I insist that the next IF Comp has separate categories for parser vs choice, short vs middle vs long, new authors vs established authors, game-focused vs story-focused, comic vs serious, well-written vs poorly-written, and innovative vs cliché! It’s just in the interest of fairness.
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$7000 prize pool for each one!
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Well, please consider entering it in Spring Thing instead, once considered the de facto home of the Big Game, e.g. your Blue Lacunas and such. Huge games being entered into a comp with a 2-hour voting rule isn’t ideal for authors or judges.
-Wade
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The SpringThing never gets the same amount of attention, and then it stopped even being a contest a long time ago and lost a lot of its appeal. Very much an apples and oranges thing, I can’t blame any author excited about the IFComp for not accepting substitutes.
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Well, there’s certainly no rule against it. I just don’t think I’ll be playing any of the declared 3 hours+es because I’ve got 100 other games that said they could be played within the judging time! That doesn’t mean I’ll never play them. They’ll have to see if they can cut through later.
-Wade
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I think there’s some merit in a Clichecomp. I should think about that
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It might be a bit of a Nichecomp.
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Nooooooooooooo!!! This topic was just closed! But it’s back from the dead!
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Lichecomp.
(yes I know it doesn’t rhyme)
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It’s actually more fun if it DOESN’T rhyme, IMHO.
Especially if it insisted on having a certain specific thing in it.
What specific thing? Well, something that could alternatively have it called Cornichecomp.
I’ll see myself out.
Let’s get this massive party started.
As we begin, a gentle word on my judging criteria: I am a famous eccentric, and I am unlikely to judge your games by the same metrics as other judges. This will most likely help you, it might hurt you. This game gets some bonus points for a puzzle involving food, and clever graffiti. It loses points for artlessly describing my character’s hard-on on more than one occasion.
Yes, I begin by playing The Incredibly Mild Misadventures of Tom Trundle by B. F. Lindsay.
Genre-wise, I might classify this as a Bildungsromen, but I don’t actually know how to spell that word and I don’t want to waste time looking it up, so I’ll call it an entry in the “Slice of Life” genre, specifically the slightly-bonkers Slice-of-my-demented-life subvariant B.F Lindsay is already famous for. See, e.g., Gone out for Gruyere in which you are menaced by a malevolent wheel of cheese; Bullhockey where a quest to gather laundry takes a bizarre and almost supernatural turn.
Before I say anything else: If you like Bullhockey, you’ll probably like this one. Lindsay has made so many games like this that it has its own style. Lindsian let’s say.
This was a good first entry in my own little judging-space because it affords space to discuss what I like and dislike about long games. This game exhibits some of the paradigmatic qualities of a good long game…and a bad one.
Broadly, this game situates me in the body of a Holden Caulfield-esque high school student who has been press-ganged into running messages between his best bud and some girl his best bud wants to bang. Charming. There is a lot of potential here: Lindsay absolutely nails the inner cognition of a teenage boy in all its tacky splendor (Lindsay may, in fact, have recently been a teenage boy, I don’t know): The game lays its first “fuck” out there prominently in the first few paragraphs, with meaningless bravado. “Shit” is used liberally exactly where it shouldn’t be. dicks are drawn all over the school.
The narrator speaks in the past tense, uncommon for parser games, but it infuses the game with a curious mix of import and triviality: I’m playing someone thinking back to high school (probably from a point not that far away, like college); I know that somehow this story is important, but it takes an awful long time to figure out why.
Let’s continue with more of the unqualified good. The Incredibly Mild Misadventures of Tom Trundle (which, no, I will not abbreviate) is a classic parser in the oldest-school style. That is, the world is big and you can look at stuff. Great start.
The author creates a large and fairly dynamic world, which is an impressive feat. Every object is described, and the descriptions have character. Parser games invite sprawling worldbuilding, and I do love it when authors “lean into” this rather than create a neat little grid that’s easy to navigate, with only the plot-relevant objects described. There’s immense virtue and power in creating a world, even if nobody sees it. For every 6-hour-plus game I’ve created, there are probably three that have never gotten past the “I just make a giant map of rooms” phase…and I know I’m not alone in this regard…and I don’t even think it’s a waste of time. Worldbuilding for its own sake is ennobling in the same way as meditation and playing with seashells on a beach: it leads to self discovery, and more importantly self-abandonment. In creating counterfactual worlds, we discover that the world is larger than ourselves.
