Do you have an unpopular opinion, hot take, or a view different from the norm when it comes to Interactive Fiction? Bring 'em on!
I’ll start with my own hot take: Adam Cadre’s Photopia isn’t as great as people say. Sure, it was different when compared to the masses of Infocom-esque games and standard genres of IF that were coming out, during what interactive fiction historians and enthusiasts (like myself) call the IF renaissance… But it’s not the masterwork that some people believe it to be.
Huh, I wouldn’t say it’s not the masterwork, but not seeing it is different. It’s a good game, at least, and the storyline is actually interesting.
The games of the first era, Infocom included, are PLAGUES, marred by having to make them last months and months in the computer: they were impossible to solve alone and without the patience of Methuselah. The tendency to be cruel in the Zarfian Scale is what has always prevented me from finishing at least one. In some ways, Scott Adams’s ones are better (especially the Questprobe ones), which at least didn’t make you a zombie on the third move to make you discover it after a month of play and when you ran out of saves. 98% of the games of the time are beautiful only in our romantic and nostalgic heads. Long live modern IF!
PS: I am not denying the incredible narrative quality of some, Infocom first and foremost, and how they have been the seed for 40 years of joy.
ETA, so to be sure ti trigger everyone: I’ve always preferred text adventures with graphics. Castle of Terror: I still go back to it even though it’s a truly horrible game.
That’s part of why A Mind Forever Voyaging is far and away my favourite Infocom, because it lets you go charging right through it, and doing so heightens the emotional impact. (I was depressed for the whole weekend after getting to 2081 for the first time, which was the first time that a computer game or video game had that impact on me.)
That said, I also love Suspended, which is exactly the thing you say it is.
It’s clear to see you were affected because I’ve never seen such evocative pixel art! I don’t know how you do it, but these are masterworks rivaling those of Lucasarts.
Yes, I’ve derailed the ‘Unpopular Opinion’ topic in post five, I know 
I dunno, I feel like “Photopia is overrated” is pretty much the mainstream take these days – heck, just a couple days ago Jimmy Maher wrote a roundup of the standout IF of 1998, and of half a dozen games, some acknowledged classics, some mostly forgotten, Photopia is the only one that came in for anything other than the mildest criticism.
So yeah as it happens, my hot take is that Photopia is really good, actually, and much of the criticism it gets comes from people who think it’s doing stuff it isn’t doing, and think it isn’t doing stuff that it is doing
To throw out another one that’s maybe more on the “unpopular opinions” side of things, while I don’t think it’s necessarily easier to write a really good piece of short IF than a really good piece of longer IF, the longer one is probably going to have more of an impact on the player.
So to actually post on topic, I’ll chime in with an unpopular opinion that’s kind of tempered by “that’s how it was back then”
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which is far and away Infocom’s most successful title stomps on almost every single rule of friendly game design. As stated, back then they didn’t have to make games smooth waterslides and having the playtime take weeks or months was a feature not a bug at full price.
The first move of the game requires you to guess about an object that isn’t described. And you have a time limit before your house collapses. Then you have to pick up plot-critical items that will lose the game if you don’t collect them before your house is destroyed, but you can’t pick anything up until you take a pill for your headache. It’s in the pocket of your gown. You can’t check the pocket until you wear the gown. You can’t wear the gown until you take it. The headache remedy is called “buffered analgesic” which is correct for setting but examining tells you there’s “nothing special about it.” In my teens I had no idea what this even meant or that it was a good idea to eat it. (Luckily they’ve accounted for TAKE ANALGESIC as a synonym for EAT/SWALLOW so it happens automatically.) If you make it out of the house, the answer to the bulldozer puzzle is likely only logical to anyone who has read the book. Then you have to ask Ford about your home which is illogical unless you have, again, learned what you’re supposed to do based on knowledge from the book. You have to understand that feeding a cheese sandwich to a dog has enormous plot consequences later, and that pressing a green button on a random device will save you. There’s lots of cool scenery and world detail, but you’re never given a moment due to the ticking clock to take it in.
