1893: A World's Fair Mystery survey results, part two
PTN
is now online in the "Designer's Journal" section of my site. In this
part, I ask whether anyone actually liked the game at all.
http://www.illuminatedlantern.com/if/blog/customer_satisfaction_survey_r.html
Short answer: Yes, we did; but we're not all that crazy about that
text-based interface you've got, there.
-- Peter
Ron Newcomb
on OS X....
--R.
aaroni...@gmail.com
> Still going through the results of my customer survey. The second part
> is now online in the "Designer's Journal" section of my site. In this
> part, I ask whether anyone actually liked the game at all.
>
>
> Short answer: Yes, we did; but we're not all that crazy about that
> text-based interface you've got, there.
>
> -- Peter
Thanks for sharing this info, Peter. This is probably the largest
survey of "purchasers of interactive fiction" done in a decade, and
the results are very interesting to see.
--Aaron
ChicagoDave
> Still going through the results of my customer survey. The second part
> is now online in the "Designer's Journal" section of my site. In this
> part, I ask whether anyone actually liked the game at all.
>
>
> Short answer: Yes, we did; but we're not all that crazy about that
> text-based interface you've got, there.
This is the primary reason why I am not directing my content to a
wider and more mature audience. The younger audience will find the IF
parser fun and intriguing. Their tolerance should be much higher and
in the case of kids that like to read or be cognitively challenged,
they might be far more in tune with the parser.
David C.
David Whyld
To be honest, I'd have thought the more mature people would be more
likely to give the text-based interface a fairer go whilst the younger
generation would just complain that it didn't have graphics.
Zylon
"David Whyld" <dwh...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1187734066.1...@57g2000hsv.googlegroups.com...
You're correct on both counts. Working for game companies (including some
that have sold software titles to schools), I can tell you kids are least
interested in games that have a lot of text. I'm not talking text adventures
here since I've never worked with them or sold them. But I can tell you that
even "edutainment" titles that have too much text score *very* low with kids
and it gets worse as you get into games that are 'more game' and 'less
education.' There are differences based on the age group but in no age group
I've worked with has the presence of text been a huge factor, except in the
negative sense. The only thing that might work is that idea of kids that
like to read. That could be a good market to reach. I would think that would
apply not just to kids though. I have to assume people here who still play
text adventures like to read. But bear in mind that just because kids like
to read books, that doesn't necessarily translate to wanting to read games.
That also applies to adults though so I'd be careful about what conclusions
are drawn, at least until you get some field data or conduct some pilot
studies.
Poster
There is a difference between "reading a game" and "interacting with a
game via text". This is not a grammar slam, but a pointing out that the
two use different skills and the latter makes the game much more real
than reading alone does.
I personally think that interactive fiction presents a challenge just by
its format. Some will rise to that challenge; some will not. I'm not
sure that it's possible to convince children to love written language
through IF alone; it's almost a given that you have to start with the
set of children who are already at that point.
Are there enough children to serve this market? Target the
home-schoolers. You'll find enough interest there to keep you busy for a
while.
-- Poster
www.intaligo.com Building, INFORM, Seasons (upcoming!)
ChicagoDave
> You're correct on both counts. Working for game companies (including some
> that have sold software titles to schools), I can tell you kids are least
> interested in games that have a lot of text.
This is not my experience to date. I have been testing IF games with
my 8 year old daughter and her school mates and although this is a
very small sampling, in a school setting, the kids have responded very
positively. I plan to continue this type of market testing. It may be
that the school setting is a major factor and I will have to take that
into account, but I still believe that 9 and 10 year olds that have
not been around game consoles will be intrigued with IF.
Any kids that are already video game savvy will be less likely to take
an interest in IF. I still think there is a sizable market outside of
that demographic.
David C.
Zylon
"ChicagoDave" <david.c...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1187752433.5...@x35g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> On Aug 21, 6:10 pm, "Zylon" <zylo...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> You're correct on both counts. Working for game companies (including some
>> that have sold software titles to schools), I can tell you kids are least
>> interested in games that have a lot of text.
>
> This is not my experience to date. I have been testing IF games with
> my 8 year old daughter and her school mates and although this is a
> very small sampling, in a school setting, the kids have responded very
> positively. I plan to continue this type of market testing. It may be
> that the school setting is a major factor and I will have to take that
> into account, but I still believe that 9 and 10 year olds that have
> not been around game consoles will be intrigued with IF.
That's possibly true although 9 to 10 year olds that aren't or haven't been
around game consoles of some kind is a rapidly shrinking market. I don't
think I'd base my strategy on that too much. Plus a range of 9 and 10 is a
very small target demographic as it is.
