I agree most people don’t read… and I suspect that was true even before television, but the reading of static fiction with minimal or no illustration is something enough people do that you don’t have to explain what a novel is to the average non-reader and making a modest living as a writer isn’t that farfetched. Heck, static fiction is popular enough that even non-readers sometimes enjoy audiobooks, to othe point an audiobook is one of the few adaptive formats that can be found from mainstream sources reliably instead of having to consult sources that cater specifically to the blind.
And yeah, a movie’s runtime, at best, is suitable to a novella and I generally don’t even bother with movies adapted from novels, even novels I love… Though personally, I kind of wish visual media would do internal monologues more often. Might not go over well with the ADHD crowd, but it’s perfectly fine to have a scene that’s just a character sitting in quiet contemplation as their actor voices the character’s thoughts.
And maybe that’s part of why I prefer parser and find the choice style of IF kind of wonky sounding: I’ve been a Linux user for nearly 20 years, and by the time I got back into IF after briefly dabbling with it in the late 90s, I had almost completely made the transition from the command line is arcane and hard to understand to the command line is so much mroe efficient than the GUI with the only GUI application I use with any regularity being a web browser.
There was a thread here to exactly that effect, wasn’t there? About priming ChatGPT to just transform natural language inputs into valid Inform-style commands? Unless I hallunciated it …
I’m interested in that viewpoint, because it’s the opposite of my experience — but perhaps that is generation, or cultural, or any number of other reasons that mean I am surrounded by novel readers and you aren’t.
I will note that, in general, the market for short fiction is huge. It is much easier to sell short stories to anthologies and magazines than it is to sell novels, and the majority of fan fiction falls firmly in the short story category, rather than novel-like.
Are most fanfics short stories? Maybe it’s because the one shots and drabbles don’t linger in my mind the way a million word epic does or a story I’ve been reading in serialized form for years does, or maybe the scales can’t help but put more weight on the longer stories, but I got the impression fanfiction tends to run longer than most traditionally published novels, and looking over the fanfic authors I follow, the ones that mostly or entirely do novel length or longer outnumber those that do mostly short form writing 5-to-1, and when I think back on writers I no longer follow because they became inactive, nearly all of the ones I can remember were novelists.
Granted, it might also depend on how one is measuring “most” and vary from fandom to fandom, and it’s quite possible most stories are short, but most of the total word count of fanfiction is contained in long stories.
That might be an interesting statistical exercise, take the output of noteworthy authors and/or publishers(including major online fanfiction sites like fanfiction.net or Archive of our Own) and compare counts of works in different word count ranges with percentage of total word count or ranking an individual author’s works by word count and percentage of career word count.
Me too. My whole family and all of my social circle are big novel readers. I barely know anyone who isn’t a BIG fiction reader. I suppose we are drawn to people who share our worldviews. It isn’t just a pastime for me-- I simply can’t imagine what life looks like for people who don’t spend a lot of their time inhabiting other bodies and other worlds. It’s a fundamental part of me. I haven’t actively or knowingly excluded non-readers from my life, so it’s been an unconscious process of sifting people to catch the readers.
I honestly don’t know what percentage of people these days are readers. But from the smashing success of YA novels in the 21st century, it doesn’t appear that the younglings are abandoning novels.
I don’t know what the people I pass on the street read or don’t read, but it’s certainly the case that more than half of the people I know are.
It’s entirely possible that I am in a literature related bubble, of course. I am not of the current generation (I am in my 50s), my family (and their friends) are highly educated, I did a literature degree (as did a few other people I still know), and I live in a university town (and possibly a different country from you, I don’t know). One or more of those factors might be relevant.
Personally this is one thing I’ll say Inform 7 has over TADS, it’s simply easier to get into, much easier.
Now that I’ve made the switch to TADS 3 I don’t think I could ever go back, I really like Inform but much to my shock, once I got over the hurdle of understanding OOP Paradigms, it felt much more natural to me than Inform’s more English like style of wording things.
