intfiction.org

I finished my introduction to IF today by playing through all of the 5 maze types in the Magnus Olsson port of Hunt the Wumpus. I found that the biggest challenge was mapping each of 5 types of maze. Once the maps were done it was usually trivial to avoid the traps and hunt the Wumpus, although some of the random features of the game meant that it was possible to lose through no fault of your own. Once you've mapped you win far more than you lose, though. All-in-all I'd say that the game is amusing for about an hour but once you've mastered a particular maze, replayability is low and the game loses its appeal.

I'm hoping that Adventure will hold far more of my interest.

_________________
"A kaitou is a creative artist who skillfully steals his prey, but a detective is nothing more than a critic who finds fault in what is left behind."
- Kaitou Kid, Detective Conan Episode 78 (Conan vs Kaitou Kid Part 1)

Hunt the Wumpus is very unusual for IF, and many people would consider it an ancestor of IF rather than IF proper; Adventure is generally considered the first true IF.

Hunt the Wumpus is often mentioned in books about gaming history as a semi-precursor to IF. This position does not seem entirely deserved: Wumpus was just one of many mainframe-based text-based games. Every computer game was a text-based game for a while regardless of genre, in the mainframe days (PLATO, PDP), and while Adventure was very special it sprang from pre-existing hotbed of invention. There were already many, many text-driven games, like tic tac toe, etc, in the days of Hunt of the Wumpus. It was not a lone precursor: it was part of an entire ecosystem of precursors, most of which were not culturally fossilised and have thus been largely forgotten.

It might also surprise some to know that most major genres of early arcade video games had direct precursors in the much less culturally fossilised world of arcade mechanical games. People tend to think that video games were born and then differentiated into different arcade gaming genres, but the different arcade gaming genres (shooter, fighter, flight sim, tank game) preceded the invention of video games. They first evolved in a weird, rich world of Rube Goldberg-style physics gaming that might seem entirely foreign to those who grew up on MAME -- almost like the gaming traditions of an alien planet beyond the range of the MAME-o-scope. (And it's orbited by an exotic, late-acquired moon of Discrete Logic video games, which are also beyond the range of our MAME-o-scope.) 8)

The early video games are all just attempts to recreate mechanical games in video. It was almost entirely an imitative world at first. It was when video games started to leverage the one thing a mechanical game cannot do: memorise a long history of player choices instead of just reacting off the most recent one -- that they began to pull ahead and the mechanical games became truly obsolete. The first game to really leverage this well was Space Invaders, with its enemy formations and shields both preserving the consequences of player choices. (There was a slight precursor to Space Invaders released by Midway in 1977 called M-4 -- this game also had shields that would remember the consequences of player choices.)

Before M-4 and Space Invaders there were tons of video games in which one or two things flew past the screen at a time and you had to shoot them. And before that there were tons of MECHANICAL games in which one or two things flew past under the glass at a time and you had to shoot them. So people think that video games revoultionised things, but they revolutionised *nothing*. It was *computer memory* that revolutionised games, not a video display, and thus until that capability was fully leveraged there was no actual marketplace revolution and mechanical games were still around and popular in the days of Pong and all its imitators. Look not to Pong, etc -- it was a mere recreation of a game that was superior as a mechanical game, anyway. Look to Space Invaders.

The preservation of the consequences of player choice is absolutely paramount to the power of computer entertainment. Graphical twitch game designers learned this lesson early and well (look at Pac Man -- there is a game designer produced maze but there is also a player-modified maze of remaining pellets).

I feel as if interactive fiction designers, however, have still not truly internalised this lesson, to this very day. They still think their job is telling a story with choices in it; but actually what players desire from them is the deep capture and preservation of narrative choices without a continuity error and a set of feedbacks constructed from as creatively mixed a stew of the player's prior choices as possible. The failure to learn and apply this wisdom effectively in a narrative context is plenty sufficient explanation for the market failures of interactive fiction over the years. (Making every event almost entirely a consequence of only the player's most recent command is sadly a fair-enough description of the vast majority of games in the IFDB -- face it, interactive fiction is largely still stuck in the pre-Space Invaders era of handling player choice. Even Mass Effect falls afoul of this litmus test! 99% of the so-called 'narrative' choices in Mass Effect have one immediate consequence and then are heard from no more.)

To be fair, though, long-term preservation of the consequences of player choices is an extraordinary difficult task in the narrative realm, and thus it makes sense that finding the best ways to nail it would take decades of experimentation by multiple communities.

But we aren't actually there yet. To my knowledge, this community has not actually produced a model for preserving player choices narratively that rings as clearly 'right' and points the way to future development as sharply as Space Invaders did for the graphic sim. (This should be enormously exciting to you if you are an explorer, because it means there is still a frontier.)

Paul.

[Extensively re-edited and extended as of April 12 9:13 AM EST but I didn't correct anything so apologies for sloppy sentence structure.]

