[DISCUSSION] Rethinking Narrative in IF -- Do we Need to Eliminate "Rooms"?
PJ
progressing the art one of the major limiting factors is the
continuance of the "room" paradigm as the basic architecture for IF
story development. I think the "rooms" paradigm tends to undercut
IF's ability to create narrative tension, which is the essence of
writing fiction. Telling a gripping story - a tense narrative -- is
what we are all trying to do, but the reliance on the "rooms" and
"map" architecture as the fundamental arrangement of an IF game
undercuts this tension, as I will discuss below.
In fiction, narrative structures can be wildly varying but, if the
majority of readers are to like the book, there generally is a prologue
of some sort (the hook), the main body of the story (which typically
builds in a somewhat linear fashion towards a conclusion), the
climax/denouement of the story, and often an epilogue tying up loose
ends. Most IF games have trouble with this simple structure, because
the "room-based" architecture of most games assumes you can and
should play them in a non-linear fashion, i.e., you can backtrack in
the story, solve different parts of it whenever you want to, dawdle to
look at the sights if you will, and execute an end-game which rarely,
if ever, actually ties up the major loose ends of the underlying story
(why does the adventurer need the treasures in Zork 1? Who is the
wizard in Dreamhold?). This type of interaction is facilitated by the
generally "open" map or room structure of most games. You may
start in a locked room, but you can usually get back there and recover
whatever you may have left if you need it in the future. In fact, by
including "undo" in most games, I would say this ability means even
critical consequences can be overcome if they are not liked by the
player (death, most obviously).
What this gains for aficionados of text adventures is the illusion of
free choice on the part of the playing character. Although the Creator
of the game is god (with a small g) in this case, what you do in the
game isn't (or doesn't seem) entirely predestined. The best games,
therefore, allow a great deal of freedom in what you do, how you do it,
when you do it, and so on, to emphasize the player's freedom of
choice. They also include multiple endings that allow the player to
get the story to come out the way they want it, i.e., you pick the
ending you like and play that one, once you know the game.
But what this loses, on the other hand, is narrative tension.
Book-based fiction enthralls to the extent that, in a good book, you
consider it to be a "page turner." You literally can't wait to
get to the next page, which leads you on to the next, etc., until you
have the whole story in your mind, the finale is complete, and you are
satisfied that, for now, you have reached a real ending for the main
character or characters.
In breaking free of strict narrative development, IF loses much of the
tension of a page-turning novel or story. In a curious way, even
action games maintain this narrative tension by the simple expedient
that you must "win" this level to get to the next, and usually
winning advances the story somewhat. You can't really "back up"
in an action game, any more than you can "unread" a book. The only
way to completely defuse the tension is to play the game so many times
that you literally can't lose anymore. Only the best ever get that
far along, which is why video games are so seductively compelling.
For most IF games, however, not only can you go easily go back and
replay them to get the ending you want, you can usually get a
walkthrough with the answers up front. Rather than narrative, they
often look more like sightseeing tours or puzzle compendiums than
dramatic stories. To analogize with the hard copy world of books, it
may be compelling for some people to race through a paperback book of
logic puzzles, but those don't sell at Harry Potter-like volumes,
inspire movie treatments, or make their authors into internationally
respected figures.
So the question is, can IF advance into a more popular or more artistic
realm, and still rely on a "room-based" architecture and its
somewhat disjointed, and perhaps less compelling, narrative style? I
haven't played as many "story-like" games (think Adam Cadre) as
others may have, but even the best ones still have that essential room
structure with "pick a direction" as one of the major plot drivers.
Despite often very good writing, narrative tension seems to be
dissipated. You play at whatever pace you want, with the only real
tension being, "can I find the author's preferred ending?" You
have the illusion of choice, but the only real choice you've made is
to continue playing the game or not. Dramatic tension within the story
doesn't keep you playing into the wee hours. Rather, it is more
usually the urge to simply find an acceptable ending to justify the
time spent so far that keeps you going.
While many undoubtedly will argue that a strict and somewhat linear
narrative is not the point of IF, it may well be one reason that IF is
not more broadly popular than it currently is. Debatable, I realize.
