Inspired by the ongoing conversations about IF for beginners, here’s my latest hot take:
The best IF for any given beginner is whatever game has narrative and/or gameplay elements that make that specific person’s brain light up, and that matters a lot more than how hard or easy the game is, how much it holds your hand, how much it resembles more mainstream video games, how much a parser game is going to teach you skills you need to play other parser games, or any of the other things that get brought up in these discussions.
I would bet that if you polled people who got into IF in the post-commercial-parser-game era, most people’s “the game that got me into IF” wouldn’t be one that was explicitly For Beginners, and a lot of them would probably be considered actively beginner-unfriendly. Finding a game that grabs your brain just right is usually the thing that motivates someone to not only finish a game but go “wow, I’d like to see more stuff like this”, and whether the game is hard or even unfair has less bearing on that than most people would expect, I think.
(Lest people think this seems parser-game-centric because choice games usually aren’t that hard or unfair, I also got into VNs back in the early '00s via games that had a lot of un-signposted sudden death or “haha guess what, that seemingly inconsequential choice you made at the beginning of the game locked you out of the best ending!” situations.)
Which is not to say that I’m not in favor of tutorial modes, QoL features, game design that strives to be as fair as possible, or anything like that, just that I feel like arguing about whether or not a specific game is a good one to recommend to nebulous, unspecified Beginners is kind of futile because what’s good for beginners in theory has little relation to what games beginners are actually getting into.
Hah, I thought about mentioning that that was one of the first parser games I played, too, and the first one I remember being really enthusiastic about (I posted about it on my LiveJournal…), also because of the relationship with Black. I didn’t just follow the walkthrough but I probably leaned on it quite a lot.
I did create a game once on the Commodore PET (with an added graphics card and D/A converter for sound) in 6502 machine language. It was not an adventure game, but a Space Invaders clone.
I also reverse engineered what I originally thought to be an adventure game in machine language (Lords of Karma), but what I found was a lot of “library routines” which emulated what seemed to me to be some kind of higher language. And the game itself consisted mostly of tables to define rooms and objects and so on. Only much later I learned the game was indeed written in Tiny Pascal (Lords of Karma (1978) | Renga in Blue) and I had basically reverse engineered its run time library and the implementation of the verbs used in the game.
Still it was a fun exercise, it taught me the benefits of table driven games (Scott Adams used tables, as well as the original Adventure game up to some point), and when I joined IFComp 2023 with my One King game (which is indeed table driven), I felt like coming back home.
Actually I typed my game in as hex opcodes since I did not own an assembler at the time. All I had was the ROM software which included a memory editor. I manually assembled all instructions and prayed I did not miscalculate any relative branching… Ah well those were different times.
As someone who tried getting into parser games, I disagree somewhat. Of course I’ll only play games where I find the story compelling, that’s a hard requirement. In typical video games I can almost always skip the tutorial, because I have experience in the genre already: WASD to move, space to jump, left click to attack, etc.
I have no experience with parser games whatsoever though. I tried one years ago, “help” did nothing, and I quit. It’s like a shooter that has no tutorial and you don’t know how to move. Every video game has a tutorial, even if most people skip them, and I think the same should apply to every other game. Choice IF at least has the “you click hyperlinks like on other websites” principle that people are guaranteed to know.
This is more of a video game thing since I’m too young to have lived through the era when IF was a commercially viable genre, so have no idea what was typical for physical game releases of IF, but even in 2012, before I went blind and most video games became unplayable, I was lamenting the decline of manuals that not only served to teach the player how to play, but as a showcase of official art and sometimes even as a thematic place to store notes… I also lament the decline of printed player’s guides(sure, a text file from GameFAQs is often more convenient and available for games that would never get a printed guide, but dammit, it’s part of my nostalgia for the 90s and I say that as someone who could be called an Internet addict in the days when surfing the web was geeky. Also found most in-game tutorials clunky in those early days, at least the explicit tutorials… though I will say that a hallmark of good game design is making the opening level an effective tutorial without it feeling like a tutorial and the first time a player needs to used one of the games advanced mechanics likewise being an invisible tutorial for that mechanic.
Of course, best approach likely varies between genres(An SRPG can get away with more explicit tutorials than most platformers at least in part due to the tendency to SRPGs more often having game-specific mechanics that the player has to actively think about and which need to be explained whereas Platformers can often get away with just giving the player a safe space to let the player experiment with their Character’s movement).
