It’s a fact:
In my opinion, choice games are basically a work of storytelling where interaction is almost zero.
Reading a story is profoundly different from “living a story”.
And the sense of mystery and the desire to discover is behind that flashing cursor.
Behind that obsessive question: “What do I do now?”
This wasn’t a parser vs choice thread. Don’t turn it into one. It’s merely asking people’s opinions on one method of writing. A style that can also be used in a parser game, whether through a choice interface, or by stealing control of your input (Shrapnel comes to mind).
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Wait, but is it a fact or is it your opinion? Us hacks who write Twines with no sense of mystery or discovery would say that maybe you need to make a choice.
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Obviously that’s my opinion.
When I wrote: “It is a fact” I was actually speaking to myself.
I didn’t mean to belittle choice based games.
I’ll try to explain myself better.
Several years ago I was playing a classic text adventure, and after several hours of play, in frustration, I instinctively insulted the parser.
In response to my action, the program simulated a viral attack on my computer.
The attack initially seemed real because perfectly imitated the Junky virus (a very widespread virus in DOS systems of those years)
I remember the terror I felt and then the relief of discovering it was a simulation.
This is what I’m looking for in an interactive fiction game (obviously not the viral attack😂 but the unexpected, the sense of discovery. …) what I can’t find in a choice based game.
But, as I said, it’s just my opinion or, if you prefer, my limit.
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You’re certainly welcome to your opinions, but what kind of constructive conversation can result from this message if you’ve decided your opinion is a “fact”?
If you’d like to ask for suggestions of choice-narratives that might change your mind, that’s constructive.
Just posting this to stir up an argument about one type of narrative being inherently better than the other is not constructive, and obliquely serves as an insult to everyone who writes choice-narrative whether you intend it or not.
Please keep the discussion civil.
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I think I was a little crankier this morning than I meant to be 
I’ve been doing weird meta twists like that in my games for years, but you probably haven’t notice because they were all choice-based. As for me, I find parser is a maze of “you can’t do that” and “I don’t understand that” and “Which box did you mean, the box or the box?” To me, parser games often feel like driving a car which stalls every 30 seconds. Obviously some parser games are better than others, and I’ve course played plenty of well-implemented ones, but a lot of times it seems to me that the “wide open possibilities” of a text adventure, whether choice-based or parser, really depend on the skill of the auth–
Oh, crap, I’m doing it again, choice-based vs. parser. No one needs to hear anybody’s opinions on that subject ever again but man is it seductive…
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And…I personally started as a die-hard parser person. I love working in Inform 7, and at first I didn’t care for choice conventions with little interactivity. But I started experimenting, hoping to figure out what’s possible with creating gameplay in a choice context. I don’t know if it works every time, but I enjoyed every weird thing I created or tried to create.
I actually have to say that Porpentine was a major influence on me. I didn’t get into all her games (Crystal Warrior Ke$ha and Cyberqueen are stealth favorites for music integration and shared love of Shodan) - but the simple grinding/gameplay mechanics started gears turning in my mind about how to engage a player and compel them to keep clicking.
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I used to love parser games. I still understand why everyone likes them and I wouldn’t convince anyone not to like them. However, my movement away from parser games happened around the same time that I stopped caring about gaming in general. At some point, the part that makes a game a “game” became uninteresting to me. I have zero patience for puzzles whatsoever. Like none. I audibly sigh when I come across one and look for a faq almost immediately. I don’t find them fun, and so they’re just roadblocks on the way to what I want, which is the story.
This why I prefer choice games. If a text adventure is a giant hedge maze, then a choice game is a mining cart in which you can switch the tracks. It’s constantly moving forward and leads to lots of different scenes to view, but unfortunately the tracks will sometimes drop you into a pit. But thems the breaks. Technically that turns the entire game into a puzzle of trying to get the best ending, but in this case every attempt is rewarded with new content, not just “you can’t do that”.
It’s completely a matter of preference and these just suit me better these days. My taste in movies, music, women, and food have also changed as I’ve grown. Life is weird like that. 
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Almost zero is not the same as zero. Even two choices gives you worthwhile agency. Honestly a big part of my enjoyment of IF dates back to Choose Your Own Adventure books and fantasy gamebooks so long ago, I’m not going to turn my nose up at a good branching multiple-choice story.
