intfiction.org

Can adverbs as a part of the player's command be used successfully in a medium-long interactive fiction? (eg. dance perkily, whisper lustfully, go slowly east)

One way I envision, is for the player to earn adverbs as they proceed, which then allow them to solve puzzles by doing the same actions as before but in a different way (carefully or hastily, for example). This way, it foregrounds which of the thousands of possible adverbs are salient to the story.

I like the concept. Varicella did something similar with its tone of voice mechanic, though that only applied to conversation.

It could be a lot of fun, if you're willing to allow many verbs to be modified by each adverb. If I can whisper lustfully, I'd want to be able to take lustfully and examine lustfully too.

A sure sign IF is maturing: these days it's not just "guess the verb" or "guess the noun", now it's... Guess the adverb!

I think you'd want to limit the number of available adverbs quite harshly. The adverb-using games I've seen thus far (Forever Always, Danse Nocturne) have gone for scope, but they've been able to do that because they're very short and really only present a single adverb-searching problem.

The other trick is that the game would probably have to be about social actions: it doesn't generally matter whether you unlock a door angrily, but the manner of conversation and performance are critical. And games about negotiating social environments are tricky. But I'm all in favour of people making more of them.

I'm not sure that's necessarily true. It usually doesn't matter whether you unlock a door angrily, but it might very very be important to do so quickly or quietly. Some adverbs make more sense for social interactions, others for mechanical tasks, others for different type of activities (listen carefully, for example).


Robert Rothman

Closing a door angrily can be a big deal too. Though usually in a social setting.

There's a lot of things that could be done (taking lustfully, closing a door angrily) which could change how other characters react to the player. In this way, you could have richer non-conversational social elements in a game. (This itself is an area where IF could expand).

Also, there's a lot of scope for giving alternative descriptions depending on how you look at something. Maybe in a timed section, examining quickly wouldn't take any time, while examining carefully would take a few turns, and they'd both give different information.

In a game where you can use an adjective for any action and there a wide range of verbs available, I think (as maga suggests), the number of adverbs should be kept short- or if extensive they should be fully known to the player. This would help avoiding it being a guess-the-adverb game.

Not that there isn't room for guess-the-adverb games, but even in Danse Nocturne (which is essentially just that) many of the more fruitful adverbs are strongly clued in the text.

Once we conquer adverbs, we'll move on to guess-the-preposition! (We already kinda have that with look on vs. look under vs. look behind...)

I'm sort of flinching as I read this, because... one of the nice things about EXAMINE is that it can mean whatever you want it to. It can just give some more specific details about what the PC has already seen, it can make the player actively take some time to look closely at something (possibly involving reading documents, trying door-handles, etc.), it can provoke memories or opinions.

This is why EXAMINE is overwhelmingly the most commonly-used verb; it can do whatever the author wants it to do, and this changing of sense goes largely unnoticed by the player -- because in real life we can switch smoothly between a lot of those functions. Adverby EXAMINE would (by default, unless you have a trick up your sleeve to manage this) be like switching from automatic transmission to manual. (Finer control, in theory, but everybody who's used to automatic will be miserable.)

I'm all in favour of doing cool, wacky things with EXAMINE. I've tried 'em myself. But don't underestimate how big a deal this would be: it is, uh, perhaps not the most prudent thing to tackle when you're already dealing with an unusual design approach.

Tangentially: in my private-eye WIP I've moved most conversation to intent-and-tone-implying verbs (interrogate, flirt, comfort, cajole, etc) rather than topics, which suits my design style It requires careful tracking of events and context, but I like the results so far ...

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I guess my first question is, how are you going to go about educating your players that this type of input is useful? Because nobody is going to do it unless you nudge them in the right direction -- they're just going to blunder on, wondering why they're failing to find the right commands.

If you think about it, (verb + adverb) is a more refined or specific form of (verb), so we're back at guess-the-verb, only with complications. The player won't know whether 'pat the bunny' is sufficient by itself, or whether 'pat the bunny gently' is necessary in this particular situation.

My second question is, how will such a scheme enhance the game? I could see that some puzzle or other might be more realistic ('pick up the nitroglycerine carefully' or 'pull the chain hard'), but I can't see that requiring the player to figure this out actually enhances gameplay. I would think that if the response to the ordinary command 'pick up nitroglycerine' is "Moving with exquisite gentleness and caution, you lift the nitroglycerine off of the table," the same dramatic effect is achieved, and without annoying the player.

But that's just me. I'm an old-school type of guy. YMMV.