But if we are to advance IF, it may be worth thinking about how games
or stories can be developed without relying on the compass and a set of
"rooms", and instead think about how a story develops, how the
interaction can affect the story and vice versa, and how to keep
essential dramatic tension throughout the course of a long IF game. I
think we need to develop games where the most casual players says "I
literally couldn't quit until I reached the end of the story."
Not, "I refused to quit until I reached an acceptable endgame."
The one is evidence of popular storytelling; the other, the obsession
of us abiding fans in the fairly narrow confines of the IF community.
Post-Dreamhold discussion has been a little slow, so this is my Xmas
gift to all of you.
PJ
"You may fire when ready, Gridley." Adm. Farragut at the battle of
Mobile Bay.
Richard Bos
> So the question is, can IF advance into a more popular or more artistic
> realm, and still rely on a "room-based" architecture and its
> somewhat disjointed, and perhaps less compelling, narrative style?
Have you played "All Roads", by Jon Ingold, from the comp a few years
ago? It would fit quite well with what you're discussing, I think.
Richard
Andrew Plotkin
>
> So the question is, can IF advance into a more popular or more artistic
> realm, and still rely on a "room-based" architecture and its
> somewhat disjointed, and perhaps less compelling, narrative style?
One of the reasons I made _Dreamhold_ so broad is that my previous
games have been getting more and more, er, jointed. As an author, I've
been concentrating heavily *on* narrative tension, at the expense of
openness. Both _Hunter, in Darkness_ and _Shade_ have very linear
progressions (in which you cannot "go backwards". Although "forwards"
means different things in different games, as those two examples
demonstrate.) Both have a lot of narrative tension.
I think that's been very effective. On the other hand, I like open
exploration too. So I did _Dreamhold_ open -- more or less for fun,
but also because it was broad games like _Adventure_ and _Zork_ that
hooked *me* as a newbie. I figured it demonstrated the fun side of IF.
Games with strong narrative can speak for themselves.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
I'm still thinking about what to put in this space.
Jeff Nyman
conventional fiction (for lack of a better term right now) so my thoughts
below are predicated upon that thinking. That said, it seems the argument
here is one of narrative tension being lost or not employed in IF and one of
the causes of this is the dependence upon a "room-based architecture". That
said, I did not really find a consistent thread of thought that established
this for me but I would be curious to hear more.
"PJ" <pete_...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1103744039.6...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> In thinking about the state of the state in IF, it occurs to me that in
> progressing the art one of the major limiting factors is the
> continuance of the "room" paradigm as the basic architecture for IF
> story development. I think the "rooms" paradigm tends to undercut
> IF's ability to create narrative tension, which is the essence of
> writing fiction.
I think when we talk about the "essence" of fiction, we do have to
distinguish what fiction we are talking about. I have been working on some
thoughts regarding how alike and how different interactive fiction is from
static or conventional fiction that you would read in a book. So creating
narrative tension could be said to be one of the elements of writing
conventional fiction (although perhaps not the "essence", necessarily). But
does that mean it translates automatically into interactive fiction? (After
all, storytelling and narrative in a movie format is necessarily different
in some ways than in a written form. In both media, you still have a
narrative but how you go about implementing that narrative might differ. The
tension you can build up in one format cannot be sustained as long in the
other in some cases, as just one example.)
> ends. Most IF games have trouble with this simple structure, because
> the "room-based" architecture of most games assumes you can and
> should play them in a non-linear fashion, i.e., you can backtrack in
> the story, solve different parts of it whenever you want to, dawdle to
> look at the sights if you will, and execute an end-game which rarely,
> if ever, actually ties up the major loose ends of the underlying story
> (why does the adventurer need the treasures in Zork 1? Who is the
> wizard in Dreamhold?).