And there are plenty of choice-based games that are less about a branching story and more along the lines of day-to-day management sims, choosing where to go or what to do from a list and trying to maximize what you can accomplish. (Horse Master is a classic example of the style.) It doesn’t have to be CYOA.
This thread is specifically about moments of zero interaction, or close to it…games that really stretch the definition of “game,” or would redefine interaction so thoroughly that you could call any book interactive fiction, since technically turning the page is an interaction!
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I was thinking about the original topic, and it becomes really silly when you think of trying to implement the same thing in a parser game. Like a huge block of prose followed by “type ‘breathe’ to continue”. I think the common reaction would “Why? 
What’s wrong with a ‘more’ prompt?” It pretty much kills any immersion, even though it’s attempting to be more immersive.
That’s exactly what happens in this parser game:
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That game is unplayable on my phone thanks to the online interpreter and lack of download. But from the part where I’m supposed to type something, I can see what you mean. Why didn’t they just make a twine game? Or at least let you choose with numbers or a menu?
But to be more clear of what I meant, I was thinking more like:
These days, you often find yourself feeling confused and uprooted.
You shake yourself and force the melancholy thoughts from your head, trying to focus on the errand at hand. You’re to meet with the real estate agent and pick up the keys to your new house while Michael runs across town to take care of some paperwork at the university. He’ll be back to pick you up in a few minutes, and then the two of you can begin the long, precarious process of settling in.
A sullen belch emanates from the clouds, and the rain starts coming down harder – fat, cold drops smacking loudly against the cobblestones. Shouldn’t it be snowing in New England at this time of year? With a sigh, you open your umbrella.
Welcome to Anchorhead…
type “sigh” to continue
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Usually parser games implement this by making you type “z” over and over again while conversations or events continue, which I guess is more immersive and elegant than “breathe”?
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I don’t think that’s quite the same, because “z” is a workaround for the fact that parser games are turn based. In a normal adventure game (or even a MUD) that had conversations you could listen to, you would just stand there and watch them play out, but that’s not possible in a text adventure.
Probably closer is the trope where you start in bed and literally can’t do a single action until you get out of bed. Like, just start with me out of the bed then. Give me control where control matters, not where I’m still stuck on rails.
It is possible to do real-time-based puzzles or events in a parser game (most systems support having timers interrupt a wait for input). And some have even done so.
But it’s generally frowned on, since people who like parser games also like that nothing advances until they say so, so that they can think carefully about their next move or aren’t disadvantaged by their typing speed.
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Yeah, it’s difficult to find a balance in scenes when a player is just witnessing something – there’s plenty of games that do quick reactive action well, and plenty of examples of good conversation, but longer, more passive bits are always pretty tricky. If you’re watching two characters have a conversation, or having an internal monlogue, or going through a more descriptive or expository section, there’s a lot of questions in terms of how to present that. If it’s one long paragraph, it won’t give as good of a sense of time passing, and let’s face it, no one reads walls of text anyway. If it’s broken up, that’s a lot of blank and empty commands, even if they have the kayfabe of a flimsy action like “breathe”. It’s a lot of time that the player and the player character are just sitting back and letting things happen.
My solution, of course, is to use TIMED TEXT, and if anyone complains, mutter something about “Kristevan semiotics” and pseudonarrative dissonance and how you’re doing a Brechtian deconstruction of the division/synthesis/synergy/syzyzy between player/character/author/text/hors-texte and if they have a problem with it it’s because they’re too stupid to understand it because it’s too deep for them.
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I would argue that if a player hasn’t fully bought in to reading a lot of text in interactive fiction, this is probably the wrong genre for them.
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…I hope you allow the end-user to control the speed/delay associated with that timed text, as different people read at different rates. 
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But if I give the player enough time to read it or I don’t time it too slow for them, then they’re going to read it and understand it and move on to the next part at a comfortable pace, when what I want is for events to happen too quickly for them too fully process, or perhaps frustrated at too slow of a pace. It’s not like I’ve never considered the effect on the player before.
Of course; at the same time, the more blocks of text there are in a game, the less likely it is that the author has been editing and paring down. There’s exceptions for everything, of course, but generally, if a passage in a Twine has a scroll bar, it’s a sign they might should break it up a bit or do another editing pass.
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