On the
XYZZY thread S. John wrote:
Ghalev wrote:
While I recognize that many disagree (and try to adjust my phrasings for clarity): I'm firmly in the "CYOA simply is IF, not a subform, not a cousin, not a form that needs to be separated or judged differently" camp and wish wedgies upon those who are not. I think the parser/multiple-choice distinction is, under the hood, much less meaningful than it looks on the surface, and a good many parser games are, in terms of actual game design and in terms of the player experience, functionally multiple-choice exercises where you're allowed to putz around with the environment or puzzles between meaningful choices (Sand-Dancer, for example) while others are functionally zero-choice exercises where putzing around with the environment is the only illusion of choice offered, making games like Rameses (a deserving and impressive work, to be sure) functionally less interactive, and less dynamic, than even the most simplistic CYOA. While the surface distinction (parser or not?) is simple and objective, I think focusing at that surface level does a disservice to what lies within each work in terms of real design.
[UPDATE: rant-tagged because S. John objects to the quote being taken from the context of his original post, which can be followed by clicking the above link.]
I submit that this abstracts away too much about real design. Real game design isn't exclusively about the choice points that you can use to influence the ultimate outcome; it's also about interaction with the game. That's why Chutes & Ladders, Candyland, and clock solitaire work as games even though they don't contain any choice points; the player is interacting with the game. No one would play clock solitaire if they didn't get to move the cards around themselves.
So in a railroaded IF like Rameses, putzing around with the environment isn't an illusion of choice. It's a form of interactivity. I've been playing Nightsky a lot, and there are a fair number of places where you bump into something that can't possibly impede your progress, but that jostles and makes a sound as you roll over it. Qua platforming challenge the game would be exactly the same if those were static platforms; qua interactive experience it would be much poorer. The free-form putzing around with the environment you often get in parser IF is like that. (Though the parser/CYOA distinction can blur a bit even here, as Undum often lets you explore the environment in ways that don't affect the choice structure.)
So, my thesis: when you're thinking about what makes a game what it is, don't necessarily think about the choices it gives you. Think about the ways you interact with it. I don't even want to make this a point about CYOA and parsers; I think that thinking about interaction is more important than anything we can get from the CYOA/IF distinction.
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