Fantastic observation – thanks! I’ve just implemented a way to handle that type of command in the game I’m starting to work on, using a newbie-friendly instructional message.
–JA
What’s the message? (Is it a secret?)
Smarter Parser’s message for this is “Usually, you don’t need to worry about the exact positioning of things. You can get more detail about something with the EXAMINE command, or use compass directions like [get direction example] to change your location.”
([get direction example] prints a random connection from the player’s location.)
No, but I’m using Inform 6, so I doubt anyone would be interested. It needs more refinements; at the moment, it looks like this:
[code]Extend ‘go’
* ‘to’/‘toward’ noun → Approach
* ‘over’ ‘to’ noun → Approach;
Extend only ‘move’
* ‘to’/‘toward’ noun → Approach;
Verb ‘approach’
* noun → Approach;
! Note: Approach needs further modification to allow 'go to .
[ ApproachSub;
if (noun in player) {
print "You’re already about as close to “, (the) noun, " as you’re
going to get, since you’re “;
if (noun has worn) print “wearing”;
else print “holding”;
if (noun has pluralname) " them.”;
else " it.”;
}
else “An understandable impulse, but that command is not necessary.
Except in special circumstances, everything that you can see in an
interactive fiction story is essentially in the same location you’re
in. If you can see it, you don’t need to do anything special to get closer to
it – and in fact you can’t get any closer to it (though the command TOUCH may have an effect).^^The
special circumstances would include situations such as if you’re lying in a
hammock. In that case, you’d be able to see nearby objects, but you would need to
use the command STAND UP in order to be able to touch them or pick them up.”;
];[/code]
That’s nice, but how come you mention the not-very-common “touch” command without explaining “examine?” If I remember my IF beginnings correctly, that’s what I was really trying to do when I attempted to get closer to an object in the room.
Good point. I hadn’t thought of that.
My guess is, it’s a losing battle trying to put together a system that will address the misunderstandings that all new players may have. I’ve expanded on that code already to allow the player to ‘go to’ distant but visible objects, and now I’m working on a way to allow the player to follow NPCs when they’ve left the room. It ain’t simple…
–JA
Of course, every time IF Parser opens a door, It closes a window:
If I hadn’t just read this thread, this might have been confusing. As it is, I still felt compelled to…
…you know, just in case.
I think a page can be taken from the primers of modern graphical games, which, I have noticed, often have controls so sophisticated and convoluted that they are barely more discoverable to newbies than the standard IF commands. But a convention has arisen in which, in the early stages of the game, hints pop up onscreen training you what buttons to press in combination with which thumbstick moves, on an as-needed basis. This proceeds until every move necessary to solve the game has been hinted at least once. At that point, by convention the player will assume that there are no more moves to be learned, and will generally stop trying to discover new control paths. In this way, pointless efforts on the part of the player are completely avoided.
I see no reason why this system of ad-hoc teaching (which is, after all, the best way to learn, since one is only truly motivated to learn to do what one is presently aware needs to be done) is specific to either graphical or gamepad-based games, and I think it would work wonderfully for IF if it has not been used already.
Of course, given the brevity of the experience in most modern IF, authors would need to adopt an ethic of design such that every verb form required to finish the game gets used in the first, say, third of play-time — no surprise late-stage command innovation unless you want to tutor the player through the entire game. One could argue that this is just good design though in any case. Act I - use every verb the game will expect of you: with training wheels. Acts II and III - training wheels come off and the player is expected to think creatively by making new combinations out of only the received grammatical building blocks, and no more.
So, these graphical game designers have worked out pretty thoroughly how to solve a very similar problem. Furthermore, today’s players are rather used to this solution and will recognise it and the attendant conventions the moment they get their first ‘typing tip’. i.e. They will tend to naturally assume that the typing tips will describe the complete set of necessary commands, and that they will go away as soon as that’s done. I suppose it’s somewhat similar to the ‘WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?’ prompt (ugh) that would sometimes be asked in the early stages of some of the games of the late '70s/'80s, but very much refined to a specific suggestion for what to type at any time. Essentially, one would be walked through the first chapter of the game.
If you’re thinking about refining your error messages instead, I think the battle is already lost. No matter how sophisticated an error message, it counts on the player doing things wrong. Failure is built into that process, so that’s suboptimal from the start, so it’s kind of irrelevant how smart are the error messages. Even if you could hire a human to stand beside your players correcting their errors with perfect intelligence, this would still be a frustrating, belittling process for the player. If you want someone to learn something just tell them how to do it the moment they realise they need to know: not before, and definitely not afterward — not if you want them to perservere. IF should work the same way. Error messages are a good backup system to have: but they should never be relied upon to teach the rules of a game, IMO.