But consider that in the range of about 7 to 11, games like Zoo Tycoon score
very high with kids. So do games like Nancy Drew: Secrets of Shadow Ranch.
Consider that games like the revamped Oregon Trail do really, really poorly
with children these days but games like Sim City do a lot better. The
difference there is that Oregon Trail had a lot of text, except for the
latest incarnations.
> Any kids that are already video game savvy will be less likely to take
> an interest in IF. I still think there is a sizable market outside of
> that demographic.
I'd be surprised if that were true but I'm interested in what you find out.
So I'm skeptical but somewhat cautiously so since I'm not all that familiar
with text adventures in terms of current marketability. Are you planning on
publishing any of your studies or your experiential data. I'd personally be
very interested.
Zylon
news:-MSdnRggN7PPHVbb...@giganews.com...
>>
>
> There is a difference between "reading a game" and "interacting with a
> game via text". This is not a grammar slam, but a pointing out that the
> two use different skills and the latter makes the game much more real than
> reading alone does.
To a child, that difference doesn't always matter. Someone who likes text
adventures is likely to define things as you do and say it makes the game
"much more real" but that's just an opinion from someone who already likes
that style of game. You can't translate that to other gamers necessarily.
> I personally think that interactive fiction presents a challenge just by
> its format. Some will rise to that challenge; some will not. I'm not sure
> that it's possible to convince children to love written language through
> IF alone; it's almost a given that you have to start with the set of
> children who are already at that point.
Is that the point? To convince children to love the written language? Or is
the point of this to just find a target market for text adventures?
I agree that if children are already predisposed to enjoy reading, they
might take more kindly to a game based on text interaction (reading and
inputting). That's not a given, however, and with everything else competing
for attention, I'm not sure that it would be compelling enough unless the
games were enough like the books they enjoy reading. For example, if you
could make games based on books the kids are currently reading in school
(like "A Wrinkle in Time" and others) that could keep their interest
possibly. But would that interest continue outside of school? That's harder
to say.
> Are there enough children to serve this market? Target the home-schoolers.
> You'll find enough interest there to keep you busy for a while.
I'm curious: upon what are you basing this conclusion?
PTN
It's an HTML TADS game, as can be seen here:
http://www.illuminatedlantern.com/if/games/1893/screenshots/
-- Peter
PTN
> I personally think that interactive fiction presents a challenge just by
> its format. Some will rise to that challenge; some will not.
This is sort of where I'm at. More specifically: I'm choosing to write
text-based games, really against the wishes of the majority of the
gaming public. (IF fans and text adventure boosters excluded). Players
tolerate my choice to a greater or lesser extent. A few embrace it, a
few throw their hands up in despair, most deal with it pretty
reasonably. Given a game that they want to play, most players are
willing to interact with the game within its (my) parameters as best
they can, provided they are getting content that they really can't
experience any other way.
That's not to say with the right marketing, and the right content, and
the right target audience, the results wouldn't be entirely
different.
Zylon
"PTN" <pet...@illuminatedlantern.com> wrote in message
news:1187795696.6...@i38g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
>
> That's not to say with the right marketing, and the right content, and
> the right target audience, the results wouldn't be entirely
> different.
That's absolutely correct. The marketing side really can't be decided upon
until you have the "right content" and that can't be decided upon until
you've focused on the "right target audience." To a certain extent with
games you can define your target audience and establish new vectors through
the gaming public, but you have to do this cognizant of the fact that you're
still going to be working within fairly well-established trajectories.
So the focus for text adventures I would think has to be on the "right
content." You have to define what that means. Is it more book? Is it more
game? You can't just say "it's both" because that doesn't work in the
market. (It rarely does, anyway.) People want to be able to categorize so
they know how to fit things into their mental maps and how to set their
expectations. The 1893 game seems interesting, based on your survey results,
because people clearly treated it as a game (and spoke to its mechanics) but
also recognized the inherent appeal of one specific aspect: the setting and
the story as placed in that setting. It seems you do have an aspect of the
"right content" there.
Now the question is whether people like your presentation of that content:
the text adventure based format. Let's say they don't (at least in the
main). Then you've got to look at ancillary aspects of your responders. For
example, are they (1) casual readers or (2) avid readers. Are they (1)
causal gamers or (2) avid gamers. Then break up both aspects of your game
into those categories and ask the relevant people about the specifics: for
the readers, focus on what they liked about the game as it related to their
love of reading; for the gamers, focus on what they liked about the game as
it related to their love of games. At some point in here, of course, the age
factor comes in so you have to relate the answers to the ancillary aspects
to the age breakdown.
It's a long process but this is how most game companies start to draw
actionable information about what the market will and won't support. There
are whole series of titles, for example, that have been modified in order to
accomodate an entirely different audience than those titles were initially
designed for. Sometimes a title (or series) was scrapped because it was
determined that it couldn't reach a significant number of people of any
target demographic.
