There is plenty of evidence that requiring an interpreter to run creates friction and will reduce your user base.
When packaging a release I try to offer every option:
My unpopular opinion: lots of the big famous parser games should not be recommended to new players. Lost Pig and Spider and Web stand out to me as particularly beginner-unfriendly. I played these as a parser newcomer myself and struggled horribly with them. Whenever people praise The Puzzle in Spider and Web, all I can think about is how it fell flat for me because the game was so confusing that I could barely understand what I was doing. And whenever people praise Lost Pig’s implementation, I remember how much the “depth” didn’t matter when I was stuck in a few tiny rooms, beating my head against the puzzles. It was so hard, I gave up!
I love parser games nowadays, but these two did not make a good first impression. And they top so many lists! I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of new players try these games, bounce off them, and then never return to the medium.
Whenever people praise The Puzzle in Spider and Web
I think it’s one of the best puzzles there is. Few games can play with perception and time in that way, and I thought it was very intuitive.
I can’t imagine the rest of the game overshadowing it’s impact, and I don’t think that the “do what’s expected” interrogation framework throughout the game is too confusing. I actually think that makes it a bit easier, because it locks you into certain possibilities.
I would agree that the spy tools you’re given are unnecessarily complicated with too many moving parts, if that’s what you’re getting at.
I have a supplemental hot take:
Experienced parser players are not good at knowing what would be a good game to suggest for a new player.
Experienced players are good at knowing the history of the medium and the significance of each game, but I think these players become blind to how much they’ve learned and the invisible skills that kick in automatically while they’re playing, so their suggestions often leave new players floundering.
I stand by my statement that Violet is the best IF for new players. Short, simple, well-hinted, and well-implemented. The hints start vague and progress into a walkthrough if needed.
Precisely! Experienced players don’t seem to realize how steep the learning curve can be for newcomers. When you can’t even grasp the basic mechanics of how parser games work, all the devious POV shifting in Spider and Web is incomprehensible. The complicated spy tools certainly didn’t help, but they were just another layer of the fog for me.
Perhaps I would’ve appreciated The Puzzle if I had played Spider and Web as my twentieth or thirtieth parser game. But I played it too early. Way too early! And now that I know how The Puzzle works, it’ll never work for me. In my memory, it’s just one more road bump in a series of road bumps. I ultimately had to use hints to finish the game because I was so lost.
I’m not saying to never recommend these games, though. Just don’t recommend them first. Save them for later! Players have to develop the skill the appreciate them, which takes time.
I had the same experience (or personal impression) with Lost pig and Spider and web. I quitted both unfinished.
But my over-all judgement is nontheless very positive. I love both games, for example I like Grunk, and from Spider and web the story, setting, mechanisms and so on.
I guess my mix of “unsolvable” and “fun to play” leads to one conclusion: I will return, but with consulting a walkthru occasionally. 
I had the same experience! I didn’t get Lost Pig at ALL and have still not revisited it after (failing to) play it years ago. Spider and Web was mostly bewildering and I haven’t revisited either.
Strong take here, I back it.
You can have your opinion about what was or was not confusing for you, but the fact remains that at least 3 people in this thread alone (me, Chandler, Peter) were pretty confused. And I agree with Chandler that there’s likely many more who have no voice here.
Well, I guess the pinnacle in any art form, with the exception of Renaissance painting, probably, is not to be suggested to any newcomer. How would I have reacted if the Godfather was the first film I’d seen? What would I have thought of Master of Puppets if I hadn’t listened to any rock prior to that? Would you pass Master and Marguerite to a 5yo?
This said, I can’t believe anyone would suggest Spider and Web to a newcomer, unless very evil.
I think recommending a first IF is a bad idea, anyway. If you’re introducing someone to IF, play it with them!
Showing the conventions, the stilted subset of English we use, and of course all the meta-commands, is so much better than simply telling them.
Agreed. I only got into parsers because my mom helped me play my first one. I wasn’t stranded alone with it.
Lost Pig wasn’t my first IF, but after “So you’ve never played a text adventure before” and 77 Verbs, games designed to be extended tutorials to the genre, it was the first IF I actually beat and got the “good” ending instead of just stumbling around with no real idea what I’m doing and frustrated by Infocom-style difficulty. Admittedly, Lost pig does have some esoteric puzzles, but at least they make sense in retrospect, there’s only a handful of them, so you aren’t ground down by, “Okay I solved this puzzle, now” only to get crushed, and I don’t think you can lock yourself out of more than the bonus point for the good ending, though I didn’t try breaking the game, so I might be wrong.
I will agree that experience tends to be anti-correlated with knowing what’s beginner friendly and that it is hard to tell genuinely easy from only seems easy because of skills carried over from similar things, and this goes for most things, not just IF or even just computer games in general… and is a big part of why so many college professors are sucky teachers, they know their subject inside and out, but most have no idea how to break it down for the uninitiated. Also why I have no idea what to recommend to blind computer users wanting to give Linux a try.
Never heard of Spider and Web prior to this subthread though, so no comment.
See:
now this, this is a take! I taught my husb IF parser stuff and we play it together all the time!
I watched that video expecting only a few points of comparison. I’m not a “gamer”—up until last year when my daughter got me into Breath of the Wild, my last contact with contemporary games was Doom 2. I don’t even think gamer was a word people used that way back then. And honestly, I wasn’t familiar with the game conventions he talked about. But a whole lot of what he said was still applicable to teaching people IF. Kudos for linking the video here.
It’s a whole series (various genres, some classic games, etc.) that I linked if you want to check out more.
In my (perhaps unpopular) opinion: you either do this through puzzles, or you do this through narrative branches.
I feel like I have zero interest in narrative branch-based IF, though I know this sounds like such a sweeping statement I remain open to having my mind changed. But when I try a game like that I just have zero interest in making those choices, I don’t get what kind of headspace I’m supposed to be in: do I pretend to be this character and then try and think what they would do in that situation? Do I think what would I do in that situation, even if it’s happening to a character in circumstances very different to my own? Is it supposed to send me into some ethical conundrum, even if I know and I don’t mind knowing this is happening to letters on a screen and won’t affect any real living creatures? Any games I’ve played that are based on “you get a different path/ending based on your choices” to me just turns into a gruelling mechanical exercise of trying to hit every path, i.e. it becomes puzzle-based but like, a really boring puzzle.
Puzzle-based is still interactive, because you have to figure out how to act to move the story forward. IF like Photopia gets called “puzzleless” but it still operates like this. Even Rameses operates like this, thought it takes that logic and subverts it by ignoring your attempts at solving puzzles and moving the story forward without you, in order to remove your agency - it still works with an expectation of agency that I think is more typical of puzzle-based than branch-based IF.
Clara Fernández-Vara’s PhD thesis is a really interesting exploration of how puzzles work to create interactive stories in noun + object adventure games
Or you integrate the choice of branches to alternate solutions to the puzzle a la Floatpoint, or deliberate fail states.
For that matter, to what extent are you making a choice if you’re selecting between known, or predictable, outcomes? The essence of choice is that all outcomes are equally attractive to the chooser. If you’re choosing by outcome, you’re just minmaxing.
It wasn’t a personalized recommendation, at least not for me, but a general recommendation. It appears on so many “best of” and “must play” lists that I encountered it as one of the primary standard-bearers for IF when I first discovered the medium. I imagine that’s how other people find it too. Ditto Lost Pig, which was just as tough. Perhaps even tougher! I at least finished Spider and Web with hints. I didn’t finish Lost Pig until years later, when I came back to give it another try.