Paul.
This was my specific inspiration for the tutorial model in The Dreamhold. The training doesn’t go through every possible move needed to play the game – but it goes as far as moving, examining, finding a key, and unlocking and opening a door. I figure by the time the player has gotten that far, she can at least find the rest of the game.
As far as I know, this approach works. Dreamhold hasn’t turned IF into a mass-popular craze again, but I think that’s a failure to get it in front of people, not a failure of design.
(I recently had a friend watch Get Lamp, pick up one of my IF-cheat-sheet cards, go to Dreamhold (via Parchment), and play through it in a couple of days. Cold start, she’d never played IF before. I call that a win.)
Love it when someone quotes just the essence of what you said, showing how wordy you needn’t have been. 87
I missed that game; thanks for the reference! I will try it. I kept up pretty well until about 2000, then I got sucked much deeper into filmmaking and my text-based IF projects went fallow for about ten years. But no longer. Anyway I very much appreciate being updated on post-2000 innovations as I have catching up to do.
I don’t know how you worked it, yet, but I was thinking I would put the typing tips on by default, with an option to turn it off for players who don’t appreciate the guide rail. I figure I would either use square brackets/box it off somehow, or have some sidekick actually ‘whisper in your ear’. I’ve seen it done both ways, graphically.
Yeah, I retweeted that cheat-sheet card on Twitter: it’s very good. Once again, kudos!
Paul.
My husband does lots of gaming but acts like a total newbie when doing IF.
One of the most marked things I’ve noticed is the tendency to try to “talk” by just entering text. For instance, when my husband was at a part where the player in surrounded by flames that can burn you, he would type “ouch.” This puzzles me because, even if the parser understood it, I’m not sure what it would accomplish.
I do things like this even as a veteran. It’s a performance — it doesn’t really matter whether the game can play along. It’s a consequence, I believe, of being put in the second-person mindset. You are being placed in a role. There is a temptation (at least on my part) to think of the things I am typing as part of the story rather than as purely utilitarian. But the commands don’t really scan at all as part of the story in a second-person IF, nor even as part of some extratextual meta-story, because you are aiming imperative sentences at no one in particular. If you are ‘you’ then who would you be commanding to ‘say ouch’ or to ‘yell’? It just doesn’t make sense to me; never has. Thus, my overwhelming compulsion to change my grammar whenever I am tempted to roleplay. The standard IF grammar and the standard IF perspective are very much at odds with each other. I feel like typing things like ‘ouch’ or ‘fuck’ or ‘whatever’, whenever I feel like roleplaying the actual character who I have been accused (by the game) of being, and I know the conventions so I know it never works, but I do it sometimes anyway just to air out that impulse to play ‘my’ role.
Paul.
EDIT: And… I’m going to try to cut down on the harping against 2nd person perspective in this forum. It’s come up for me in a couple of different threads now, and this is only like my 40th post, and it will likely continue to be in the forefront of my mind — but I didn’t come here to try to hijack every thread in favour of agitating against the conventions of the form. I came here because I just love IF, despite my objections to the narrative conventions that have developed around it, so it’d be best not to thrust those objections front and centre. Anyway the better argument is to produce more games that don’t follow those conventions.
You know I do the same thing sometimes, typing expressions as if in character. It just seems natural. I only do it if I’m really into the role, though, so it’s not often.
This does make a difference if you’re a beta-tester, because the author will be reading your transcript very carefully, and it’s always nice to entertain him/her while pointing out the rough spots in their work.
BTW I do appreciate your comments re: second person. I hadn’t thought of some of those things that way.
About the Keyword Interface extension:
While I recognize the utility of this with beginners, it seems like there’s a possible problem with things that aren’t listed normally in the room description (mainly scenery and parts of things). If a new player gets used to paying attention to blue things, s/he might not think to look at things in the background, and generally might adhere to a graphics-adventure mentality of having a discrete set of usable objects rather than a text-adventure mentality of thinking outside the box about what you can interact with. What have your experiences been with new users and this extension?
I’d be curious to hear what other authors who’ve tried to use a system like this feel, but my general impression is that as long as you mention to players early on that they keywords are not the only words they can type, they will merrily keep trying to interact with unimplemented scenery until the cows come home.
