What are your IF Hot Takes and Unpopular Opinions?

General Off-Topic Discussion
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Thousand Year Old Vampire is a fantastic shout. Here are a few smaller ones I’m fond of- I’ve written up my playthroughs for these three:

  1. michtat the dream wizard (5-15 minutes, adorable graphics, a small wizard kitty guides you through a dream)
  2. Iron Valley (technically not strictly a journalling game, but easily adapted to one, excellent if you’re a fan of Stardew Valley and enjoy the use of tables for adding randomization)
  3. Of Moon and Leaf (this is one I would use to introduce someone brand new to the concept to playing solo journalling games, really beautiful balance of gentle structure and free space to get creative, lovely dreamy world presented with a hint of danger if you want it to lean darker)

And some random others I’ve enjoyed:

  1. Alone Amongst the Ruins (uses a very popular system, focuses on the humanity in the aftermath of the apocalypse and untold stories of survivors and those who have passed)
  2. Alone In Between (classic haunted house set up, I love the emphasis on communication with the ghost and different signs from the undead)
  3. Alone Among the Court (great condensation of the court intrigue scenario, would make a lovely taster to tempt someone into joining a TTRPG table for Butterfly Court, which is my go to game to introduce newcomers to play-by-post TTRPG sessions, having run it twice)
  4. Across the Sea (has the sort of soggy, damp feeling to a classic gothic set up, very cute subsystem with interactions with the villagers as well)
  5. Keepsake (if you ever wanted to be the barowner of the D&D scenario where all the adventurers return to their old watering hole after a journey of a lifetime to regale the patrons with their heroic deeds, this is the game for you- very beautifully laid out pages also)
  6. DRIFTS (fascinating sci-fi set up with the role memory plays in the alien landscape, provides a great opportunity to really dig in deep with worldbuilding and exploring the desert planet)
  7. BLOOM (this feels like a game that Nulla would really like- you’re a teenage girl struggling to survive on an island infected with a ravenous, monstrous plague that transforms people, plants, and animals alike- and its soaked in body horror, as you scrabble to survive, but love persists in the story, too)

I should note that this is not at all a comprehensive list to this style of game- and is more of an arrangement of those that I really enjoyed, that would perhaps not typically make someone’s top ten list of obvious examples of the all time greats. Smaller little ones* that I’ve picked up and collected overtime, like a similar list of Twine subgenres of Horror games I compiled awhile ago. All great fun though, and trend to being on the shorter side.

*Iron Valley and BLOOM are pretty well regarded, but most of them are relatively less known as far as I’m aware.

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104

I have to agree with John Ziegler here. I’ve never been given that impression either. But then I started playing parser games in the eighties, and the games I started with had clear instructions. Here are the instructions for one of the first games I played, Level 9’s Colossal Adventure:

By using two-word commands you move from location to location, manipulate objects that you find in the different places, and perform actions as if you were really there.

Unlike our other games, Level 9 adventures contain no instructions withing the program. We felt that this type of game was very easy to play - and that the space would be better used for more rooms and treasures.

The program asks you ‘What next’ whenever it expects you to enter another command. Simply type an English phrase to tell it what you want to do and press RETURN. The program will then act on your request, ask you for the next command, and so on.

Now, at this point, we must admit that the program does not really understand English (no program does, despite claims in press adverts) but it does have a large vocabulary of English words. Thus it can behave as if it knows the language by analysing each entered phrase, picking out the words that it knows, and guessing the meaning of the phrase from these. Words that it it does not understand are ignored.

In practice, this works well and you should find it simple to state what you want to do: if the computer does not understand, re-phrase your request.

Colossal Adventure provides great freedom in possible commands, but to help you get started some of the possible instructions are summarised below:

EAST, NORTHWEST, INTO, TAKE, DROP, SCORE, INVENTORY

It should be emphasised that these are only a small sample of the words known by the program and, in general, if you want to do something just type what it is in simple language and see if the program lets you do it.

To save typing, words can be abbreviated (e. g. EAST to E and NORTHEAST to NE).

If modern players are labouring under this misapprehension, that’s probably the fault of modern authors, who, if they’re anything like me, assume that their games will be enjoyed by seasoned players. I usually ship my I7 games with Crazy Uncle Zarf’s IF Cheat Sheet, but perhaps in-game instructions would be better.

