Various measurements of the "size" of a game

2100… wow, that’s big. For a minimal playthrough, eh?

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Gotcha… so when you say 100k words, do you mean words in the source code or words that the player might see on screen?

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It means words in source code. To find words that appear on screen, I think there are some threads where Zarf and others use python to figure that out, but I haven’t checked.

As for Mulldoon legacy, I got the info from this walkthrough:
https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/solutions/mulldoon2.sol

It says:

Takes about 2100 moves.
Comments and points are in ()

I just checked Finding Martin, which I felt was bigger than Mulldoon Legacy. It has 1966 moves in the walkthrough (found by counting lines in the walkthrough, subtracting comments, headers, and blank lines)

Edit: My goal for my game is for each of the ten segments to require 200 moves, so it will be roughly the same length as mulldoon legacy. However, my puzzles are much easier than all of these, and I’ve already made some segments shorter, like the murder mystery.

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Wow, you’re going to be up there with the big dogs!

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2100 if you follow the walk-through to the letter, easily much higher if you play without one, and spend most of your time, exploring, examining, screwing up, undoing, rinse, repeat

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My playthrough of Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina counted over 3000 moves. Not a minimal walkthrough number of course, but probably closer to an average player experience. Tackled most of the game myself, only (and sparingly) resorting to the walkthrough when I was truly stuck and/or when the math went over my head (calculations in base 12? 7? I never got my head around that.)
Finding Martin took me closer to 4000 turns, played in the same manner.

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Coming from a fiction background, I initially sort of naturally gravitated toward “word count” as a measurement of game scale, but I feel like the necessity of this question succinctly illustrates the problem with it from a player’s point of view.

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I might point out here that Choice of Games has had a kind of arms race with word count, resulting in games like Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale having over a million words (of source and text combined).

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A lot of the word count comes from variations, though, the two longest ones they have are zombie Exodus,: safe haven and lords of infinity, and both of them are big, in the sense that they have tons of variation to them, resulting in drastically different playthrough‘s

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An interesting metric might be the file size of a compressed play-through transcript. You’re mostly measuring word count but discounting repeated passages. It’s a bit arbitrary but on the plus side I feel like it would allow comparing parser and choice games somewhat fairly.

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I usually think of “size” as in hours, because it’s more applicable across genres, but people expect different things from different genres. If somebody’s talking about a game with a single-player campaign they’ll often say, like, it’s about 10 hours or that it’s really short at 3 hours, and treat that as reasonable, but people don’t really tend to talk about, say, Civilization or Madden as having a size in hours.

For the Choice of Games stuff though word count tends to work fairly well, because it’s immediately understandable by players. Players usually have a sense of how fast they read and such.

But, for other games (including parsers and Twines and text stuff) I tend to think “big” means “takes a long time to finish.”

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For me, the “size” of a game doesn’t correlate with anything I can really measure directly. It’s like how some fantasy novels end up feeling like they have very large worlds and others very small ones, despite having the same amount of text. It all comes down to the impression the writing makes on the reader.

For example, let’s take two famous one-move games. Aisle feels much larger to me than Rematch, even though Rematch has more locations and more objects in it—because Aisle’s writing very intentionally gives an impression of vast potential, while Rematch’s very intentionally does not (anything except the winning move ends the same way).

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Is speedrunning a thing in IF world? If so, is it simply the minimum number of commands, or the time to type them all in (which would reward more succinct ways of typing commands and fast and accurate typing)? Also, would exploiting bugs to shorten play sessions be an acceptable strategy, much like normal speedruns?

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Ugh, it should be…

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Last time I asked, most people wouldn’t replay a game once, let alone repeatedly for a low time.

Trying to finish a game quickly, on the other hand, might be a thing. A different thing

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It varies by game! I know there was a lot of discussion of beating Hadean Lands with the minimum number of resets, not caring about how many moves it took.

Of course, for a lot of old games, the whole point is to optimize your move counts. Can you get out of Colossal Cave before your lamp runs out of battery? Can you fix the catastrophe in Suspended before all the humans are dead? This seems like it would lend itself well to move-counting “speedrunning”.

In non-IF games, speedruns that focus on optimal strategies rather than optimal executions tend to be TASs: “tool-assisted speedruns” where the player encodes the optimal sequence of button presses and the computer executes it frame-perfectly. And there’s definitely a thriving community around these.

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For me it all depends on the game. I’m certainly going to play Aisle more than once!

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Sure, there are exceptions, in terms of both players and games. There always are. Especially with regard to exceptional games. “I’d replay Hadean Lands” isn’t the same as “I replay IF games”. Aisle is a classic.

When I’ve asked here, I think only one person expressed interest in doing so, ever. It’s a subject that I’ve taken an interest in (for my own project).

I’m sure we could find some takers for getting through the royal puzzle in a minimum number of moves, but…

There’s a seedcomp review that specifically mentions not replaying games, and I don’t think it’s an outlier. I just don’t think it’s a thing these days.

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To me, it comes down to how much the experience will be different on a replay.

  • A one-move game is generally built around the conceit that you’ll play it several times, trying different single moves to see what happens.
  • In The Wand, half the experience is playing it a second time with knowledge you couldn’t have had at the beginning of your first run.
  • Counterfeit Monkey is full of alternate solutions to puzzles, and has a “hard mode” that disables the most obvious solution for each one: if you replay in hard mode, you’ll need to go further off the beaten path. (I tried to imitate this in Scroll Thief, which also has a hard mode disabling the most obvious solutions.)
  • The conceit of Night Road, like many Choicescript games, is that you build a character and then see how that character would approach the story; a different character might go through it entirely differently.
  • The goal of “tactical” games like All Things Devours is to optimize your approach until you have a winning run planned out. (Suspended, Lock and Key, and Varicella are also in this category.) You’ll often need to restart instead of just restoring a save if your approach wasn’t correct.

All of these make the experience very different if you play it a second time. Something like Zork, on the other hand, will be basically the same every time you play it. Once you’ve solved all the puzzles once, there’s not much left to experience. And most IF ends up falling into this category: replayability just isn’t a design goal for most works.

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I agree with this, and with your list of exceptions. I’m making a poll just for the heck of it, but I think it will reflect your thoughts here.

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