Some of my work is targeted at young students. It is not always a means to deliver fiction but to encourage abstract thinking and teach a little science (fiction) along the way. For my use, I choose both parser based fiction and Twine based on my intended use and student. Text rich IF is not always a bad thing.
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How do you manage that when peopleâs comfortable reading speeds vary from around 80 to 450+ words per minute? I was playing a game recently where most of the comments were that they disliked the (intentional, I believe) effect that the text came and went too quickly for them to fully process, while that hadnât even occurred to me until reading the comments since I found it frustratingly slow.
Did you mean syzygy or xyzzy?
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I donât agree for parser. I think shorter blocks enhance the interactivity. Ratio of response text to input text could be considered a measure of interactivity.
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In an unreleased story (parser-based) I have a few moments where for added emphasis of time passing it will wait for some real time before printing the next paragraph. But itâs not asking for other input during that time, the delays are pretty short, and you can skip most of them if you really want to advance faster, which I hope should make them atmospheric rather than annoying.
Pacing is really important. Text styling can be very effective, but style must be balanced with the playerâs reading speed.
When in doubt, err on the side of never wasting the readerâs time.
Thereâs a huge difference between pacing and manufactured suspense.
One of the guyâs behind Disco Elysium said they modeled their dialogue system after Twitter. In his mind, people always say they âhate readingâ but everyone canât stop complaining about how much time they spend on Twitter. Iâve tried to keep that in mind with my own designs and writing.
While I think thereâs some reason in what youâre saying, I also think reading text in a game off a monitor is a different experience than reading passages in a novel in a book or on your phone. Maybe itâs just me, but reading on a computer screen is harder, especially if the lines are wide and your eyes need to do a lot of travelling. The smaller and narrower the chunks, the easier it is for me to read large amounts of text on a screen and more immersed I can be in the story instead of begrudging the physical experience of reading itself.
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A love of reading text is not a pre-requiaite to enjoying playing text adventure games.
Text adventures donât require very much text and many 8-bit games thrived with no story and little text.
The less text you have, the easier it is to make the world rule based and interacrive. Storyless text adventures are puzzle boxes with a parser UI.
Choice based games donât necessarily need to have a story, or a lot of text either. Graphics reduce the need for descriptive text too.
This obviously is why I donât think that IF and TA are interchangeable terms. Some IF is not text centric, and some TA is not narrative centric. IF and TA have significant overlap but they are not synonyms.
One by definition requires a narrative and the other is loudly and proudly a game - with or without âfictionâ.
I feel that a breathe single choice is okay as a sort of literary breath or pause. Interpreter games, including those by Infocom, do this occasionally. Thatâs what should be kept in mind. Do it too much and you ruin the experience.
Thatâs not a great comparison, IMO. The people that donât enjoy reading but waste time on Twitter arenât really reading. Theyâre just scrolling through their timeline without paying attention to anything until a selfie or gif jumps out at them and then theyâll spend two seconds responding with a reaction gif or some generic phrase thatâs been recycled to the point of being unfunny and meaningless. The ones that do like to read just spend their time getting into fights with people because someone likes something that they donât like.
Ignoring that, I agree that a wall of text can be difficult on the eyes. Most news sites have learned to break up large blocks of text with an image, video, or even an enlarged quote. Just something to give your eyes a rest.
Novels are usually about four to five paragraphs per page, which is also a good number for Twine games and the like, IMO. From what Iâve seen, a lot of Choice of Games games adhere to this also, though they occasionally get long winded in parts. But they never get as bad as their semi-competitor the Delight games that sometimes feel like theyâre trying to fit a whole chapter into a single page.
Is this something you know from study, or something you are invested in being true 
Whatever you may think of Twitter, I have learned a lot just by studying the design of their page and I think itâs had a positive influence on my latest work. And I do think a lot of people are reading on it, itâs just that the options you have to engage with content tend to make it useless for anything other than boosting or remixing. Itâs the design of interactivity, and not the design of the text, that makes it as horrible as it is.
Though there are some pretty funny people on there.
Choice Games work fine for me because Iâm playing them on my phone. Phone reading is easier for me because again, the line widths are very narrow and with the way scrolling works your eyes arenât moving too much. By contrast, Twine games I play on PC get tiring when thereâs so much text on a page I have to scroll.
I donât think I could play Choice Of Games stuff on my computer.
I lurk on Twitter a lot, and my observations are based on that. There are some good people on there, but there are also truly, truly horrible people on there as well. I think Twitter (and social media on general) took a dive the instant the like button was introduced. Everything is about likes and follower counts even if half those followers are bots.
I also prefer doing all of my reading on my phone (if not an actual paper back). Iâm pretty sensitive toward the fact that most IF doesnât care about mobile at all, even though I think itâs the ideal platform and the future of IF. Even for parser games, IMO, even though typing is obviously easier with a real keyboard.