Although i'm new to IF, I do understand what you're getting at because I am a big fan of what is probably IF's close cousin, the RPG. I have enjoyed many video game RPG's but the problem is that even those that give you choices on things basically only effect boolean states in the game. Taking a sidequest may mean that you can't take a different sidequest. Accepting one character in your party may mean that you can get some item down the line that may not have been accessible before, but all-in-all the game is pretty much the same no matter what you do. I have always longed for an RPG where the decisions that the player makes greatly alters the outcome of the game and can completely change everything that happens from there on. I haven't seen it yet and it seems to be what you're looking for in IF. A story that based on player choice sets events in motion that greatly alter what happens at the end of the story.

What games do you think come closest to this experience?

_________________
"A kaitou is a creative artist who skillfully steals his prey, but a detective is nothing more than a critic who finds fault in what is left behind."
- Kaitou Kid, Detective Conan Episode 78 (Conan vs Kaitou Kid Part 1)

Difficult, maybe. Time-consuming, certainly. Satisfying for the player ... unclear. If I understand what you're talking about (preserving the player's narrative choices over the arc of the story), the result would be a branching story in which the player can encounter one of several different story lines.

This can be done with simple CYOA software of course. But I'm more concerned about the nature of the narrative that the player experiences.

A story -- almost any story -- has a most satisfying ending (Hamlet marries Ophelia and they live happily ever after) and an array of less satisfying endings (Hamlet gets drunk that night and never encounters the ghost on the battlements). Were an author to write a branching narrative that included, say, two happy endings and five unhappy ones, then five players in every seven would have an unsatisfying experience because they would never encounter a happy ending!

Sorry, but I can't quite see this as a desirable design for a game. One wants the people who play the game to have a good experience. At least, I do....

I wouldn't identify a satisfying ending with a happy outcome. For one thing, players' definitions of happy outcomes can vary. For another, a satisfying ending might be one in which one feels that one's actions have the consequences they ought to have had. I can think of two romance-/relationship-oriented IFs where on my first playthrough I arrived at an ending that was signaled to be suboptimal -- the PC and the love interest don't get together -- but that was the ending my choices were leading up to, and was satisfying for me.

In case you're curious:



But another point is that the credible threat of failure can make success more satisfying. If you play through to an ending you don't like, perhaps that gives you an incentive to play through to one you do, and make you feel like your choices matter. After all, one of the consequences of your actions in Space Invaders can be that you lose quickly, but no one thinks the less of it for that.

Actually to me, a great game would be one where you could play through it different times to experience the various outcomes. I used to love "Choose your own Adventure" books as a kid and I would read through those and first do what "my" choices would be but then would backtrack and check out all possible story threads until I'd read the book from cover to cover. That's a simplistic example since many "Choose your own adventure" books didn't even try to keep a consistent universe even within their own pages and depending on your branch the "cause" of whatever started the adventure in the book may not match the cause in a different branch. A game with a consistent universe but where the actions of the player's character effected the outcome of the story to me would be a great game that I'd play again and again.

_________________
"A kaitou is a creative artist who skillfully steals his prey, but a detective is nothing more than a critic who finds fault in what is left behind."
- Kaitou Kid, Detective Conan Episode 78 (Conan vs Kaitou Kid Part 1)

I don't have specific titles to hold up as good examples -- they are all bad examples. Sure, some are worse examples than others, but it's like asking me to pick a golf club that can come closest to hitting a home run. The fact is, most narrative game designers have given up on what should be their holy grail (preserving deep consequences of player choice), believing that either it is impossible or (like Jim, above) that it is not even a desirable goal. The future will almost certainly prove these people wrong; the question is how, and I don't have that answer. I only have my own (as yet unpublished) pet theories and experiments, which I do not assign any privileged position: they might well fail.

But generaly speaking, shorter games tend to do better on this because they are not bumping up so hard against the limits of combinatorial explosion. (That is why longer narrative games tend to get narrower and narrower in scope towards the end, providing the unfortunate built-in sensation of a shrinking realm of possibility, very unlike linear movies/books which normally only provide the sensation of increased scope as they mature.) But there is another part of me that realises this is an unfair requirement at the present time and so I turn this criticism off when I evalutate most games, because I want to at least try to enjoy them and I think it's fair to evaluate them on their own terms. However there is no question in my mind that the idea of interactive fiction is broken. It has never really been not-broken, and it's going to take a massive leap of insight from some unexpected corner in order to make it so.

If I had to pick a gaming genre that comes closest to the ideal of preserving deep consequences of player choice, it would not be text games, but it would be roleplaying games (which you mentioned). But of course they do it by quantifying the effects of player choice and turning them into metrics that participate in a huge monolithic system of randomly detemining outcomes. There are very serious limits to that method as a way of representing all of the possible stories and emotions in the world. It's mathematically up-scalable but it isn't narratively down-scalable. You'd better be doing a pretty standard heroic quest narrative, or the expected RPG tropes are just all going to get in your way. That can't be the way forward.