Tom Trundle’s World feels large…and real…the kind of reality that comes from those “my crappy apartment” games. Lindsay’s Bullhocky was similar in this regard. As a lengthy digression (get used to it): some particular quirk of human neurochemistry seems to cause new entrants to the world of IF to set about constructing an interactive world based on their own crappy apartment…or school…or dorm…or house…or whatever. These games tend to have a charming vividness as the author simulates the intricacies of a door hinge, a bathroom, or a weird crooked hallway that starts out going to the south but then kinda bends and goes east. Tom Trundle’s world has a few odd details that are so carefully mapped out that I’m convinced they’re based on something real: a teenager whose parents let him live in a little bungalow out behind the property; a teacher that loves soda, a notebook full of interlocking-triangle doodles that has no plot relevance whatsoever.
Last Year’s bizarre variant, Extreme Omnivore, Text Edition is probably the height of the My Crappy Apartment genre, but EO:TE (which I will abbreviate, because it’s not a 2-hour-plus game) did not do very well last year…and there’s a reason for that. My Crappy Apartment games tend to suffer from a fatal flaw: because they are set in a world just like real life, a world in search of a purpose, there tends to be precious little for the player to do. They simply exist. Tom Trundle’s world, sadly, feels like this as well. There’s a surprising amount to see and interact with, the author has even taken the time to code dynamic environment events into nearly every location…but I’m simply shunted from one location to another like a damn tourist. I have no choice whatsoever.
this is because The Incredibly Mild Misadventures of Tom Trundle is, at its heart, a puzzle game and a memoire. I lack agency in part because this story already happened…it’s being remembered, and I’m just supposed to faithfully carry out the memory. I solve a puzzle, the narrator recalls that’s what he did, and we move on to the next puzzle. Some people like games like this…I do not. Parsers are fun for me precisely because I can explore and decide. Let me explain more:
The lack of player agency is so dramatic here that I’m convinced to some extent it was deliberate. Some commentary on the strictures of being a teenager or whatever. I begin at my desk…I cannot stand (because class isn’t over)…I must wait…the bell rings, I leave school…but I can’t leave until I go to my locker…I go to my locker, discover my friend has left me a note: he wants me to deliver a letter to his crush, now I can leave…that sort of thing.
This has some synergy with the fact that the author creates numerous exits to rooms that (deliberately) do not work. The milleau is very much a large world, where (due to not having reached the age of majority) I am denied access to the interesting bits: I cannot enter the teacher’s lounge after school; I certainly can’t take my teacher’s briefcase, even though its an item I can look at; One room’s description artfully reads: This tree-lined street went east-west—east to my bungalo, west to nowhere. Take your pick. Needless to say, I cannot go west. West is the world that is not home. I don’t get to go there…sixteen year old me can relate.
The game even puts some seemingly interesting choices into my hands right away: I’ve got this note from my best friend…a secret note. I’m not to read it. But this is a parser game and the item is right there in my hand. I just know that I can type some command like “open letter” and learn all his delectable little secrets. The power is awesome, and it’s the sort of implied choice at the heart of the parser genre: a choice-based game would need to make this explicit: Open the note/Don’t. Here, I simply know by the nature of interactable objects that I could open the note, but choose not to.
It makes my ultimate decision to be a good friend all the more powerful. I have a pretty good idea, thanks to the introduction, of who I’m supposed to be in this world. I’m not going to open the note…maybe on some other replay, but for now I shall play the part of the faithful friend. (more on replaying later)
Alas, as the plot moves forward, I am forced (without any choice in the matter) to betray my friend. I run the note to his lady love…I see her posing in a bikini…the author forces me to watch as she poses in the bathroom…Then when I delver the note I am forced to WAIT while she reads the note…then she walks over and kisses me…and I’m forced to enjoy it.
In competent hands, this kind of denial of agency in a game that otherwise bestows agency can be powerful: IF has been using constrained choice for social commentary since the early 2000s. Here, however, it feels violative. I thought I was a good friend, alas, I don’t get to make that choice. On further playthroughs I discovered I can’t even read the note in advance of this encounter. The narrator chides me that he’s not the sort of person who would do that. I am forced to play a character that is just noble enough to deliver the note without reading it, but lacks the willpower to conform to the Bro Code.