But itâs really sad how many games in this yearâs IFcomp I couldnât play because they either didnât scale to my phone, or had positional elements that broke on my phone, or used a version of the JS interpreter that doesnât accept mobile keyboard input, etc.
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I mean, this forum has a like button. But this forum also is used exclusively by a community with shared goals, limited size, and is one which inducts new members by having them introduce themselves. Also content is organized into fields of interest and topics.
We both agree on the mobile point though. Designing for mobile first is what Iâm interested in going forward. And to tie it back to the topic, I kind of hate having to scroll, so finding out how to break up longer text in a way that isnât grating is important to me. Or maybe it just means I need to introduce more choices, which I guess gets out of the problem entirely.
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Mobile is certainly the âfutureâ of choice-based IF. (Iâd say mobile is already the most popular way to enjoy commercial IF of all kinds, particularly if you include F2P graphic novels in the mix.)
IMO, this is a bit of a problem for Twine, because inline âhypertextâ isnât that great on mobile. Fingers require buttons that are at least 1cm x 1cm. If you have two lines of text, one atop the other, each of which has a different choice option, itâs going to be difficult to for players to tap on the option they want (unless the font size is unreasonably large).
One way to âsolveâ this problem is to include âenoughâ filler text between the options to make them easy to touch the right one, but that tends to be unpoetic.
The other way to âsolveâ this is by avoiding hypertext in the middle of regular text: make each link its own paragraph with a blank line before and after it. But then the links are basically just buttons; they donât feel like text you can touch. It would be better at that point to replace the links with actual buttons with borders, rounded corners, margins, etc.
As for the topic of this thread, IMO, ChoiceScriptâs âNextâ button fades into the background as part of the UI. In ChoiceScript, we call it a *page_break command, and itâs fine. You donât even notice that it says âNextâ after a couple of pages. I think that a hypertext âNext pageâ link never fades into the background, especially when it has some real text in it (âBreatheâ).
Foregrounding the page break is good when you want to call attention to the act of turning the page, but bad when you just want a simple break between pages to break up the text.
Thatâs interesting. Whatâs an example parser game that you think plays better on mobile than on desktop?
Mobile parser games havenât taken off relative to desktop, and I think itâs not just the keyboard problem. For traditional text adventures with a complex map, I find it really helpful to have a window open with a map (either provided by the game or in a Trizbort window) and another window open with puzzle notes.
I certainly agree that good IF presentation requires restricting the width of lines of text to something that doesnât force the eyes to scan back and forth. At Choice of Games, we set our game text to have a maximum width 480px which feels about right to me, though I could imagine setting it narrower than that. (But, then, you can also resize your own browser window on desktop, something you canât really do on mobile.)
Ian Millingtonâs Cheat Sheet for Better Typography recommends max-width: 450px but in the font heâs using that works out to only ~50 characters, which feels a bit too tight for my taste.
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This has been an interesting and useful thread to read; right now in a WIP demo Iâve been editing after a long hiatus from serious writing, Iâve got three single choices in a row, phrased as questions that the narrator answers to give some context to the story and setting â itâs a bit of a clunky work-around, and given what Iâve read here, Iâm thinking it may go over better if I present all three choices at once, and let the player go through them in any order.
(I do think that this is an authorial choice where thereâs no real way of pleasing everyone â some people love judicious non-choices to progress, some people hate them. Getting peopleâs perspectives on these things is interesting and useful, but ultimately, itâs an aesthetic choice like any other.)
Also, Iâve very much kept in mind the Choice of Games guidelines â even though I work with ink, not ChoiceScript â to keep chunks of text per âpageâ to around 200 words at most.
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Ooooh thanks for this guide. I will definitely be reading this.
Millingtonâs âBetter Typographyâ is an exercise in sore eyes⌠An example of âHow not to present an essayâ.
I like the reader to bring their own perceptions and interpretations to my text. I donât want to have to give answers to questions like that because if I, the author, do the work of interpretation for you, then youâre not actually interacting with the work and it never lives in your head, and that kills the mystery, it kills the golden goose. Weâre not going to talk about JUDY. Weâre not going to talk about JUDY at all. Weâre going to keep her out of it.
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I havenât published much choice-based IF but I have been writing a lot, and my one published game is quite large. While Iâve tended to avoid having a ânextâ link as much as possible, there are definitely times when itâs unavoidable. Having two or more in a row definitely makes a game feel less interactive, and this is where a âfake choiceâ might be a better idea.
I play a lot of IF on my phone including parser based IF. I find ChoiceScript games the easiest to play and Twine the most annoying, because of the necessity of enlarging the screen to ensure I click on the right link.
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Youâre like the blue roseâŚ
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