I am not sure the room-based architecture assumes anything. The *people*
playing a game based on a "room-based architecture" may make that
assumption. (We might also say a location-based architecture, instead of
saying "room" in particular.) Some players may not, however. Some players
may make the assumption that since these set "rooms" exists, there must be
some order. Perhaps they do not see it yet; but many might assume it is
there. Note here that I cannot assume what most players will assume because
I simply do not know. I am also not sure that this room-based architecture
means that "most IF games have trouble with this simple structure" of
beginning-middle-end. I would need you to cite examples. There are a lot of
assumptions in the above quoted paragraph. I am certainly not in a position
to say they are wrong. But I have to question them. For example, while we
can no doubt showcase many games that do not tie up the "loose ends", I am
sure we can cite many other games that do in fact do this.
> What this gains for aficionados of text adventures is the illusion of
> free choice on the part of the playing character. Although the Creator
> of the game is god (with a small g) in this case, what you do in the
> game isn't (or doesn't seem) entirely predestined.
Well, that depends on the player. As a player of games (the meta-context), I
know that while the game world may seem totally "open", there is probably
some underlying logic or order to things even if I cannot see it right now.
So you do have free choice in how you traverse certain paths in the game.
What you do not have "free choice" on is how the game will end
(eventually) - either you reach a (pre-determined) winning state or a
(pre-determined) losing state. I think most players will tend to know that
much of what happens in a game is "pre-destined" to some extent, simply
because they have played games before. That is not to say that some games do
not offer what appears to be a very large range of actions. But to "create
narrative tension" (which is the issue we started off with), you often have
to limit the scope, I would think.
> The best games,
> therefore, allow a great deal of freedom in what you do, how you do it,
> when you do it, and so on, to emphasize the player's freedom of
> choice.
The "best games"? I have seen many games that limit my "freedom" to do
things but that provide a very gripping story (and maybe even some narrative
tension). This might be a bit categorical to suggest what the "best games"
do.
> But what this loses, on the other hand, is narrative tension.
> Book-based fiction enthralls to the extent that, in a good book, you
> consider it to be a "page turner." You literally can't wait to
> get to the next page, which leads you on to the next, etc., until you
> have the whole story in your mind, the finale is complete, and you are
> satisfied that, for now, you have reached a real ending for the main
> character or characters.
>
> In breaking free of strict narrative development, IF loses much of the
> tension of a page-turning novel or story.
But IF is *not* a novel in that sense of being a "page turner". It is a
category error, in my opinion, to equate the one with the other in this
sense. However, you might say that the hallmark of a "page turner" for a
work of IF is that the player "forgets" to save at all as they go through
because they are typing responses to further the story without thinking
about consequences: they just need to see the next part because the game is
interesting. Or you might say that a "page turner" novel is one we read
longer than we normally would sit reading. By that logic, maybe "page
turner" IF is a game that we sit and play for longer than we would normally
sit to play any game. And I have not yet seen the correlation between your
claims:
(1) breaking a "strict narrative development" and (2) "narrative tension".
I have not seen it shown that IF breaks free of a strict narrative
development, except in relation to how you would consider that same
development in a written novel. Again, that, to me, is at least bordering on
a category error because whatever the similarities between a novel and a
work of IF, they *are* different things. So I have not seen either
proposition shown to be true and thus I cannot form an opinion that the
existence of the one proposition ("strict narrative development") has led to
a problem with the other proposition ("narrative tension").
In a sentence it sounds like you are saying that the imposing of a
"room-based architecture" inherently leads to a breaking of any sort of
strict narrative development and that this, in turn, leads to a reduction of
narrative tension.
If that is the case, it is at least a hypothesis to consider.
> For most IF games, however, not only can you go easily go back and
> replay them to get the ending you want, you can usually get a
> walkthrough with the answers up front.
You can do that with an action game as well. Two examples would be "Deus Ex"
and "Deus Ex: Invisible War". Those are action games and I pick them because
they also have story-driven elements that lead to different endings in both
games. You can buy a strategy guide for both games and get all the answers
(plot twists, secret areas, etc) up front. I can also save my state in such
a game where a branch point is and then restore after the game ends one way
to see how it ends the other way. (That is, in fact, what I did with the
original "Deus Ex" to see how the three endings play out.) I agree that you
can do this with IF games as well, as you assert. But you can do this with
many games. So I am not sure how this is advancing your idea of narrative
tension or room-based architectures. (I am treating this post as an argument
for your overall hypothesis, so I am trying to fit everything you say into
what I understand that hypothesis to be.) Like any game where you can
save/restore, I suppose you could argue that some tension is lost. The same
could be said of a book that you have already read and are now re-reading.
