intfiction.org

Clever, though it seems to draw attention to Mr. Parser Voice: EXAMINE is what I do; DESCRIBE is what someone else does for me.

And my two cents: as a player I rarely use examine, smell, listen, etc. unless cued to, or I'm stuck. It seems like the commercial companies of old instilled that reflex into I-Fers, cause I still don't seem to be developing it.

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Blog at Gamasutra :: Programmer's Guide to Inform 7 :: Seattle I-F

Ah, okay. I didn't have Inform available to test with, so I just looked up a fairly recent game file - but not recent enough. Next step: getting TADS 3 to follow suit.

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Emily Boegheim

Funnily enough, the WIPs where I've done this have all been in the first person.

Oh, well, yeah, that does work better outside of second person.

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Blog at Gamasutra :: Programmer's Guide to Inform 7 :: Seattle I-F

I agree. The vast majority of the time, you don't care at all what the sign looks like, so I virtually always just print what it says. Yes, there are occasional times when the appearance is important (or just potentially interesting):

>EXAMINE NOTE
"Captured by pirates! Send help!"
It's in your brother's handwriting.

But that's rare enough that one's execution of the EXAMINE command shouldn't be built around it. What's more, unless your game contains an Exploding Runes analogue, then once you find out that the note is in your brother's handwriting, you're always immediately going to want to read it.

We seem to have gotten off the original topic a bit- teaching IF to new players.

There's an IF card that seems to be pretty good out there, which describes basic actions.

I think what might help is an extension.

The extension could be included in basic rules or added as needed by authors, but it should include all the basic information we take for granted, such as using compass directions to move, taking inventory, examining things, etc.

Recently watching some newbies play, they never thought to take inventory, figuring that carried items were not relevant. Another was writing overly complex sentences. Having an "About" file that made all of these things apparant would be nice.

Granted, some people use their own about files for hints and such.

Emily Short's Tutorial Mode is supposed to do that, but I've had difficulty with it. It always seems to gravitate to unimportant stuff (like prompting the player to "examine door") and has more than once trapped me in situations where it won't accept the command it prompts you to type.

Of course my game relies heavily on custom "use" functions and has custom compass directions, so I'll be stuck creating my own help resources in any event.

To be honest, the more I come to understand interactive fiction the less convinced I am that there is a universal solution to teaching new players how to play.

For me, the problem comes down to disparate implementation.

As you've discussed, the command "X (object)" might mean something different to two different authors. Or, fifty different authors. Or, it might be implemented differently by the same author in two different games. Or, more confusing still, implemented differently by the same author in two different places within the same game. How do you communicate that to a new player? How do you make a general rule to cover that? Isn't that the power of authoring languages, such as Inform 7? To be able to assign any meaning the author wants on any given command or action, and create new ones?

Of course, even if we were all to suddenly agree on the differences between "EXAMINE", "SEARCH" and "LOOK AT (object)", there's still thirty years of IF games that don't work along those lines. And then there are all the "experimental" and "innovative" works.

Further complications come in the complexities of regional, social and cultural expression. Language is fluid. Yes, we can use a tutorial to set up more rigid connections between commands and their meanings, but then you run into problems of instruction versus experimentation.

To that end, the inclusion of new commands is a difficult concept for new players and for authors.

How does a new player know that this particular game contains the command "URINATE", necessary for a toilet-stop puzzle mid-game, if the game doesn't implicitly tell them? The author, of course, hopes that the narrative will convey that it's the right course of action, but there's no guarantee the player will understand or use the right command. (They might type "TAKE A SLASH"). Worse still, this might be the only IF game ever written to include that command, leaving the new player wondering why they can't type the same thing in another game.

Where is the line between madatory tutorial and experimental surprise? You could say that any command that's required to "win" a game should be part of a tutorial. But something like the example above might be ruined by such exposition.

It's interesting to see video games struggle with this same issue when they stray into the use of text input and narrative. Super Scribblenauts is a great example here. When playing the game, I wrote "LONG POLE" hoping to give it to Maxwell so he could knock a Starite out of a tree, but when it materialised, the game deemed that Maxwell could not hold the pole. I don't know about Maxwell, but I've held many long poles. Why couldn't he? After all, he can hold a "POOL CUE", "LONG STICK", and even a "POLE VAULT". It's also interesting to note that the game (by necessity) has its own system of disambiguation.