Inform’s recipe book is genuinely genius to include and I wish TADS 3 had something similar, nowadays TADS’s documentation is pretty good but Inform 7 still has it beat in my opinion, learning the language and the adv3 (or adv3lite) library is difficult to do at the same time. Inform being by far the more popular choice and having more resources doesn’t help.
But ultimately Inform is just harder to write in in the long run, to me at least! Though my games are much more game-like than traditional Inform 7, TADS is much better at handling that. (It can be argued if some of my projects even count as “IF” so much as they do traditional RPGs/Roguelikes but text based)
Still Inform is popular for a reason, as you said for most people Inform is far easier to understand initially and I am one of them, and understanding an Inform 7 codebase is possible for even beginners. And it’s much easier to get a simple project up and running which feels a lot nicer to work with and it’s got a ton of examples.
There is a mechanic in some choice-based IF where you click on a word and it reveals more text. This would be fine if it added the new text at the bottom of the content (or maybe a large tool tip that floats on top of the prose), but a lot of these clickable words inject the text exactly where the word was.
The result is a paragraph changing form in such a turbulent way. I find that form of text reveal very annoying.
As a more general grievance, I find it really hard to engage with choice-based games where it isn’t clear what clicking a particular piece of text will do. If it might cycle to a different piece of text, or it might expand the text in-place, or it might advance the story to a different passage entirely, I’m going to spend more time fretting over what order I should click stuff in in order to not miss out on anything than I am actually engaging with the substance of the game.
I like games that make it clear which one is which, tho sometimes the disorientation caused by the lack of clarity is intentional (not in all games, but probably in porpentine’s)
Oh, big same. Though I’m a completionist so if there’s a distinction there I’ll try to click every single “expand” link on the page before continuing, so I can see why some authors try to disincentivize that.
The ways lawnmowering differs between parser and choice games continue to fascinate me!
Some of this can be remedied by not writing a mountain of text around the link word. I find myself doing this and realizing it makes you have to read the whole thing again.
Limited-parser games are strictly superior to choice-based games.
The two media are isomorphic in terms of story content. Any story told through a limited parser interface can always be translated to a choice-based interface, and vice versa. It’s nearly a mechanical correspondence. The limited parser, though, produces a much more immersive player experience. Constantly confronting players with a strict enumeration of their available options is the ultimate sin against mimesis.
I’m not sure that’s true? You can’t easily have the just-discussed text-injection or cycling through text in limited parser games—maybe you could get something similar by writing your own parser, or really exploiting Vorple or WebUI, but that’s got a higher barrier to overcome compared to just using a choice-based interface.
Assuming VNs and such are considered choice-based, imagining, say, Digital: A Love Story as a limited parser game without the entire experience being changed completely seems difficult.
This point should be true for world-modelly choice-based games that don’t use such text effects, however.
I would consider “choice games are just inherently worse than parser games” to be a pretty room-temperature IF take, personally. It was hot and fresh 10+ years ago and it’s been lying around congealing ever since.
I guess it depends on what “choice-based” means, since every game with pre-written dialogue responses will only have those responses for the player to choose to engage with. But there’s a fairly deep pool of conversation topics in Midnight. Swordfight. that I would not say falls within any standard choice-based model. (That game also has choice-based dialogue, since it has three different conversation systems, but the systems don’t intersect.)
But that wasn’t my claim. The warmed-over, decade-old debate is between traditional parser games and what was then called hyperfiction (but I see that term used much less lately), and the no-longer-hot take is basically “hyperfiction is lazy”. I do think there’s a higher quality ceiling on full parsers but that’s also not my point and probably not even controversial. Traditional parser games inherently require more effort because there are more possible interactions that have to be considered and just giving stock responses to all of them makes for an ill-polished game. But in comparing limited parsers to choice systems, laziness doesn’t enter into it because the burden on the author’s imagination is (or should be) identical. If either requires more work than the other, that reflects entirely on the state of the available tooling and not at all on the inherent complexity of the problem.