Tension often comes from not knowing what happens next.
> So the question is, can IF advance into a more popular or more artistic
> realm, and still rely on a "room-based" architecture and its
> somewhat disjointed, and perhaps less compelling, narrative style?
I would need a definition of "more popular" and "more artistic". I would
also need (for me) some proof that a "room-based architecture" necessarily
leads to a "somewhat disjointed" narrative style. You could be right about
that if I judge a work of IF the same way I would judge a novel. But, then,
for me, I would not do that because they are not the same thing. As far as
some narrative style being "less compelling", I have found that one-room
games or games that do not even really require locational considerations at
all are much less compelling in their narrative style than games that are
"room-based". That, however, may just be me and my tastes, so I am not sure
how I would say IF has to "advance" or what direction it should "advance".
> Despite often very good writing, narrative tension seems to be
> dissipated. You play at whatever pace you want, with the only real
> tension being, "can I find the author's preferred ending?"
Keep in mind, "narrative tension" is just what keeps the reader reading,
because they are wondering what is going to happen next. If a person keeps
playing an IF game, maybe it is wrong to call that "narrative tension" but
they have been kept reading (and playing). That said, I agree that perhaps
narrative tension in the strict literary sense is missing from IF or, at
least, it can be depending on the game. (Games like Babel, for example, I
felt had a great deal of "narrative tension" as did the game "The Weapon".
Those were "page-turners" to me.) Even if we grant that narrative tension is
missing or is "dissipated", I then wonder how much of that is due to
expectations on how much alike conventional fiction and interactive fiction
should be or even can be. Narrative tension can also be considered the way
to manage the flow and the conflict that occurs in a story. And, again, the
"play at your own pace" is not contrasted here with a "room-based
architecture", which was one of your central points. I assume you mean that
the "play at your own pace" setup is partly created by the very nature of a
location-based game or a game that takes place within a geography.
> to continue playing the game or not. Dramatic tension within the story
> doesn't keep you playing into the wee hours. Rather, it is more
> usually the urge to simply find an acceptable ending to justify the
> time spent so far that keeps you going.
Well, dramatic tension can be different than narrative tension. The source
of dramatic tension will come via specific conflict. Two opposing forces
will be matched against each other and the dramatic tension of the story
builds as they struggle in their conflict with each other. So I you have a
player of an IF work who sees the game or the puzzles in it as being their
opposing force, they may very well play into the wee hours. Dramatic tension
is part of the story itself, while narrative tension will be how someone is
reading the story. Again, however, I cannot claim to speak for even a
minority of the IF-playing public so I cannot say what does or does not make
someone continue to play a game.
> While many undoubtedly will argue that a strict and somewhat linear
> narrative is not the point of IF, it may well be one reason that IF is
> not more broadly popular than it currently is. Debatable, I realize.
It is an interesting debate. It is definitely worth investigating these
things, I believe.
> But if we are to advance IF, it may be worth thinking about how games
> or stories can be developed without relying on the compass and a set of
> "rooms", and instead think about how a story develops, how the
> interaction can affect the story and vice versa, and how to keep
> essential dramatic tension throughout the course of a long IF game.
Here is where I would agree with you entirely in terms of thinking about how
stories can be developed *in the context of a game*. Story development and
how much conflict and tension can arise in interactive fiction and to what
extent is, to me, a very interesting field of study. If we want to look at
storytelling elements, much more than narrative tension is showing how the
protagonist grows or changes as the result of the events in the story. How
do you model that in IF? Can you showcase the resistance of a player
character (protagonist) to deal with a situation in a game, given that the
player is (ostensibly) in control of the player character? (After all,
resistance to taking action is often a hallmark of a protagonist in
storytelling.) How can we model motivation? The motivations of a protagonist
and how conflict hinders or helps those motivations also lead to narrative
tension. So as I think on this, while narrative tension may be an issue, I
am wondering if putting it first is a "cart before the horse" in that the
other elements of "traditional" storytelling (that generate narrative
tension) are what are more lacking in some IF than just saying "narrative
tension" is lacking.