J. J. Lawless
wrote:
>I agree that if children are already predisposed to enjoy reading, they
>might take more kindly to a game based on text interaction (reading and
>inputting). That's not a given, however, and with everything else competing
>for attention, I'm not sure that it would be compelling enough unless the
>games were enough like the books they enjoy reading. For example, if you
>could make games based on books the kids are currently reading in school
Get J.K. Rowling to endorse/write a hogwarts game and give the
proceeds(if any) to charity(as she did with a franchise related series
companion book already) perhaps?
That would get a lot of kids playing that one game, and then perhaps a
few will like the format enough to look for more.
-J
ChicagoDave
> that have sold software titles to schools), I can tell you kids are least
> interested in games that have a lot of text. I'm not talking text adventures
> here since I've never worked with them or sold them. But I can tell you that
> even "edutainment" titles that have too much text score *very* low with kids
> and it gets worse as you get into games that are 'more game' and 'less
> education.' There are differences based on the age group but in no age group
> I've worked with has the presence of text been a huge factor, except in the
> negative sense. The only thing that might work is that idea of kids that
> like to read. That could be a good market to reach. I would think that would
> apply not just to kids though. I have to assume people here who still play
> text adventures like to read. But bear in mind that just because kids like
> to read books, that doesn't necessarily translate to wanting to read games.
> That also applies to adults though so I'd be careful about what conclusions
> are drawn, at least until you get some field data or conduct some pilot
I'm reluctant to talk about sales targets, but I think this entire
thread is drifting towards the video game comparison. I can't stress
this enough. IF is not comparable in any manner to the video game
market. The cost of content creation, the target sales numbers, the
target audience...all of these things must be approached in a
completely different manner than every other type of PC or console
gaming.
Your skepticism is drawn from tactics and focuses that are not
relative to IF. We don't want to put different kinds of content in
front of kids and say, "which one do you like better". We plan to laud
the great stories you can interact with with kids that love to read
books like Captain Underpants, The Magic Treehouse, Junie B. Jones,
Nancy Drew, Faeries, and more.
This is heavy lifting. There is currently no market for IF. We have to
_create_ it.
It's odd how people view sales so differently now than in years past.
There seems to be a culture of "let's throw this out there and if it
doesn't work in two minutes, it must not be marketable" and
conversely, "Hey, this piece of junk is selling like hot cakes, let's
keep creating more junk!"
Real sales is about defining your market and figuring out how to
advertise your product so that it sells. No one takes the time to do
this in a throw-away culture. I don't believe products need to be
bestsellers from day one. I think there's a great deal of business
that can be done by creating new markets through hard work, adapting
to customer feedback, and delivering high quality products.
David C.
Zylon
> I'm reluctant to talk about sales targets, but I think this entire
> thread is drifting towards the video game comparison. I can't stress
> this enough. IF is not comparable in any manner to the video game
> market. The cost of content creation, the target sales numbers, the
> target audience...all of these things must be approached in a
> completely different manner than every other type of PC or console
> gaming.
Maybe that's so. I'll grant that. But the fact is the people you sell to
will probably still look at them as a game. Even if you dross them up as a
"book" or an "interactive novel", it's something you install and "play" on a
computer. To a lot of people, that's a game. So if you're truly trying to
market these as a book concept or a story concept rather than as a game,
your marketing strategy would be quite different as would your target
audiences.
> Your skepticism is drawn from tactics and focuses that are not
> relative to IF.
Maybe. I'm not so sure about that. Maybe your optimism is drawn from tactics
and foci that suggest text adventures are so different from games. Call it
"IF" if you want, that's fine. But that's a term you're going to have to
market to the buying public. I know Infocom tried it years ago. It worked
for awhile so maybe it can again. Then again, Infocom didn't have the same
types of competing elements out there, at least from a gaming perspective.
> We don't want to put different kinds of content in
> front of kids and say, "which one do you like better". We plan to laud
> the great stories you can interact with with kids that love to read
> books like Captain Underpants, The Magic Treehouse, Junie B. Jones,
> Nancy Drew, Faeries, and more.
But "loving to read" and "loving to play what you read as a game" (or
"interactively read what you love to read as IF") are different things and I
guess I'm not seeing how the one necessarily translates to the other. Are
you saying this is the notion you're going to try to create in the market?
If so, I can at least see that as the beginning of a plan. My confusion is
that sometimes it sounds like we're talking about marketing a game to
readers; then I hear marketing a book to gamers; then I hear marketing a
game to gamers but with a different emphasis of what makes a game; then I
hear marketing a book to readers but with a different emphasis on what makes
a book. All of those are possible (and other permutations) but they are very
different in focus at least when you get into tactics such as marketing and
market creation.