I don’t mean to make too much of a meal of the sexual aspect of this, but it’s worth a comment. Sex in interactive games needs to be handled very delicately, even if the player is playing a specific character, not a genderless player-stand-in. In particular, Tom Trundle stands in stark contrast to last year’s Robotsexpartymurder, a masterpiece of the IF-with-Hard-Ons genre. Robotsexpartymurder is an incredibly horny game that nevertheless affords me, the player, diverse and varied opportunities to not be horny…and that choice is actually meaningful. Denying the player choice in a parser game is annoying…denying the player choice in a parser game when it comes to intimate decisions feels intrusive. The Incredibly Mild Misadventures of Tom Trundle forces me to watch, hard-on and all, while my friend’s crush poses in front of a mirror, then later I’m forced to make out with her.
After my first hour of play, I felt slightly betrayed: I had been presented a large world, and had not yet been afforded the opportunity to make a single meaningful choice.
Another digression. In the world of IF, we are confronted with an awkward question of how to rate games that don’t really afford the player any agency. These games sometimes use the utter lack of choice for the purposes of commentary or dramatic effect. My Father’s Long Long Legs uses the lack of choice to convey leaden, eldritch doom. Polish the Glass conveys madness. Out uses the same mechanism to convey liberation, in an almost Buddhist sense. So does the archetype of the genre: the northnorth passage. Indeed, there may be some profound truth in these games: It may be that only in doing the same damn thing sixty gazillion times shall we find ourselves.
The trouble is that some of these games are just…bad. I’m not going to name names and hurt feelings, but every comp, there are a handful of submissions that simply force the reader to click through some text for twenty pages, perhaps with some arbitrary choice spliced in there somewhere like, e.g., “Call Stephen” versus “watch some TV and then call stephen”. Somehow…Some way…these authors are convinced they’re making interactive fiction. I’m sure by some metric they are, but the fact of the matter is that this constrained choice generally makes for bad interactive fiction. A player gets bored…even frustrated. Why not just read a novel?
The Incredibly Mild Misadventures of Tom Trundle is frustrating. After more than a hour, I reached a point where I was sure…so sure…I would finally be afforded a chance to make a meaningful choice, rather than simply be shunted around by the narrator:
"I had a choice. I could either go back out again and try to intercept Will, talk fuckin’ sense to him, and deliver Liz’s note.
Or I could just say fuck it, and hang out here at home, strum my guitar, go visit Anne, and have something resembling a weekend."
Let me be perfectly clear: after spending an hour as Tom Trundle, this would be a choice both meaningful and difficult: the author does a decent job making me care about my friend…but also making me feel just a wee bit tired of his loverboy antics. Seeing my girlfriend after jamming out on my guitar actually seemed like a good idea. I decided, after thinking about it a little bit, to just throw my friend to the hounds of love and not help him out.
…but no, i cannot do that. Once again the narrator reminded me that I had a friend in need. I was forced to run yet more errands to move the plot along. I can’t go see my girlfriend until I deal with my friend’s bullshit. This is very frustrating.
I don’t know the term for this in broader IF, generally I think we’d just say the game is “on rails”. It’s a puzzle game after all, and one that is fairly linier in how it wants you to solve its puzzles: do this, then do that, then take care of that other thing. I don’t even have the freedom to choose what order to solve puzzles, or even to explore the world very much. To some extent this is the life of a teenager…to another, quite larger extent, it makes for a boring game.
The story is engaging enough that I do want to see what happens, and there are charming little details later on: A puzzle that involves supreme pizza, a kidnapping that could just be a broad attempt to mess with the narrator (this seems to be a motif in Lindsay’s work. Perhaps he’s channeling the Cohen Brothers) but I feel the game pulls the reader around a bit too much for the parser genre.
This is all a long way of saying that it’s a puzzle-parser on rails, of the sort that I don’t really like, but it’s well written and charmingly bizarre enough that it’s saved from a bad score.
FINAL VERDICT: A perfectly adequate 5
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I take it you didn’t play it to the end? I think it’s just the beginning (well, an hour and a half long beginning in this case) that is “on rails” as you say. After that it opens up to a proper puzzlefest.
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When I tried to open Will’s note, the message I remember seeing suggested “I might be able to open it accidentally” which teased that I could open it by solving a puzzle. Which created the illusion (for me anyway) that I did have some agency, but was choosing to continue my mission out of loyalty. Eventually I got to read the note anyway.
Was there really some other way to open the note by accident? I doubt it. This isn’t a game that stands up to replay. But it doesn’t need to. It just needs to create those little teases that you might have some other choice the first time through. That was my take anyway.
Successful parser fiction is all about creating the illusion that the game will successfully respond to any input, but really only has to successfully respond to the input that the player provides. The magic trick worked for me, but I guess not for every player of this game.
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