ALL THIS to get to the famous “Babel Fish Puzzle” which I do admire as the trope maker of Rube-Goldberg “just one more step” sequential puzzles and this specific puzzle is endlessly forgiving, but you have to solve it before an announcement is made in the Vogon language so you can comprehend it, or you’re game-overed for reasons that won’t make much sense.
ENJOY POETRY is a critical command and a leap of logic that cements this as a game for fans and people with understanding of the book only. Otherwise, it feels as though you’ve been thrown onstage without a script to play Arthur Dent. The moon-logic is the point and we all love Douglas Adams, but it’s a terrible game with great ideas and great writing.
I suspect the endless conundrums of Hitchhiker’s Guide was the idea spark for the second Adams original collaboration Bureaucracy which at least spells up front that absurd complication is the entire point.
I think it is a well known thing that HHGttG is unfair af, the babel fish puzzle shows up in every solve the soup cans article and that’s one of the least unfair ones!
I don’t have any hot takes about games that isn’t just Expressing a Mean Opinion about someone’s personal creation so, hot take: inform 7 is a really annoying and clunky coding language wearing the mask of english like an ill-fitting skin and it sucks how much attention and air it takes up in comparison to other parser languages in this community!
(also, I don’t mind expressing mean opinions about games but I don’t feel the urge to wrap them in the language of hot takes)
It’s not good for coders. But non-coders like me get a little jump in comprehension because most of the simplest tasks work as expected. It’s only when you want Inform to do gymnastics that you have to learn the hard way that it understands a very specific dialect of English and do the work to learn its peculiar quirks.
The other advantage it has is the IDE and plug-and-play/instant testing that a lot of the other parser flavors lack. Hacks like me can barely be bothered to write in a text editor and use a separate compiler. I couldn’t even grok how to build a game in ChoiceScript - which has something like three pages of authoring instructions - until they made a community-created IDE to simplify it.
who knows what community-created IDEs could be made for other parser languages if there were more resources and time taken for them as opposed to only always inform 7!
edit: also please insert “I (aster), in my subjective opinion, think that…” in front of every statement in this thread that I make. subjectivity is implied!
Controversial? IDK: I think sometimes discourse about old games gets flattened into “is this as fair and enjoyable as games made today?” I certainly hope not! After some decades things really ought to be better. It would be a shame if they weren’t. “Old game isn’t fun” is often true in the way “the model T isn’t fast” can be true.
Today I learned I’m mainstream lol.
I get SO ANGRY at Inform all the time. But with no coding background at all, I could pick it up and write something with it, which is pretty amazing, so despite its persnickety ways I am very grateful for its existence.
I didn’t know this. Yeah, without the IDE I’d be screwed.
I did not say that Inform 7 shouldn’t exist or has no use for anyone (it should and it does), it is just is also annoying, clunky, wearing the mask of english like an ill-fitting skin, and the subject of a disproportionate amount of attention while other parser languages (I hear adrift is no-code?! cool!) languish in a dearth of attention or resources. that’s my hot take! that’s all!
Thou liest! At least in my case.
I’ve programmed in assembly language, but I like Inform. I don’t think I’d want to write a game of the kind I write with anything else, now.
My Hot Take is that I identify with the word ‘programmer’ rather than ‘coder’. Maybe some professional coder can tell us when this cultural shift to coding instead of programming happened. I’ve never programmed for my day job (or coded).
-Wade
A game being cruel makes me not want to play it, because I don’t like getting locked out of victory with no warning, and oftentimes the reason why doesn’t make sense or isn’t anything you could have predicted. Also, starting off with IF “classics” like Zork or Adventure is one of the worst ways you can get anyone into it, rather than a more accessible modern game. They’re historically significant, but they’re not fun and don’t represent a lot of IF being made now.
Inform has a lot of annoying default mechanics (trying to avoid preventing excessive paragraph breaks is an exercise in frustration) that they don’t teach you how to work around. There’s also things that should be included by default, like basic text effects, menus, or the Small Kindnesses extension.