However, what if we use a roleplaying rules system as a start, and just scaled down the rules to a smaller ad-hoc field of play? Sort of inventing a new roleplaying system for every narrative set-piece. You could also come at the same target from another direction; start from a standard text game, and add unorthodox ad-hoc advancement metrics that only apply to a particular predicament. By learning where the rules lie, the player learns the shape of that situation and becomes more aware of the possible narratively extrapolated effects of their actions (beyond just the next turn). In order to have deep consequences you need to give the player the power to predict some of those consequences, even though they might happen ten turns down the road. Why? Because what is satisfying about deep consequences is having the power to manipulate them. (This is why Jim's objection above about people only seeing a 'sad' ending betrays that he is still thinking in terms of people not being able to predict their actions and playing more by trial and error -- this is the classic IF setup but there is no reason it has to be this way.) So in order to give people the power to manipualte consequences many turns in the future, you have to teach them rules with consequences in that future; rules they can apply to their present behaviour. That means you have to somehow formalise each narrative predicament in the abstract rather than *just* describing that predicament then situating it in a toybox world in which only physical objects are discretely represented. We have to move beyond the physical when it comes to object-orientation. You have to give the player long psychological levers on the main character, and find a naturalistic way to teach the player where those levers might reach to, in advance of pulling them. (The roleplaying equivalent would be a player being able to see the ultimate highest level skills achievable along every branch of the skill tree -- this is pretty crucial to a successful RPG, notifying the player in advance of where these learning branches might ultimately lead. Large text adventures are desperately lacking in long-term goals that vary with play style.)

This all resembles proceduralism of course, but I am talking about recruiting ad-hoc systems specifically into psychological terms. You'll see more what I mean if/when you see my work-in-progress.

I'm not saying I have found the light though by any means. I'm just saying, 'Hey it's still dark in here,' and hunting for my own wumpus. 8)

Paul.

Do you feel as though challenge is a legitimate subset of player choice? I ask because there are a number of somewhat prominent IF titles that present you with a scenario that grinds toward a particular unhappy ending, which can be altered by the player's decision to come to grips with the game logic and derive a workable set of choices.

Defining it in those terms casts a fairly wide net. I am thinking specifically of Make It Good, which is quite difficult but nonetheless exquisite.



This is the core mechanic of Make It Good. Another game laid out along these lines is All Things Devours. Those are the first two that come to mind, but the essential kernel of the idea is present in many IF games. Spider and Web pivots on a moment where narrative learning and player prediction fuse together and ignite in an unhinted but obvious solution.

Yes I agree with you Ben — that is a legitimate subset of player choice. However, so is 'find all the treasures and put them in the trophy case'. If you didn't pick up the treasures available in the early parts of the game, that can affect your endgame and make it less than optimal (or prevent it from happening altogether). The way you describe it strikes me as a variation on that although I haven't yet played Make It Good; I have had it recommended several times and I have a system for checking out recommendations but I'm not very efficient at following my systems. I have at least moved Make It Good up on the list — thank you.

Your point brings up an important perspective though — it's not so much that there have been zero ways of incorporating past player choices. It's more that there is an overly simplistic, now very much played-out paradigm for doing so. Manipulate a list of physical objects to get the optimal ending. The other 'endings' are mostly failures.

I believe in allowing failure (big-time) but I don't really believe that holding out one or two win conditions and making the entire game a process of lining up the physical pins necessary to achieve that win condition is the future of narrative gaming. I believe that we can leave this territory but *without* dispensing with puzzles. (We have plenty of expeirments already that leave this territory *by* dispensing with puzzles — I am not in favour of those.) This is key to the idea of long-term narrative levers allowing players to tailor their experience. I am advocating using the principles of puzzle design to allow players to work out how to mould their characters in a direction that intrigues them personally, which may and probably should indirectly create a panoply of endings (but does not actually have to create multiple endings).

So instead of asking the player to work toward a specific ending, why not ask them to pick a goal to work towards, among a bunch, and then explore what those choices will do to the scenario and the ending? This is still goal-driven and leads the player forward (which is extremely important for a game) but doesn't put the player in a position of consciously trying to assemble a specific narrative as if it's a model kit. I want the player to be seduced into living in the narrative having chosen a non-compulsory manner in which to do it. I want the player to feel the way I did in A Mind Forever Voyaging when I stumbled into my own apartment in the virtual world and decided to try to just hang out there for a while with my virtual wife and see what would happen — in that moment, I chose my own goal for the game for a while and it was the best I've ever felt playing Infocom, despite the fact that the game didn't really make any hay out of my going to refrigerator repeatedly. Wouldn't it have been awesome if it had? Wouldn't it have been awesome if the whole progression of the game were mutated and altered based on my decision to avoid my duties and stay at home?


Having seen it recommended elsewhere in this forum, I have now played All Things Devours and I am forced to say I found it tedious and just a ton of repetitive puzzle grunt-work necessary in order to attain a final ending configuration that I already knew everything important about in advance. The game was all, 'jump through these difficult hoops just to prove you can' with very little mystery about where the story was headed. I want my experiments to be pretty much the exact opposite of that. 8)

Spider and Web of course is a brilliant piece of work for reasons you mention. I don't think it is quite doing what I'm doing, either, however. I will try Make It Good at my earliest convenience. Thanks again!

Paul.