Could we work together to write a set of clear instructions for a standard parser game? Work it up into an extension for each of the major authoring systems? Does such an extension already exist?

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105

The The Plant-Photopia sequence in that Digital Antiquarian post is interesting because it shows where the “now IF is ruined” cutoff seems to be for him. For some old-school players it’s the kind of puzzleless IF embodied by Photopia, for others it seems to be Inform 7 or the emergence of choice games around 2012.

A great divide in Spanish IF happened...

around 1999, when Inform was translated to Spanish (together with Photopia). Infocom fandom, the “interactive fiction” label, the Z-machine and the new experimental approach it brought, all gelled into a single polarizing phenomenon. There was a period of cold-war coexistence around the glulx VM, and now there are two almost completely separate communities.

On an unrelated note, another Twine hot take of mine is that learning a story format is not a lifetime commitment: if you know Harlowe or Sugarcube you can pick up the other one and apply most of the concepts you know (conditions, loops, include, goto…). In fact, learning about the differences can help you to hone your skills in both.

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106

Indeed. And my biggest problem is that I don’t really want to spend time teaching people how to use a medium that is 50 years old. It’s my fault if new players drop the game because they don’t know the basic Inform commands, I know. Still, I won’t commit to such a burden.
Maybe we should point more to the TALP jams and let those game teach gaming in IF. I dunno. Like when you first give Mikey Mouse to children and only after that you hand them Harry Potter. Amirite? (Probably not).

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107

Not sure if you’ve ever taken a look into Prince Quisborne, but in it I provided both a fairly comprehensive set of instructions, as well as a terse version that provides roughly the same information in closer to bullet-point fashion. Both forms are applicable to the entire parser game genre, and have nothing specific to PQ in them. The special commands and options for PQ are in a different section. (Without checking, there might be a sentence or two that say “… but in this game you don’t have to x”.)

The default instructions that MJR provided built in to any TADS3/adv3 game aren’t bad either, and I’m sure @Eric_Eve 's do a good job as well.

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Indeed! I love Prince Quisborne! I’ve been meaning to go back and finish it.

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112

I’ve played a couple of sessions of Thousand Year Old Vampire this way, and I have been preoccupied with the question of how to evoke similar feelings in parser games ever since. You might be onto something.

EDIT: if I had just scrolled a little farther before replying, I would have seen that the game was already mentioned! Consider this a further endorsement. It’s a great time.

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114

Very true. Also, finding the right engine that both motivates you and allows you to express yourself freely is one of the hardest and most important things for a budding IF author. I still feel like I haven’t found the right one. The IF landscape is all over the place, hiding in nooks and crannies… and sometimes it hides in plain site.

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115

Hot take: Tables were a terrible addition to Inform 7, which leads to really stilted prose code. Whenever I start reading code related to tables, the illusion that I’m reading English totally breaks down.

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Here’s my hot take: I hate branching, different endings, different paths through a game.

There are several reasons:

  1. There are too many occurrences of unintended effects. I don’t mean things like the choice was intended and the story then took on a path that was obvious in hindsight but because the game designer actually misinterpreted my intent. You are still on rails but you have to guess what to do to be on the rail you want to be on.
  2. I don’t want to go through a game the 10th time again to try this or that differently, just to try and see if anything would be different and this time nail the best ending. If all endings were equal, maybe ok, but even then, there’s content I would be missing out on simply because I didn’t do just the right actions.
  3. If the game is “tailored” to me that doesn’t tell the story the author intended to tell, or rather, the author tells a different story based on the choices I didn’t know I was making (see 1) and if you try to tell 10 different stories, then invariably some would be subpar.

Given all these points, ironically, I feel like I have less control, not more. I prefer games that get me mentally involved but still tell the one story.

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Um… How do you want to do the “interactive” part of interactive fiction?

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It’s still interactive, even if you are on a single rail. You poke around, you can do stuff in different order, you can still get a more involved feeling than reading a book. Most (all?) original Infocom games are single rail. So are Legend’s, or LucasArt’s and Sierra’s. They don’t tailor the story but they are still interactive.

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I don’t really get the appeal of these either, but I think it’s important to note that different endings and branching paths are not necessarily the same.

For example, Silent Hill 2’s main endings are based on what the player does on a largely incidental level and are meant to be somewhat consistent with the player’s state of mind. It doesn’t really impact the story until the ending, and each ending is satisfying.