I used to love the stuff that came with games. Not just the feelies in Infocom games, but manuals and other things like the ship blueprints in Wing Commander, the little cardboard fold-up ships with Space Rogue, the map and coin with Ultima V, etc. Edit: I just noticed those were all Origin games, lol. Still there were plenty of others.
I also remember noticing sometime in the 90’s that game graphics had surpassed the box artwork.
And nowadays, you only get the cool stuff if you pre-order the limited collector’s edition that’s twice the standard edition… and as I understand it, a lot of physical games these days are glorified digital download cards.
Many IF works will never get the attention they deserve. Many good games from amateurs have not been promoted right and will be lost to time, even within the scene.
Not everyone submits work to the archive. Back in the late 90s/early 00s, the archive was a primary distribution mechanism for new games as well as a source for old ones, so most games ended up there as a matter of course. Nowadays there are more convenient avenues for releases (itch.io being the most obvious) so submitting work to the archive becomes an additional step for authors to take.
Plus, it’s difficult to gauge the number of people who discover tools such as Inform or Twine and go on to create things with them that are never brought to the attention of “the” online IF community.
Speaking more generally, I think it’s fair to say that there have been great works across all mediums that languished in obscurity in their time and which have since been lost and that this will continue to be the case.
The simple fact is that everything eventually succumbs to the ravages of time and, whether good or bad, no matter how you qualify those descriptors, it takes a certain amount of luck for a work to be well known and a certain amount of luck for any record of a work to survive past its original creation. It’s great that entities like the Ifarchive, Project Gutenberg, the internet archive, and others are making active efforts to preserve certain types of media without regard to quality or notoriety, but the simple fact remains that there will always be works that will never make it into such archives, hidden gems that will make it into such archives that will remain lost in the shuffle because these archives almost always contain more than any one person could ever fully go through, and the hard drives, flash media, optical media, etc. containing these archives and their backups will all eventually fail or something will go wrong in a data migration to new storage at some point, or the ability to access that media or work with the files therein will be lost. Even inscriptions carved deeply into stone are lucky to survive millennia, and none of our modern digital storage has had even a full century of stress testing and most evidence suggests. Honestly, it’s not hard to imagine humans of 3035, assuming we survive that long, calling us the second dark age because the knowledge of how to interface with our digital tech has been lost and we left behind relatively little in terms of physical records. Heck, a repeat of the Carrington Event could potentially wipe out all IF as we know it aside from print CYOA books, published source code that survives in print, and the like.
Heck, Shakespear might be the most famous playwright of all time, yet I understand his plays mostly survive as reconstructions from scattered notes, not because full scripts were published in his life time or complete, unpublished scripts have survived and been found.
I would definitely include MAME among them. I think MAME mostly gets it right, with a curated list of files identified by hashes. While the MAME project doesn’t distribute ROMS, they make it easy for others to identify them. The end result is that files for MAME supported platforms are widely known and shared, even for obscure works that probably almost never get played.
I go way, way back and beta tested Inform 7 on the IF Mud. I did NOT feel it was natural language processing… You phrase it very well. “Wearing the mask of English like an ill-fitting skin.” I am dyslexic and If I put with or when or something in what the compiler considered the wrong place, it would crash. Although the way I would put things was not technically totally bad English or unallowed. It was like the interface was a grammar nazi. Heh. I did wonder too, if foreign language speakers would have a problem with it.
But a lot of people were attracted to writing to IF that had minimal or no coding experience. And now they could write some IF, maybe low puzzle if that does not appeal to me.
Working and living a life it took me about 2 years to learn all the ins and outs of Inform 5. Later maybe 6 months to learn Inform 6. Learn them well enough to change standard library responses, change code to do really tricky things. And I was a programmer, so I had sympathy for people who did not want to put hours and hours in on learning to code. I also did not want games that were just mainly narrative.
I think Graham, TRIED, verry hard to make it a natural language processor. But it was more an aspiration than an accomplishment. Yet, Graham contributed an incredible amount to the growth of IF. I found Curses and Inform and directions to raif/rgif on AOL and rushed right over. And ever since I had played Infocom games I wanted to write one. TADS 2 was around, but the appeal of Inform, reversed engineered, was the parser was the same and a lot of the library responses were similar to Infocom’s. In my opinion they are still classics.
I haven’t been around in 15-20 years and things have changed, but the roots of the IF community started wanting to write games like Infocom and started with Mark Roberts’ and Graham Nelson’s strong contributions so the rest of us could carry on.
