Investigative vs. Exploratory IF
Captain Mikee
interesting reason. Both games are heavily NPC oriented, but even more
than this, the flow of play seems very different from most games I've
played.
I think the difference is the type of puzzles involved. Your goal in
both of these games is to find out what's going on, and when you think
you know enough, make a decision about how to end the game. This puts
a lot more of the burden for advancing the plot on the player. In a
traditional (I'm calling it "exploratory") game, nothing happens until
you solve the right puzzles, and then you're pointed towards the next
puzzles by the map opening up or physical constraints on the PC. "Find
the key" is the fundamental puzzle of exploratory IF. But in an
"investigative" game, solving puzzles gives you new information. The
line between player and PC is more blurry; you can have a good idea of
what's going on, but if the PC doesn't have the evidence to prove it,
it may be hard to figure out what to do. Often what you need is to
share the right information with the right character, but even when
you do, an obvious path may not open up from there. The flow of plot
is much more open - you need to solve many puzzles to get a perfect
score, but few of them are required to solve each other. The end of
the game is a lot more uncertain too - instead of dying or winning,
there are lots of partial success endings.
I'm very interested in this "investigative" form, but I'm having a
very difficult time getting my head around it. I ended up using a
walkthrough for EE after completing it once because I didn't feel like
repeated playthroughs to get a perfect score. I discovered some very
cool puzzles that I'd completely missed, which was impressive in
hindsight but since I had no clue those puzzles were even there, it
seemed like a little bit of a waste. I also played the game very
secretively, hiding as much as possible from characters who didn't
seem trustworthy. I think this is a habit learned from exloratory
games, but in this game, full disclosure will get you more
information. Part of the reason is that the PC is someone with power
and authority. Deadline is the same way; doing sneaky unethical things
will not help you reach the "best" ending. In contrast, the PC of
Lydia's Heart, a very traditional-feeling game, is a young girl afraid
for her life, and she is justified in robbing and tricking even
somewhat sympathetic characters.
Here's a summary:
Exploratory IF:
* PC is an inexperienced maverick
* Sneakiness, theivery and sometimes violence are rewarded
* Failure often results in death
* One clear winning ending
* Many replays or save&restores may be necessary
* Goals and successes are clear and obvious within the game
* NPC interaction is minimal or peripheral
* "find the key" is the central puzzle; solving it expands the map
* Puzzles are interlinked; all must be solved to reach the endgame
Investigative IF:
* PC has power and authority
* Open and ethical behavior is rewarded
* Failure does not usually end in death
* Many partially-successful endings
* Possible to reach some degree of success in a single play-through
* Goals and successes must be evaluated by the player, not just the PC
* NPC interaction is central
* "get the evidence" is the central puzzle; solving it may or may not
add conversation topics
* Puzzles are largely parallel; a partial success can be reached
without solving them all
These two types of game are so different that I think they may attract
completely separate audiences; calling them both IF might do them a
disservice.
So what I'm wondering now is, what OTHER types of IF are there? Can
you put most games you've played in one of these two categories (do
they already have names?) or is there more?
hari...@gmail.com
> So what I'm wondering now is, what OTHER types of IF are there? Can
> you put most games you've played in one of these two categories (do
> they already have names?) or is there more?
I'd say almost all of the games I've played have been Exploratory, if
I go by your categorizations. I didn't really like Deadline because
it felt so clock-oriented. I tried Witness but never finished, but
now it's been so long I don't recall what it was like. The only other
possible Investigative category game I can recall enjoying is A Mind
Forever Voyaging: you had to use a recording mode to capture certain
things in the simulated future; your recordings were either useless,
or vindicated the new government Plan, or implicated its failure.
Emily Short
(A description of investigative vs. exploratory IF.)
Your "investigatory IF" list seems to me to split into two important
clusters:
> * PC has power and authority
> * Open and ethical behavior is rewarded
> * Failure does not usually end in death
> * Many partially-successful endings
> * Possible to reach some degree of success in a single play-through
> * Goals and successes must be evaluated by the player, not just the PC
These are features that let the game address moral, ethical, or
lifestyle issues, by encouraging the player to think about the PC's
behavior in an ethical context (rather than allowing him to do
anything and everything to win the game), and by refusing to label the
endings as winning or losing. There's been a fair amount of interest
in this kind of IF recently. See: The Baron, Fate, Slouching Towards
Bedlam, Tapestry, Whom the Telling Changed, and (in a less moral, more
personal-preference way) One Week and Masquerade. Possibly Pascal's
Wager (judging only from a few snippets I've read about it -- I
haven't played yet).
