I find this super interesting. I agree about Spider and Web (I’m pretty sure in my last save I’m still stuck in that first damn hallway). And I guess I agree about Lost Pig too, but only because yeah, if it had been my first-first, I would’ve had trouble. Heck, I still took forever to think to look in that damn fountain. I tried kicking the food machine, breaking it open, etc., and got stuck for a not insignificant amount of time. Kind of like one of my other early IF experiences, Shade, when I spent about as much time wandering around the half-sandy apartment, never once thinking to turn the radio knob again.
Depending on the game, there’s a good chance even now that I’ll get stuck playing find the verb/object at least once. I’ve had to accept it as a quirk of the medium (and/or my brain).
But it’s still better than when I fired up Planetfall, and the game went:
YOU'RE HUNGRY YOU'RE HUNGRY DOOR'S LOCKED YOU'RE HUNGRY YOU'RE DEAD
I still haven’t gone back to it.
I wonder about something like Eat Me as a first game, since the verbs are limited, and a new player might relish (ha) the power they have over the environment. I feel like a big part of learning to play parser games is getting used to maintaining your mind palace while also reading bits of text and typing orders into a computer. It’s a different muscle than straight-up reading. Eat Me could be a bit disorienting for some players, but extremely immersive and playful for others.
E: I’ll expand on this (and this might actually be controversial)
For new players, I tend to recommend games made in the past five years, preferably by authors who are active here or on the Discords I frequent. The simple mechanical reason is that parser games made today have many conveniences that parser games made twenty years ago did not.
Also: I want to promote a feeling of connectedness and community. It’s cool to see authors talking about their work, or reviewing games, or otherwise contributing to ongoing IF discussion, and so I consider that whenever making recommendations.
Thanks, Drew! I did write that game specifically to be friendly to newcomers, although I’d still recommend that an experienced player get a new player started by playing with them. No matter how gentle a parser game is, it’s still a parser game with all the quirks and conventions of the format. Which leads to…
Eat Me, or The Wand, or any limited parser game, is an awesome choice for new players, but it won’t teach them about interacting with a “normal” parser game. So I don’t think you can expect that a player who has successfully and happily played Eat Me would be ready for Counterfeit Monkey.
Being a pretty extreme introvert, I try to avoid recommending anything that requires knowing people. It would be nice if we had a decent sized game with a story mode so somebody could see all of the commands in action, but that doesn’t exist yet (No More is good but short and Repeat the Ending is just wrong for it). I’ll have something in one of my ST games, it would be nice if I have time to really invest in using it as a tutorial, but right now I’m not sure I’ll make it.
I’m not sure Fairest is a good fit for that, either, what with all the meta stuff. What game is a good fit for it? If there’s something in existence that would be a good fit, perhaps the author could be persuaded to include a story mode, especially if someone did the work for them.
I do think that the TALP games are in general pretty good for new players, and these are what I recommend. I don’t think you can go wrong with any TALP game in the top 3 of any year.
By decent sized do you mean not too small, or do you mean neither too small nor too enormous? 'Cause I put quite a lot of effort into making a story mode available!
Heh, yes, the idea was yours in the first place! But for the purposes of this convo I think a more introductory game is desired. IMO both PQ and RTE are too large and possibly too challenging for the experience.
Sorry for not mentioning it, I was thinking about sharing my code with people.
Yeah, all of that sounds right. Putting in story mode is just a table with a list of commands, but I guess some tutorial messages would be nice on top of that. Assuming we had the right introductory game. Since the tutorial messages would be work above and beyond, I think I’ll commit to doing the story/tutorial mode myself for Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight. If not in time for Spring Thing, then for the post comp release. In the overall scope of making the game, it shouldn’t be a huge deal. Maybe I can make a thread about it once the work starts.
I guess the reason I disagree about difficulty being an issue is because I expect to need the walkthrough at some point. As long as I can some of the game, even just a tiny bit, I’m happy, and I can see how the game works, kind of.
It’s like famous Shakespeare quotes. I don’t read or watch Shakespeare, except for what I was forced to read in high school and a few other failed attempts. A lot of people feel the same way.