There’s nothing to stop you highlighting second-order nouns in the descriptions of objects:
But the range of gameplay styles in IF games is extremely diverse. For some games, either of these mindsets might be appropriate (or even some other style of playing). I can certainly think that highlighted keywords might be a bad or misleading choice for many games (not even necessarily hardcore adventures, but also more naturalistic story games like Galatea), but it can also be a great fit for a lot of others.
Similarly, if you tell them that they only need to worry about the keywords (and it’s true), experienced adventurers will still poke at the scenery, while newbies and casual players will feel a weight lifted off their shoulders.
I have a much bigger problem with the combinatory explosion of having to examine and search and in some games do some third command to everything, than I do with figuring out what the keywords are in the description, which is not as hard and definitely not as boring. Examine should be it — you examine something, it’s examined. If there is something more, reveal to me a different noun (or a different time, after some event has changed the noun) to focus on, so I don’t feel like I have to double- or triple-verb every noun in the game to experience it well.
Maybe I am getting a bit off-topic here or maybe not, but ‘examine’ and ‘search’ should be synonyms, IMO, and there should be no other generalised ‘look at it even deeper’ verbs, because I only have enough patience for one automatically-try-it-on-most-things verb. Add another and I get bored, add yet another and I get frustrated, as the game doubles or triples in length without getting any more interesting. This is when you begin to yearn for keywords, and so I see it as a solution to an overly broad puzzle space, often caused by too many general-purpose verbs rather than by too many concrete nouns.
It would be like defining double-clicking something in a graphic adventure to mean looking at it even deeper than just clicking it. Having to click each object, and then double-click it, would be a pretty silly way to extra-double-dog-disguise a graphic adventure’s clues. And then if the designer decided to put an ‘importance aura’ around certain graphic objects to cut down on all the resulting tedious triple-clicking of unimportant things, it’d all seem comically overdesigned. That’s how I feel about keywords, basically: I suspect them of being a solution to a problem that shouldn’t be.
Unfortunately the problem does exist. I’ve played at least 3 examples of it in this year’s IFcomp alone. In one of them I felt obligated to examine, search, AND ‘concentrate on’ every object in the game. (It was otherwise pretty interesting, but man.) I suppose some highlighting could have helped manage that workload, but I’d prefer it if they just subtracted most of the tedium altogether by ditching the redundant verbs.
So I feel these things are both signs of bad design, and I tend to expect double-dog-clue-burying when I see highlights. I’m sure there could be exceptions and not everybody would use highlighting to compensate for multiple layers of examination, and I realise there are different valid styles and expectations of play other than my own.
Paul.
We talked about this very thing at Seattle IF yesterday, with the same conclusions. We added the observation that good writing would mix physical description with the PC’s thoughts & feelings & POV, so having different buckets for EXAMINE and THINK ABOUT seemed to encourage bad writing, as well as suspect game design as you say.
My favorite good example was the dirigible that descended upon the zombie/pirate parade in Violet. Upon examining it, she only replies, “That can’t be legal.”
This seems to indicate that, unless the author specifically separates them, Examine, Think About, and Search should be synonymous for the same action: comment further.
I think this is pretty much the trend in most modern IF anyway: most recent games don’t require any use of SEARCH or LOOK UNDER without some kind of hint in that direction, unless the game is explicitly a game about meticulous investigation (such as a forensically-focused detective game – Make It Good does some of this, but is I think fair in that regard).
THINK ABOUT I have sometimes used as a mechanism for asking for a hint. I like it better than HINT ABOUT (puzzle object) because it feels less meta-gamey, but it shifts part of the task of enacting the protagonist’s role from player to game. “Here, I know there’s something interesting about this locket, but I don’t quite get it, game. What might my protagonist think of, left to her own devices, that I the player am not coming up with right away?”
But my EXAMINE descriptions do typically include a fair amount of viewpoint character thought and interpretation.
Hrm. I’m not so sure of this. Off the top of my head, I think Snowquest, Dual Transform, A Flustered Duck, and Raising the Flag on Mount Yo Momma required “search” or “look under/behind” at some point, which seems like a pretty wide spectrum of well-received recent games. In two of those cases that sent me to the hints, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they weren’t well-clued in the game; I often miss clues.
Anyway, I pretty much agree with Paul’s original sentiment; the combinatory explosion can be a big drag for the player, and adding “search” to it makes it worse.
[Sorry if that’s spoily; didn’t know how to make the comment without slight spoilers, and spoilering out the games wouldn’t help.]