Again, however, your general idea seems to be predicated upon the notion
that we might need to eliminate rooms or location-based IF and I have not
seen it established that the one necessarily must have impact on the other.
I think that there are a lot of ideas sort of mixed together here that (for
me, at least) bear further investigation.
- Jeff
ems...@mindspring.com
> In fiction, narrative structures can be wildly varying but, if the
> majority of readers are to like the book, there generally is a
prologue
> of some sort (the hook), the main body of the story (which typically
> builds in a somewhat linear fashion towards a conclusion), the
> climax/denouement of the story, and often an epilogue tying up loose
> ends. Most IF games have trouble with this simple structure,
I'd have said there are a number of IF games that follow this structure
fairly rigorously. What about, say
All Roads, by Jon Ingold
Being Andrew Plotkin, Centipede, or Tale of the Kissing Bandit, by J.
Robinson Wheeler
Rameses, by Stephen Bond (The Cabal also has a linear plot, but is
extremely r*if-centric)
Photopia (obviously) but also 9:05, by Adam Cadre
Kaged, by Ian Finley
Unraveling God, by Todd Watson
Gourmet, by Aaron Reed (more or less, minus some of the epilogue I
would've liked to see)
Sting of the Wasp, by Jason Devlin
Shade, by Andrew Plotkin
Somewhat more common is the structure with prologue and epilogue but a
broad midgame. If you want sheer suspense, try Anchorhead. There the
plot is controlled not only by geography but also by the placement of
characters and events in that geography -- and those move around.
Similarly, though it's showing its age in a few specific ways,
Christminster has held up very well and has a clear structure with plot
events throughout. And Andy Phillips has written several highly linear,
extremely plot-heavy games -- Heroine's Mantle being the only one I was
able to finish. They don't get quite as much discussion as they
otherwise might, mainly (I think) because the puzzles tend to be
fiendishly difficult and unfair, and the implementation unbalanced. But
you can't fault the guy for not putting in enough plot, or for not
having an interest in suspense.
(I wouldn't say this is a modern-IF invention, either: I recall being
very interested in the outcomes of Plundered Hearts, Wishbringer,
Lurking Horror...)
Now possibly what these games have is not what you consider narrative
tension -- I'm a little fuzzy on your definition thereof. But I would
say that I was always interested in finding out what happened next, and
not simply out of a devotion to the solving of puzzles -- in some
cases, I was so interested that I hurried through puzzles in order to
alleviate the suspense. Some of them are mysteries, where the key is to
find out what's going on; some (especially the comedy-farce types, like
Gourmet, or To Hell in a Hamper, or Sting of the Wasp, or Paint!!!, or
Fine Tuned) maintain pacing and interest by giving the character a
specific important goal and then firing ever more obstacles at him.
Your analysis (unless I misunderstood you) assumes that all rooms
remain accessible for the sake of keeping the game winnable, that the
content of the rooms won't be changed, and that locations won't be used
as stages for scenes or events that happen only once. None of these
things is true in general, though they may be true of Dreamhold.
> For most IF games, however, not only can you go easily go back and
> replay them to get the ending you want,
Sometimes. Play Necrotic Drift.
In any case, the ability to replay seems not much different from the
ability to reread a book.
> you can usually get a
> walkthrough with the answers up front.
I think this is a red herring also. You can get Cliff's Notes for
books; that doesn't mean that the books are worse than they used to be
*because* the notes exist. (Your experience may be less enjoyable if
you read the notes first, but whose fault is that?)
> Rather than narrative, they
> often look more like sightseeing tours or puzzle compendiums than
> dramatic stories. To analogize with the hard copy world of books, it
> may be compelling for some people to race through a paperback book of
> logic puzzles, but those don't sell at Harry Potter-like volumes,
> inspire movie treatments, or make their authors into internationally
> respected figures.