But would anyone argue:
“My teacher made me read Hamlet in high school. I’m sure it’s good, but it was absolutely impenetrable. I found it hard to get through the old English, the poetic meter, the motivations of the characters, and everything else. The only thing I got out of it was what my teacher taught in plain English, and I’ve forgotten most of that.”
“In fact, my difficulties with Hamlet mean I can’t even appreciate “'To be or not to be…” as a popular quotation. I don’t understand why people — people who also don’t read Shakespeare! — love saying it so much, especially in what’s probably the wrong context. That quote is totally overshadowed by the rest of the play.”
There are games that I have trouble appreciating. One is The Gostak, which I tried to play once years ago and have tried to understand from external walkthroughs and explanations several times. None of it has stuck, which I guess it my fault, but that’s the sort of difficulty I have problems with. What I’m getting at is that I don’t have any problem appreciating something if I can be guided through it.
Is anyone ever really ready for Counterfeit Monkey?
And I see your point. But there also has to be a bit of felt resistance or quirk—that’s what these games are about, at least for me. Each reveals something about how its author’s mind works, and serves as a (limited) conversation with that mind.
I also totally agree with playing together. If the experienced player has played the game, they can serve as a living hint bot. And a second warm body to talk to cuts down on the dread of being alone with the text.
My wife and I play a lot of board games, and I’m the designated rules teacher. Almost every rulebook I’ve ever opened has made me look at the setup rules, the turn order, the multiple decks of cards and sets of colored tokens on tracks, and worry that’s the game I’ll never grok. I don’t know why.
Similarly (and related to @pbparjeter’s point about Shakespeare—I felt the same in school) there are a lot of parser games I’ve started that gave me an immediate sense of dread, like, “Oh, this is the one I’m never going to find my way through.” As if at the very start, a lot of parser games feel like Dan Schmidt’s For a Change.
Maybe it’s because you can’t let them wash over you for the first 30-50 pages like a novel, or wait until the end to step back and stare at it like a short story. When you get through the first paragraph(s) of a parser game, you’d better understand something, because it’s your turn next…
So far as Shakespeare goes: that usually emerges from a scholastic setting. People read it in school. Often texts are annotated. A teacher will discuss it. Most people’s first experience with Shakespeare will not be equivalent to somebody saying “Here’s this beloved parser game from many years ago.” Now, that doesn’t mean some people won’t pick it up–nobody taught me how to play Zork I, which many consider radically unfriendly.
But if you’ve written some of these games and tried to show them to your friends… well, I know a lot of smart people who are highly motivated to see my work and… some of them just don’t get this stuff. They really don’t. I know others here have had similar experiences.
You might not, but other people do! I myself stuck with IF and now I love it, but I was persistent enough to keep going after the Lost Pig road bump (and a few more). Other people aren’t necessarily persistent. They hit a wall with a parser game and then give up on the whole medium. Which I think is a shame. In my own case, it’s also a shame that I’ll never experience The Puzzle from Spider and Web properly.
But I’m posting in the Unpopular Opinions thread for a reason. People always push back!
My own experiences as a new player have done a lot to inform how I write games. Eat Me and The Bat are designed to hopefully be entry-level. It’s a tricky thing: tutorial-style games tend to be less attractive, but new players really need tutorialization. So I try to make “normal” games that still function as tutorials.
Many people are indeed turned against Shakespeare in school by being forced to read the plays when they’re too young. It’s not Shakespeare, but I’ll never forget how my sister had to read The Scarlet Letter – in elementary school! Not the right age for that book. Even high school (where it’s typically taught in the USA) is too early, in my opinion.
You’re not alone. Somewhere along the line, board game designers forgot that there’s elegance to simplicity. I feel that some board games would be better served as video games instead.
However, even the most complicated rule system can be conveyed well by a good rule book. Unfortunately, I believe (even with the best intentions) most rule books are written by people who are too close to the game. They have “grokked” too much and forgotten what was once not intuitive for first-time players.
I think another option for where the interactivity/gameplay friction can come from is some sort of resource-management mechanic (see e.g. 80 Days or Reigns), although crucially the resources should be something that’s actually exposed to the player in a fairly explicit way, with clearly-established mechanical consequences, not just a bunch of stats that are being tracked and referenced opaquely in the background. Although I guess some people would argue that that’s just “video games” and not interactive fiction?
