Tutorial Game for the Parser Unaware?

[pinkunz]

@Gwen

if your goal is to teach people how to play a parser game you should stick to using the parser

Hello Gwen, thank you for your response. I understand your points and if it were only parser input being taught, I’d be tempted to take that approach. However, there are really at least two things being taught here: the world model typical to text adventures & parser games, and the actual parser interaction with that world model. Allowing the player to intuitively explore that world model and discover how items, rooms, scenery, inventory, and NPCs all interact and function allows for that to be grasped separately before tackling the parser itself.

Let me quote @robinjohnson from a different topic, because he elucidates this point quite well:

@robinjohnson

[a parser game] …implements a world model – interconnected rooms, portable and non-portable objects, inventory, etc. – that is so heavily associated with parser games that they’ve become near synonymous.

For the most part, I think that world model is what supports the game design paradigm that we’ve come to think of as parser games, and it’s what people who like parser games actually like about them. All I did was take out the actual parser , which is, for the most part, what people who don’t like parser games actually don’t like about them.

I grant that starting with buttons first takes more time and potentially adds more complexity and possible points for confusion, but there is one more thing I’m trying to demonstrate to the player, and that is the intrinsic limitation of a button interface. Starting with a button interface and successfully interacting with the (simple) world model only to run into more complex situations that can’t be handled with that interface demonstrates a solid Why for the parser. More importantly, this demonstration takes place after the player has already invested into the gameplay and not prior to playing. This is opposed to trying to tell the player why they should play a text input game (ironically using a wall of text) before actually developing any interest in the premise, setting, or characters of your game. For many players, this is a big ask when we already run at a deficit of patience from casual gamers.

@Gwen

As for the idea of a tutorial game though, it does sound interesting, I’d definitely give it a play. Personally I think it’d be a lot nicer to see more games tackle tutorial design in their game design besides just info dumping how to play or making verbs visible.

Agreed, either of those methods would be inadequate for many prospective players.

@Gwen

The speaker talks about this a bit in the part on Half Life where they talk about how the player is introduced to the enemies, and weapons through environmental design, not some pop-up or other info dump. An example of this I think would work well in a parser game would just be showing other characters picking things up, or moving to the other room in order to teach someone how to TAKE or GO. (mainly in this case the reported text should aid the player in knowing what verb the NPC is using such as “You see NPC goes north” or “you see NPC take the item”)

That is an excellent tutorial suggestion (as well as a great narrative hook, Alice does indeed follow the rabbit) and you can consider it safely swiped. * swoosh *

@Gwen

I’d definitely be interested in hearing more about what all you hope to teach the player in terms of verbs or general game play.

When an author writes a book, they don’t typically write for an audience, but instead write for an individual or, at most, a few specific people that they perceive (right or wrong) as representative of their overall audience. In that way, to be entirely transparent, the archetypal individual I perceive this game being written for is my wife. Her interactive fiction experiences thus far only include a single scarring episode at roughly twelve of being sat down in front of Infocom’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with absolutely no guidance or explanation (not a forgiving game even for the parser fluent). Her last positive videogame experience was in the early 90’s playing Capcom’s Yo! Noid for the original Nintendo. Opening the game to a blinking cursor, no matter how friendly the interface, or being prompted to read a written FAQ before the game begins would be a non-starter for her. She’s certainly not stupid, quite the contrary, in fact. She is very smart and a voracious reader, vacuuming up novel-length fiction in particular. She often laments that authors don’t keep internal consistency for their character’s actions in light of their motivations. I see her very much enjoying (hypothetically) something in the vein of a modern Plundered Hearts, or Violet, or even Alabaster…

…if I could get her to play it long enough to get interested.

This is all to say, that there are three separate things I’m trying to impart to my wife and others like her:

• Fluency and possible interest in the world model system of stereotypical interactive fiction.
• Familiarity and basic fluency with a text parser input and the sorts of things this interface allows one to do beyond a button interface.
• Why a text-based game, and Interactive Fiction in general, may be worth further exploration on their part.

The first and second points are really only crutches to getting to the aspirational third goal.