Neither do most books. (To be fair.)
> So the question is, can IF advance into a more popular or more
artistic
> realm,
This assumes 1) that more popular and more artistic look the same, but
also 2) that IF will reach its apotheosis when it more closely
resembles a novel. Which I think is not quite right. It seems to me
that it needs compelling interaction, first and foremost; good
characters and a narrative that make you want to know more can
certainly be part of that, but are not the sum of it.
> and still rely on a "room-based" architecture and its
> somewhat disjointed, and perhaps less compelling, narrative style?
This sounds much like Chris Crawford's line in his recent book on
interactive storytelling. (_Chris Crawford on Interactive
Storytelling_, shockingly enough.) I haven't read it cover to cover,
but part of his thesis is that spatial relationships are not a good
thing to base stories on. His contention is that all good stories are
about people, and that for interactive stories to occur one has to move
away from spatial models towards dramatic models.
I don't agree entirely; the story may be about people, but for the
interactive part to work, you need the player to understand the range
of action. That's much, much easier to achieve with physical activity
than with, for lack of a better term, emotional activity. (More about
this in a minute.)
> I
> haven't played as many "story-like" games (think Adam Cadre) as
> others may have, but even the best ones still have that essential
room
> structure with "pick a direction" as one of the major plot drivers.
Obviously, I can't argue with you that *you* felt narrative tension
here, but I will say that I don't think *picking a direction* drives
the plot in most plotful games I've played.
> Despite often very good writing, narrative tension seems to be
> dissipated. You play at whatever pace you want, with the only real
> tension being, "can I find the author's preferred ending?"
Sort of. You can read at whatever pace you want, too, in the sense that
it's possible to close the book twenty pages from the end and come back
three weeks later.
> You
> have the illusion of choice, but the only real choice you've made is
> to continue playing the game or not.
I can think of a bunch of counter-examples, but to pick one: Slouching
Towards Bedlam offers a real choice about endings. There is no one
author-preferred choice. There may be a player-preferred choice -- I
have my preferred ending, certainly -- but that's another matter: now
the challenge for the player is not simply to get to an ending, but to
understand the world of the story well enough to choose an ending for
himself and bring it about. Which he chooses to regard as the true
ending depends, naturally, on his own preferences.
> But if we are to advance IF, it may be worth thinking about how games
> or stories can be developed without relying on the compass and a set
of
> "rooms", and instead think about how a story develops, how the
> interaction can affect the story and vice versa, and how to keep
> essential dramatic tension throughout the course of a long IF game.
The world model of IF -- with rooms and supports and containment --
offers a basic mode of interaction for the player: move around,
manipulate objects in simple physical ways. If you strip that out, you
have to have something with which to replace it. What will the player
do in order to control this hypothetical story-based IF? How will you
convey to the player what the range of action is? How do you make the
responses consistent?
There have been some attempts at this. One thing the player can do
(rather than move objects) is converse, and there's some conversational
IF out there -- try Shadows on the Mirror, if you want one with some
narrative structure, lots of freedom of choice, and a situation where
room-and-object manipulation is at a minimum. Outside the realm of the
traditional text adventure, there's also Facade, an interactive fiction
where your conversation with a fighting couple defines the course of
the story. (It hasn't actually been released, to the best of my
knowledge, but there are extensive discussions online about how it
works.)
Most of the other non-room-based IF/IF-like stuff is more experimental
and verges on CYOA or hypertext. But if you're interested, see Space
Under the Window, Threading the Labyrinth (hypertexty), End Means
Escape, One Week (and a similar but more IF-structured game called A
Week in the Life).
Another approach is to use the existing physical model to express more
complicated things: in one specific case, the choice to walk through a
door might signify not the desire to be in the other room, but (say)
the decision to walk out on an NPC. And it could be the *same* door
that you've been using all game to get to the other room; it could even
have been important in a different way earlier. So it is possible to
set up a situation in which a simple action carries complex meaning.