> This is heavy lifting. There is currently no market for IF. We have to
> _create_ it.
If you claim there is no market for "IF" and you have this group here of
people who still like to play and in some cases write these games, then
that's a telling statement. You're saying in effect that even people who
currently play and write these games do not constitute a market for those
games. I find that interesting. Granted, what you have might not be a big
market, but it's at least a market, isn't it? This thread is about a game
called 1893 that's a text adventure that people bought. So clearly there's
some market. This is the kind of confusion I'm talking about or at least it
seems like confusion to me.
What I'm trying to figure out is whether or not in your mind the idea is
that there's no market for what you're doing because what you're planning on
doing is so different from what people in this community (and presumably
buyers of 1893) would classify as "text adventure" or "IF."
> It's odd how people view sales so differently now than in years past.
> There seems to be a culture of "let's throw this out there and if it
> doesn't work in two minutes, it must not be marketable" and
> conversely, "Hey, this piece of junk is selling like hot cakes, let's
> keep creating more junk!"
That's not how people view sales, so much as it is a statement of a much
more fickle market than in years past. With many more options available (and
many more diverse options) sometimes it does become an issue of "this better
sell fast." That happens with box office ticket sales and network prime time
shows just as much as software applications. Sales has adapted to the
market. Not the other way around.
> Real sales is about defining your market and figuring out how to
> advertise your product so that it sells. No one takes the time to do
> this in a throw-away culture. I don't believe products need to be
> bestsellers from day one. I think there's a great deal of business
> that can be done by creating new markets through hard work, adapting
> to customer feedback, and delivering high quality products.
I absolutely agree. Where I'm finding confusion here (and maybe this is
stuff you can't talk about yet) is what it means to "create new markets"
with text adventures. These were (and are) games. They act in some ways like
books that you read. Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books were (and are) books.
They act in some ways like games. So the "create new markets" sort of
depends on the approach you're talking about here. This is especially the
case I would think for you since both markets (text adventures,
choose-your-own-adventures) were largely flashes in the pan when considered
over the whole landscape of games and books. Any "create a new market"
strategy has to take that into account.
Jim Aikin
box is sealed, and we're not even allowed to shake it. So let's argue
about what's in the box."
The way to tell what's in the box is to open the box. That's what Dave
is aiming to do. I hope he's fabulously successful, and I don't think
it's possible to predict in advance whether he will be.
What's missing from the discussion is the word "content." Trying to
dissect whether middle-school students will like IF better if it's sold
as a game they read or as a book they play would be breathtakingly
irrelevant even if we HAD hard sales figures, unless we factored in
whether the damn game was any good.
I'm going to drag a dead elephant into the ring here. Harry Potter.
The reason the Harry Potter books have sold is not clever marketing or
movie tie-ins or the fact that they're about kid wizards. The books have
sold because they're really good books. Not perfect, but really, really
good.
If you can come up with a great game, you'll probably create a market.
If your game is mediocre, all the muscular marketing on Earth ain't
gonna help you overcome the inherent balkiness of the delivery medium.
--Jim Aikin
Adam Thornton
Jim Aikin <midig...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>The way to tell what's in the box is to open the box. That's what Dave
>is aiming to do. I hope he's fabulously successful, and I don't think
>it's possible to predict in advance whether he will be.
Pshaw.
Prediction #1: He will be.
Prediction #2: He won't be.
I'm pretty sure *one* of those is correct.
Adam
Zylon
news:fao8ad$b2p$1...@aioe.org...
> What's missing from the discussion is the word "content."
Earlier I said: "The marketing side really can't be decided upon until you
have the "right content"." So content isn't missing. I've said this from
the beginning.
> Trying to dissect whether middle-school students will like IF better if
> it's sold as a game they read or as a book they play would be
> breathtakingly irrelevant even if we HAD hard sales figures, unless we
> factored in whether the damn game was any good.
But deciding whether you want to focus on a book or a game may determine
some of your content.
> The reason the Harry Potter books have sold is not clever marketing or
> movie tie-ins or the fact that they're about kid wizards. The books have
> sold because they're really good books. Not perfect, but really, really
> good.
Absolutely right. But if they were written solely as a game, their content
might have been a bit different in some ways. They weren't sold as a game.
They were sold as a book, which dictated the style of the content to some
degree.
> If you can come up with a great game, you'll probably create a market.
History in the gaming market suggests otherwise because you haven't defined
what "great game" means. To whom? What style of game? What interface of
game? It's easy to throw around "great." It's not so easy to define what
that means. (Except after the fact, when you have a ton of sales. Then
people call it "great.")