Presently, I wonder if it's not the players we need to be teaching, but the authors. While it is extremely improbable that the larger IF community might come to a universal agreement on a style guide or a "standard", a quorum of talented authors implementing IF in the same way would be able to provide a fantastic and consistent body of work to introduce new players to.

Perhaps, then, (accepting that we can't change the past) we could really start to talk about what certain commands mean, and how new players are able to use them.

It's just a thought...

Neo, do you feel that there's no standard set of commands that are used in a fairly standard way across most (90%+) of IF? I'd argue pretty strongly that there is, although there's fuzzy areas, like conversation. A lot of this is indoctrinating new players to conventions of the genre and command phrasing. Sure, on occasion there's new verbs, and we should make it clear that different games deviate slightly, but they're deviating from a loose standard.

New commands are usually the exception, not the rule, and uncued new commands are generally looked upon unfavorably. (That is, urination is not something I'd ever try unless the situation seemed to demand it, whereas examination is something I do as a way of getting information about the world.) Standard commands may function slightly differently - I think/hope SEARCH is getting deprecated these days - and I think it's fair for authors to hint or explicitly say what choices they've made in these gray areas are.

SEARCH is never going to be a surprise choice the way URINATE might be; it's pretty clearly in a gray zone where implementation is a little unusual in a game. The same with TALK TO vs. ASK/TELL/SHOW - the author needs to direct players on gray systems.

I can well imagine a tutorial object that encourages the player to come up with verbs on their own, and provide feedback, letting the player "pass" after two or three iterations. That is, it would be an over-implemented object, and would respond to a huge variety of commands, providing juicy affirmation for players who tried their own commands.

But honestly, I can only remember one or two AHA! moments with new commands - it's one of those things that's awesome when it happens, but happens very rarely in the games I've played.

Definitely. Indeed, I'm not saying that there isn't something of a standard already. But in interactive fiction, context and nuance can make or break a new player's experience. In many cases, it only takes a single misunderstanding to bring a game to a halt.

Using my own experiences from the last 12 months as the example...

There are a number of commands that have never stumped me since I (re)discovered interactive fiction. A few examples would be "INVENTORY", "SAVE", "LOOK". These commands have worked exactly the same way in pretty much all of the games I've played.

Then there are those commands which are undeniably linked to an action but, due to the context, I've been stumped in using them. Surprisingly, they include compass directions. Yes, I know that the abbreviation "NE" is north-east, and that the command syntax never changes, but I remember one section of The Dreamhold where I spent an hour lost and wandering around because I misunderstood the description of a curved passageway. It said something like: "The exits are east and west from the passage, which curves round and ends to the northeast." I kept going east and west, but didn't understand northeast was also an exit. In this case it was the application of context, not the command itself. So, while I can be taught that "NE" is northeast, I also needed to understand how Zarf uses narrative.

This thread mentions some other perfect examples. "EXAMINE" where "READ" or "SEARCH" or "FEEL" is intended. Getting on or in things, or trying to make things work with each other, continues on occasion to perplex me. In the IFCOMP 2010 game Ninja's Fate I temporarily struggled to find the right syntax to attach the rope to the grappling hook, the grappling hook to the open trapdoor and climb down the rope inside the museum. It's a simple action, which I can describe many ways in plain English, but the correct implementation of commands seemed to elude me.

And you're right: conversation is the real killer. I think I have yet to have a complete conversation with an NPC that worked exactly as I intended. And given how many games are now striving to have a populated game world in order to create further immersion, that means a certain level of frustration is becoming increasingly inevitable (at least, for new players).

On the topic of deviation, I have to disagree. I think that while many games use a similar set of commands for most of their actions, almost every game these days includes something new. Maybe not an action to go to the toilet, but something. A new twist to doing things, a new way to reference something, a new type of object or puzzle that works a little bit differently, a new exception to the rulebook. Otherwise, we'd all just be using the commands examine, get, drop and attack, etc.

(Speaking of which... "ATTACK" is another good example. I'm holding a light-saber, but when I type "ATTACK STORMTROOPER" do I really mean that I want to rush at them with my bare fists? I can't remember which game it was, but I recently died from doing a similar thing.)

Perhaps you are right. Perhaps it is all a matter of indoctrination. But I still can't help but wish there were a range of games--even just a series--that played the same way. A series where, once you knew how the first one worked, you didn't need to learn new commands or actions or realign to a new author's intentions to play the rest.

Then again, maybe that's just me.