I also think Twine could stand to be a lot more user-friendly – there’s no embedded documentation and nothing easily accessible that breaks down the differences between what each format does. Also, there’s no actual sample programs to see how things work in practice.
Something I’ve noticed across a broad swathe of a very particular type of game, is that there’s a consistent issue where the first love interest you’re introduced to already has such a massive advantage over the others by the time you bumble into them, it almost makes no sense to pursue the other options when you get the chance to- or sometimes you’re locked out of their romance routes immediately! Which is a bit bothersome.
It kind of forces you to go ahead and read external materials about the love interests to pick yours in advance, which isn’t how I prefer to play- I like to just see which character’s route I naturally end up on. It also kind of means that I wind up pairing up with the first love interest anyway, (as this is usually the ‘friendly, kind one that whisks you out of the way of danger’ or ‘one ally you start off with in a den of snakes’ or ‘the childhood friend to potential lover.’) I mean, I like those tropes, but I also find it a bit difficult to see why someone would hurl themselves at the mercy of some random prince or devil-ish smirk-y ne’er-do-well if your apparent best friend/confidant/guide is telling you not to.
I get why it happens so often- it’s a very easy way to create a reason for the main character to meet their associates/the other love interests, but it does skew things in favour of that first love interest. Which I think is a bit of a flat note, if the game is primarily centered around romance and the love interests are a big selling point, as is the case with such games. I mean, especially if it’s super long- I’m extremely unlikely to create multiple save files, unless it absolutely blows me out of the water with the love interests- out of the like, dozens of these style of games I’ve played, I’ve done that for like, one, ATOC (A Tale of Crowns) which is basically one of the big dogs in the arena. It just feels a bit clunky in construction, and I’ve noticed it’s a common issue in this subgenre(?).
Most standard vampire-fanfic harem Twine games* are more fun to write than play. Which is why itch is ankle-deep in them.
(* While, according to the Copenhagen definition, not all harem games need vampires nor Dr Who crossover slashfic, they are all lumped into what is called a whovampireharem-like. Even those not strictly using undeath.)
Without intending to argue people’s hot takes or opinion, I think this conversation has made me understand something.
I can understand frustration about a good system that doesn’t get attention. I think the brilliance of Inform 7 is the packaging. It’s Microsoft Word for Parser Adventures. It’s one package that includes documentation, examples, the workspace, immediate side-by-side testing and feedback, and several ways to package what you do as a playable game. Nelson and Short made their system ridiculously convenient and full featured and well-documented so if you are new at this, it’s the easiest thing to pick up and say “I can write an adventure” instead of “I need to learn how to code, and look on the internet for piecemeal documentation by different people and see if I can find code examples and then figure out how a separate compiler works, and then research what text editor works best for me…”
Someone else said they wished there was better Twine documentation - there is Twine documentation all over the place but it’s not just a Twine manual - there’s a Harlowe manual and a Chapbook manual and a Sugarcube manual - they may as well be different creation engines within the framework of Twine. You kind of have to know the look of different Twine flavors to understand what format you want to use because they each have strengths. I’ve tried for years to get started and had the same choice-paralysis because I’m used to AXMA which was basically Twine 1 but packaged up to facilitate the entire process of making a choice game in a similarly complete pipeline package that Inform does.
I’m on a Mac, so I have tried to experiment with TADS but tis’n’t intended for my hardware, really. Twine is actually pretty full-featured, but if you’re used to Microsoft Word, it’s like Notepad++ - very simple but powerful if you know what you need it for.
Given that IF is largely text based, I find that not enough IF projects (and default engine settings, for that matter) care about font legibility.
Replaying a game to find out every possible ending doesn’t excite me.
Dark themed interfaces are hardly ever done right. Light text on a dark background needs thinner weighted fonts, for example.
A comfortable paragraph width for reading is not a physical dimension of the screen, but a restriction to 60-75 characters, regardless of font size rendered.