By contrast, these:
> * NPC interaction is central
> * "get the evidence" is the central puzzle; solving it may or may not
> add conversation topics
> * Puzzles are largely parallel; a partial success can be reached
> without solving them all
...are features that let the game pose knowledge puzzles rather than
puzzles of manipulation.
Knowledge puzzles are harder to set up than manipulative puzzles,
because it's not always easy for the game to tell when the player has
figured something out; a badly-paced knowledge-puzzle game can force
the player to tediously go through "finding out" steps when he already
knows something. So the alternative is to set up a bunch of ways to
let the player find something out, and then let the *player* control
when he's ready to finish the game. Act of Murder is a good recent
example: while you *can* wait until the generous time limit runs out
to make an accusation, you can also decide when you know enough by
starting the arrest early. (In this respect, it emulates the design of
Deadline.)
This approach (letting the player determine when to bring on the
endgame) doesn't always work perfectly. Victor Gijsbers' critique of
Pytho's Mask (http://www.ministryofpeace.com/if-review/reviews/
20050916.html) discusses how a design intended to handle the knowledge
puzzle problem can go wrong.
So I guess I'd say that there are a few games that combine all the
features you listed, but that they just happen to be the intersection
of two better-defined and more fully-populated sets.
Floatpoint more or less tries to do all these things, but the reason
was that I wanted the player to decide when he thought he had enough
information to make his choice; so that was not so much about testing
whether the player had worked out a specific solution to a puzzle, but
about letting the player decide what types of information from the
game world were relevant to the moral decision at the end.
namekuseijin
> I didn't really like Deadline because
> it felt so clock-oriented.
Certainly well-suited for a game called "Deadline".
Conrad
> Captain Mikee wrote:
>
> (A description of investigative vs. exploratory IF.)
>
> Your "investigatory IF" list seems to me to split into two important
> clusters:
>
Yeah, I'm with you, Mikee, on the basic dichotomy, but I think Emily
has a point here. Similarly, a game could well thwart the scheme
you've got entirely, by being an investigative object-manipulation
game (think of Myst reincarnated as text). Or _Lost Pig_, which
doesn't divide neatly by this scheme.
Nevertheless, I think there's something to it.
Conrad.
Captain Mikee
> > * PC has power and authority
> > * Open and ethical behavior is rewarded
> > * Failure does not usually end in death
> > * Many partially-successful endings
> > * Possible to reach some degree of success in a single play-through
> > * Goals and successes must be evaluated by the player, not just the PC
>
> features that let the game address moral, ethical, or
> lifestyle issues...
> .features that let the game pose knowledge puzzles rather than
> puzzles of manipulation.
Knowledge vs manipulative were the words I was looking for.
Interesting to separate out the moral questions into a separate
overlapping category. Are there some examples of games addressing
moral issues where the puzzles are manipulative? How do those aspects
affect one another?
Victor Gijsbers
Hash: SHA1
My "Fate" certainly fits that description. The story is a series of
moral choices, while the puzzles that stand between you and the outcomes
are puzzles of manipulation, never knowledge puzzles.
"Fate" differs from "The Elysium Enigma" in that in "Fate", the moral
dilemma is more or less spelled out for you from the beginning. You'll
learn a bit more about the characters, their relations, and their plans
as the game progresses, but that's more or less just icing on the
underlying situation. "X wants to do Y to you, and what are you willing
to do to stop him?" is the question. And of course, if you wish to
address such a question in your game, the player must first know what X
and Y are, because she can only start making the decisions once she does.
"The Elysium Enigma", on the other hand, leaves the situation mysterious
until the very end. It is revealed slowly, and the process of revelation
is part of the point. If you don't follow it through, you'll only
achieve partial success--because you can't make an informed final
decision until you've found out (more or less) everything.
This means that in "The Elysium Enigma", you can have "partial success".
This makes it different from traditional games, where you are either
successful or not; but it also makes it different from "Fate", where
there is no measure of success except for the judgment of the player.
But there is no reason, as far as I can see, to believe that knowledge
puzzles must always go with a measure of success, while manipulative
puzzles lend themselves to dropping a measure of success altogether.
"Floatpoint" is a case in point. It is very much about obtaining the
knowledge needed to make an informed decision. But you can also make the
decision before you know what is going on (if I recall correctly), and
_that will not invalidate your decision_. The outcome will be the same
as it would have been had you not gotten all the information. (Again, I
hope I recall this correctly.)
What makes "The Elysium Enigma" different from "Floatpoint", then, is
that in the former, some possible endings only become available once you
have solved a majority of the puzzles; whereas in the latter, they are
always available. (Fictionally, both approaches make a lot of sense in
their respective games.)
