intfiction.org

My copy of "War and Peace" (Wordsworth Classics) starts the notes section with:
"We recommend these notes be consulted sparingly on a first reading, so as not to interrupt the 'flow' of this great novel."

Maybe IF could do the same thing at the opening, so as to instill into the player the idea that replay might be an obvious choice:
"You may want to stay in the city during the first play-through, so as to get a solid understanding of what is going on politically."
A more subtle way would be to leave the player at the end with the clear feeling that she still missed quite a few of the puzzle pieces.

But then, 'Rematch!' wasn't that interesting the first play-through, so why would I play it again?

_________________
-- Biep.

To clarify, I wasn't talking about a literal play-through in that sense; when it comes to Rematch (or Varicella, for that matter), the right analogy to completing a novel is not a single play-until-death, but all the play-sessions from when you first start the game until you reach a winning ending. At least, that's the formulation that matters for the question 'does this game have high replay value?'

And that kind of game, because it's heavily puzzly, is probably the most resistant to replay. With the great majority of IF puzzles, once you've solved it once you can always solve it; you can't really replay Rematch until you've forgotten what the solution is. (You can mess around looking for alternate solutions or easter-eggs, but you cannot repeat the learning / exploration / theory-testing process that makes up the core of the game experience.)

All right. To clarify from my side: my remark was a playful way to make just that point.

The best way to get people to replay seems to me to make sure they feel there is more to be learned. Rematch is puzzly; Aisle is not - I think that is an orthogonal issue. Indeed, the idea of "having solved it" feels like "done, finished", and unless the puzzles are random in a well-done way that diminishes replay eagerness - even if the solution found is only one of many possible ones. That is a psychological point, I guess.

But establishing a sense of unfinishedness is possible, I suppose.

• Having an unreached goal. Rematch does that, of course, but non-puzzly goals exist. I still don't know whether
  Spoiler: show

  Glass
  has a happy ending or not, but the game surely made me try to find out several times.
• Having an still unknown, interesting part of the world/story. Aisle does that, but many other games make sure more questions are raised than answered on the first play, or the first few replays.
• Establish a "collect them all" mentality. The PK girl tries to do that somewhat (but not enough for me to really go for it). Some games tell how many endings there are.
• Going meta.
  Spoiler: show

  Rematch does that, too, and Slouching towards Bedlam
  does that a bit (most of its meta-ness doesn't concern replaying after finishing, but some does.

_________________
-- Biep.

I would agree, Logically. However, I recently replayed Andromeda Awakening, and I found that I liked some of the puzzles better now that I knew how to solve them. Having something to do on the replay other than just re-reading text that I was already somewhat familiar with made replaying less tedious, even though I'd already gone through those puzzles. I guess this implies that the experience of solving puzzles is not about reading the text; it goes to confirm that interactivity does have separate value. That's a personal and subjective observation though, so I don't know if it sheds any light on the replayability discussion, much less the branching plot discussion.

Umm. Something like this:

Replaying and re-reading are two different things. If the interesting thing is not what the author writes but what the reader reads (as Barthes suggested), rereading creates a new reading, because the reader is somebody else (namely: one who has already read the text).

Replaying means being able to make other decisions the second time you play a game. This is something that happens in the game, not in your head.

The claim that replaying and rereading are different things does not mean you can't do both at the same time. In fact, assuming you go along with the idea of treating a game as a text, it would be impossible to replay something without also rereading it.

Unless you argue that a piece of IF is not a text in itself, but a text machine, so that you are in fact not reading the same text, but a different text created by the same text machine at the time of playing.

That last bit is a tricky argument, because it's not obviously false, but still misleading. The reason it's misleading is because it's missing the point: while any interactive work can be seen as creating a (perhaps infinite) set of possible interactions, you shouldn't try to understand the work by looking at the interactions, or in IF terms - by reading the transcripts.

Does that make sense?