This principle is central to many of my favorite scenes in IF -- the
crisis of Spider and Web, the magician's performance in Act of
Misdirection, several parts of Slouching, the endgame of Words of
Power, etc.
What it really comes down to is crafting interaction and content that
dovetail together. The interaction can be of a standard room-based type
or not; I don't think it matters much, as long as the player
understands his options and the game handles them gracefully.
But that problem is not one that can be solved in general. It has to be
solved over and over again for each specific work.
steve....@gmail.com
The point about the "rooms paradigm": "Shade" was the first and finest
deconstruction of the rooms paradigm. More recently, the Tads-3
"ConSpace" extension is the cutting edge of this general project. One
way to overcome the problem of the "rooms paradigm": stage your game in
a single complex master location.
This does not answer all of your points, but I think it helps.
ems...@mindspring.com
> Like any game where you can
> save/restore, I suppose you could argue that some tension is lost.
The same
> could be said of a book that you have already read and are now
re-reading.
> Tension often comes from not knowing what happens next.
Hm. It's true that some tension comes from not knowing what's going to
happen, but I'm not sure this is the critical issue.
What I find strongly engages my attention in a story is
a) having a hypothesis about where the story will go from here, and
b) having strong feelings about that hypothesis.
I might want the anticipated outcome to happen, or I might hope it
won't; either way, I have a reason to read on. Seeing this unfold can
be sufficiently compelling that I still feel be engaged by a story I've
read many times.
This explains the success of the romance novel industry, I think. I
don't imagine many romance readers are *surprised* when the hero and
heroine get together at the end. The experience is rather about
developing an emotional stake in an outcome which is guaranteed, by the
terms of the genre, to come about. Admittedly there's a great deal of
trash, but if you're looking for popular storytelling that reaches a
lot of devoted, page-turning readers, there it is. Caring about the
outcome is at least as important as not knowing what it will be --
probably much more important.
I tend to like best the stories where the ending both is and is not
what I expected: what happens is consistent with the circumstances that
led to my hypothesis, but it's richer and more interesting than what I
had in mind. The good guy doesn't just defeat the villain in a fight;
he redeems him, instead.
This isn't impossible in IF. Varicella pulls it off. But the effect is
comparatively unusual. A lot of IF sets out a clear goal and then makes
the player work to get there, and then the ending is exactly what the
player thought it was going to be. (Because "winning" means "getting
what you wanted all along"? Maybe. I'm certainly guilty of this myself:
several of my games are weakest story-wise at the ending, because I
followed the too-obvious trajectory.) Still, I think this is better
than IF of the form "unlock all the locked doors you can find, and this
will cause a plot to occur in your vicinity". The player has to have
*some* idea of where things are going -- what the story's about, and
what types of conclusion are possible -- before he can have an
investment in the outcome.
Incidentally, it was Dreamhold that most recently reminded me of the
hypothesis-and-emotion principle, though about a puzzle rather than a
plot element:
SPOILER SPACE FOR LATE-GAME CONTENT
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In order to get the buckler, you have to ride the rising tide of black
goop *through* what appears to be the ceiling. The first time I played
this, it seemed entirely possible that I was about to be crushed, but
it also seemed just conceivable that something else would happen -- I
thought I was probably being stupid even trying it, but I was also too
curious not to.
This is a small-scale rather than a large-scale example, but it struck
me as a neat effect.
Mike Roberts
> In thinking about the state of the state in IF, it occurs to me
> that in progressing the art one of the major limiting factors is
> the continuance of the "room" paradigm as the basic
> architecture for IF story development.
I don't think you're way off base, but I think you're focusing in too much
on the "room paradigm." As I see it, that's just a facet of the general
issue, which is the "interactive paradigm." I think the physical map is an
especially obvious manifestation of the interactivity because it's so
concrete - each room gives you an enumerated set of choices for where to go
next. The thing is, the command prompt in general gives you a specific (and
finite) set of choices at any given time, too; it's just not as obvious
because the choices aren't openly listed for you.