Summarising, I would say that we can have:
* Puzzles of manipulation
* Knowledge puzzles
* No puzzles
* Win/lose dichotomy
* Partial successes
* No success-metric
and that these are not related to each other in an interesting way. (At
least, I have seen no evidence that they are.)
I do think, though, that the morally upright protagonist, rather than
the sneaky one who will do whatever is useful, is probably more
congenial to either of the last two win/lose options. For such a
protagonist, victory can be tainted by the means he has used to achieve
it: and that means that you cannot have a win/lose dichotomy, for a
tainted victory is a victory, but less so than an untainted one. (Unless
you go to the realm of morality plays, and have any protagonist who does
bad things punished with a losing ending. That would probably not be
very convincing artistically.)
Regards,
Victor
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Captain Mikee
think this partial success idea doesn't work so well for me. I have to
ask...
[spoilers]
Doesn't the prince reveal who he is when you dance with him? Why does
the masked man act like that never happened? And do you need to do
anything with the secret door in the library yourself or is that just
to show where he was hiding?
And what's with the ending where you can't escape from a conversation
with no menu options? Am I missing something?
I did like the game, the characters and the writing were lovely. I
just get frustrated with not understanding the plot.
Emily Short
> I went and played Pytho's Mask. I see what you're talking about, but I
> think this partial success idea doesn't work so well for me. I have to
> ask...
>
> [spoilers]
>
> Doesn't the prince reveal who he is when you dance with him?
It may be implied; I didn't think it was explicit. (Can you tell I
wrote this game seven years ago and it's gotten a little hazy?
Sorry...)
> Why does
> the masked man act like that never happened? And do you need to do
> anything with the secret door in the library yourself or is that just
> to show where he was hiding?
You don't have to do anything with it.
> And what's with the ending where you can't escape from a conversation
> with no menu options? Am I missing something?
Urgh. Sounds like a bug: I've heard of people running into this, but
not how (and at this point can't really go back and see). You're
supposed to be able to conclude the game definitely by settling your
relationship in one of several ways.
Captain Mikee
> I went and played Pytho's Mask. I see what you're talking about, but I
> think this partial success idea doesn't work so well for me. I have to
> ask...
I want to apologize for derailing this thread, and also for making a
hasty judgment about Pytho's Mask. The nice thing about multiple
endings is replayability. I don't tend to like replays, but I
discovered this game is a lot of fun to replay. And looking for more
information about it led me to Emily's great "Plot, scene by scene"
article which I'd forgotten, and covers some of the issues I wanted to
bring up here.
Emily Short
> On Jun 10, 5:28 pm, Captain Mikee <captainmi...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > I went and played Pytho's Mask. I see what you're talking about, but I
> > think this partial success idea doesn't work so well for me. I have to
> > ask...
>
> I want to apologize for derailing this thread, and also for making a
> hasty judgment about Pytho's Mask.
Hardly derailing a thread to bring in specific evidence! I just wish
Pytho's Mask were a little less fragile. Every once in a while someone
mentions running into a bug in the conversation system, and I gnash my
teeth -- I could probably rewrite it now to be considerably more
robust, but on the other hand there are only so many hours in the day,
and new projects are always more fun than redoing old ones...
Captain Mikee
> On Jun 10, 10:28 pm, Captain Mikee <captainmi...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> (Can you tell I
> wrote this game seven years ago and it's gotten a little hazy?
> Sorry...)
Not at all... sorry for bringing up old projects that you're done
with!
> > And what's with the ending where you can't escape from a conversation
> > with no menu options? Am I missing something?
>
> Urgh. Sounds like a bug: I've heard of people running into this, but
> not how (and at this point can't really go back and see). You're
> supposed to be able to conclude the game definitely by settling your
> relationship in one of several ways.
I think this happened when I refused to kill Valkir, Avril interceded
and died, and I told the Prince not to come in. Not that I expect you
to try to duplicate it.
There were several other points in the game where you're still in
conversation but there are no topics. I wonder if this is a glulx-
related problem? A few times I tried entering ">a," and was told that
there was no option a, so it's not just a display issue. On replays,
however, most of those points seemed to be intentional lulls in
conversation (trying to bring up a new topic responds with "this is no
time to change the subject").
After several replays and reading Victor's article, I think I've
definitely gotten some good answers to my questions. Thanks! And in
response to that article I'd reiterate that replaying this game is
definitely rewarding, so it doesn't seem all that unfair to go back
and find all the bits you missed.