I think it’s difficult to do something like that effectively in textual choice-based games because player choices need an immediate payoff, which usually means branching when you’re working with text-based choice engines.

(And even Silent Hill 2 isn’t fully successful in its approach because people still debate the true ending, IIRC.)

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Well, that’s the choice they made, and I get that some (maybe most here?) find it appealing. I just find these kind of things annoying at best, infuriatingly frustrating at worst.

It’s also ok if you want to make a game like that. I am just saying that I don’t like it and it’s ok to have different tastes :slightly_smiling_face:

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There is no perfect IF development system, just as their is no perfect programming language and no perfect engine for any other genre of game. Every design decision in the creation of a language/engine is a trade off and one person’s must have feature is another person’s curse.

If the Inform 7 documentation is a Ph.D. course in inform 7, the obvious question is where is the freshman undergraduate coarse… or the highschool course, or the Inform for Script kiddies course? And the same goes for other systems.

Are solo journaling games another name for solo adventures for TTRPGs or are they a different thing entirely?

I know game manuals are a lost art and even mainstream video games kind of abandoned them in favor of in-game tutorials decades ago, but now I’m curious if any old school infocom manuals have been preserved. or properly digitized.

For what it’s worth, I feel like coding is a far broader concept than programming and can encompass not just the actual writing of program code, but scripting, writing markup, etc. Also, everything these days seems to be a webapp made by someone who probably wouldn’t know a compiler if it bit them, so I wouldn’t be surprised if JavaScript and SQL see more use among those who identify as coders than more traditional programming languages, though I bet there’s also a lot of drag and dropping and letting hte middleware generate do the coding going among amoung non-coders.

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I think they’re the same thing? Typically, it will present the single player with a setting and basic plot elements, and the gameplay is in how the player chooses to respond/write down their narrative experience with pen and paper. Some include additional elements to add some randomized chance, such as a Jenga Tower that can fall at any point in play, flipping coins, consulting a tarot deck, rolling dice to look up entries on included tables, and so on.

For example, I might play a game with a central story of: you, the player, have just moved into a haunted house. Pick out some descriptors from a given list to describe the house, (Victorian, bungalow, crumbling, pastel, damp). Write about your arrival- what do you notice? Roll a d6 dice to learn about your neighbour (1 being around your age, 2 being older than you, and so on). When communicating with the ghost, draw cards from your tarot deck: with the different suites and numbers and major/minor arcana representing different possibilities: maybe Cups cards mean that the ghost is talking to you inside of the sunroom, and the number corresponding to it indicates how strongly the ghost’s presence manifests, or some such. What does the ghost want? Who was the ghost prior to your arrival? Write down your conversations with the ghost. At the end of the week, decide if you are OK with a spectral roommate, and write either an exorcism or a home warming party.

You basically outsource the role of the DM/GM to randomizing elements or omit it entirely, and they tend to have a strong focus on narrative and personal reflection.

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I strongly disagree. But this has inspired my own hot take: I think using branch-and-bottleneck to railroad is dull. Heads-I-win, tails-you-lose choices feel like wasted choices.

Isn’t that the result of there not being facilities to automatically jump to choice points, like you see in some VNs? And in any case, aren’t the right actions content in themselves? I find, say, replaying Slouching Towards Bedlam to get the different epilogues and appendices pretty interesting.

I’m surprised you’re insulting Inform 7 like that; it’s hardly the TeX of text adventures, but surely it’s at least troff? :stuck_out_tongue:

I suppose the reflection part would limit the capacity to adapt it digitally, but the randomness could be done.

who doesn’t love pseudo-Lisps for writing adventures?

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I’ve tried to understand Dialog, but I just don’t. Where’s the explain like I’m 5 tutorial?

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That’s definitely Jim Aikin’s Inform 7 Handbook, the proof being that daughter really got into it when she was 8, whereas the official manual and recipe book would have been too much to read through.

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I don’t like being given insignificant choices, both ones that feel small-scale and ones that have no impact on the story. For example, asking which coat I want to wear before I go outside, rather than just saying “You throw on your blue coat and you’re out the door.” Small things like that should be glossed over and the big story events should be described in more detail.

It’s kind of like how parser writing is optimized: describe the object generally, then highlight any notable features that might be involved in puzzles or drive further interactions.

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