I went into The Bat expecting to need the walkthrough, but I only used it once or twice, so I think you succeeded in making it approachable.
However, the way that you formatted the guide (kind of like an invitation) was what sold me on the game. I knew as soon as I looked at it that I probably wouldn’t ruin my experience of the game if I did decide to use the guide.
I think more games should treat walkthroughs in that way, almost as part of the game or as a digital “feelie” … though I’m guilty of never writing them for my own games.
Something I’ve never understood is why most “challenging” IF uses permanent failure as a means of difficulty. Are there any games where, if you fail, you have to repeat the current “stage?” The only ones I can think of are Border Zone and Spider and Web. I think a lot of interactive fiction fans and other gamers are scared away from “hard” interactive fiction because failing without constant manual save game backups can mean your entire game is forfeit, whereas other genres such as action games make it clear how much progress you will lose if you fail and do not make you restart the entire game. I know RPGs tend to have you forfeit your progress that hasn’t been saved, but at least in those games, when you save, you know that all your progress is “good” so far - if you can make it to the save point, your game has not been rendered unwinnable.
Why don’t more challenging works of IF have this sort of “checkpointing” system for game-over or unwinnable situations?
I don’t know how much you may be referring to modern IF, but certainly all of those conventions of “other genres such as action games” came much much later than Infocom’s games.
Back when the canon was being created, virtually all games used permanent failure as a means of difficulty. It was the norm.
The first game I can remember that let you insert another coin and press start during a countdown to continue from the same level was Super Mario Bros. Zork II was more like an arcade title of its day, in giving you three lives and not actually undoing everything at death.
Also, saved games not being a thing in most sorts of games at the time, IF was actually much friendlier than the norm.
For a long time, it was The Way It Was, and there wasn’t any other way, so we all just went with it. I don’t know how old you are, but playing a game ON THE COMPUTER was so rad in 1980 that I would have put a drop of blood on the screen every day if that was what was required to keep doing it.
I don’t think much modern IF still punishes players this way. I did my time on the front lines and won’t play anything that zombifies me now.
Parser games have become a lot more generous in terms of unwinnable games. I think there’s an audience expectation that new games don’t have unwinnable states (or else explicitly warn the player about them). And yes, zombie games were a norm in the 80s, but computing resources were far more constrained than they are now. I’ve never even thought about memory or storage while making Inform games, but those 80s authors thought about it all the time. I can keep track of all sorts of things and even be messy about it if I like. That usually wasn’t an option.
So both tech and craft have advanced to a point where there are good examples for avoiding unwinnable states. I don’t think it’s something well-reviewed games do often anymore.
So far as autosaves go, Parchment and Lectrote both keep one. If you don’t have any fail states, that’s a viable solution without coding overhead on the author’s end. I’ve used @Draconis 's autosave extension (Inform 10) to make a manual (as in, manually set by the author) save and restore before. It works really well. I know TADS can use similar features, though that’s not my wheelhouse.
So the answer is that a lot of modern parser games are pretty considerate and friendly right now, and there are tools authors can use to go further.
Yeah, if we’re going to compare contemporaries, 80s arcade games were pretty much designed to kill the player as quickly as possible to keep the coins flowing, but most of those didn’t really have a concept of progress, instead just repeating the same basic gameplay loop while making things harder with the goal to get the highest score rather than reach some predefined ending, and if they have an ending, it usually comes in the form of playing so good the game breaks, and when those early console games were doing something more expansive than just watering down an arcade game to fit hte more limited resources of consumer-grade hardware, save features were rare and the game expected you to beat it in one sitting or to use passwords, warp zones, or stage select codes to continue from where you left off. The Original Legend of Zelda was the first NES cart to have SRAm and early JRPGs like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior made use of it as well, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t until the 90s and the 16-bit era that saving became common for platformers and other action dominated genres, and even then, saving was often limited(Super Mario World was the first Mario game to let you save progress, but you could only save after clearing certain levels, Donkey Kong Country required visiting a particular location on the map screen to save, and a world’s save point was almost always part way through the world, and both games would boot you to your last save upon losing your last life and there was still the occasional game with no saves(Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 had no saves, the original Star Fox had no saves, Zombies Ate my neighbors had a password system that would only give you a new password after every 4th level and the player’s arsenal always starts out nearly empty.)