in his Get Lamp interview.)