If you give the player any sort of control over the story, you give up a
corresponding amount of control over pacing. In static fiction, pacing is
an essential tool for manipulating narrative tension, so losing control over
pacing is a big challenge for the writer. Conventional text IF has a
relatively complex world model that gives the player a relatively large
amount of control (moving around on the map, sitting and standing and lying
on things, waiting, examining things, opening and closing containers, taking
and dropping objects, putting things inside and on top of other things,
pushing buttons, pulling levers, turning dials, switching switches,
questioning characters about topic words). There's a lot more to the basic
world model than just moving around on a map, and all of those possible
actions take away from the author's control over the pacing.
If you start paring down the world model from the typical modern text IF,
you can get various results - examples include the early two-word games, and
graphical adventures like Myst. If you eliminate the physical world model
(including the map), you can still have IF in the broad sense of fiction
that's interactive. One example is CYOA-type games; another is hypertext
fiction. The curious thing to me is that, in practice, it seems that
there's an abrupt phase transition (as it were) from static to interactive
fiction - as soon as you add even a simple interactive element, you start
facing the writing challenges we're talking about, pretty much in full
force.
--Mike
mjr undersore at hotmail dot com
Jeff Nyman
news:1103769050....@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> Hm. It's true that some tension comes from not knowing what's going to
> happen, but I'm not sure this is the critical issue.
I just meant that you will probably not feel the same amount of "tension"
the second time through reading a book, for example. Tension generally comes
from not knowing what is going to happen. After all, if you already know,
there is no real tension, although that does not mean you are not engaged by
the story, even on a second or third go around. As you say: we initially may
form a hypothesis. We may believe we know what is going to happen. But, the
first time around, we do not know. Thus the tension. Later, upon a second
re-reading, we do not form a hypothesis - because we already know. Thus,
right there, some of the tension is already let out of the narrative sail.
Again, however, that does not mean the story would fail to engage us.
> What I find strongly engages my attention in a story is
>
> a) having a hypothesis about where the story will go from here, and
> b) having strong feelings about that hypothesis.
I would agree and I share these traits in reading a story; I would imagine
many of us do. That is, in fact, where narrative tension comes from. In
literature or story writing they tell you, as a writer, to try to create
situations and characters that your readers will care about and with whom
they feel emotionally invested in to some degree. If the reader cares about
your characters and what happens to them, they will probably keep reading.
Your readers will form hypotheses, if you will, about what is going to
happen to the characters or how they can possibly resolve the situation they
are in. That can lead to narrative tension.
> I might want the anticipated outcome to happen, or I might hope it
> won't; either way, I have a reason to read on. Seeing this unfold can
> be sufficiently compelling that I still feel be engaged by a story I've
> read many times.
Right, I would agree. However, feeling engaged by a book and feeling the
same depth of narrative tension you felt when you truly did not know what
the outcome would be is, I would venture to guess, somewhat different. That
said, such a difference may be completely academic. The difference in IF, it
seems, is that you can actively experiment with the model world to see what
works and what does not (as your "Dreamhold" example makes clear). In a
written novel you cannot do that except to pause and guess what the author
may have in store, then read ahead to see if you were right. In IF you can
actively try various solutions to see what the author had in mind. Seeing
our various attempts at solving puzzles fail but not kill us can keep us
engaged to keep trying, particularly if the game is clever enough to
recognize that you, as the player, are on the right track and perhaps offers
encouragement of some sort.
> This explains the success of the romance novel industry, I think. I
> don't imagine many romance readers are *surprised* when the hero and
> heroine get together at the end. The experience is rather about
> developing an emotional stake in an outcome which is guaranteed, by the
> terms of the genre, to come about.
In a romance setting, I would agree: the reader generally knows the eventual
outcome that will occur. In the case of romance, the general notion of
narrative tension revolves around the various conflicts - the hero (or
heroine) getting into various situations and having to resolve them. So
while you probably know the general outcome, you do not necessarily know how
that outcome is going to be achieved. The same could often be said of the
spy thriller or any situation where characters have to get themselves out of
some situation. Often it is fairly clear how things are most likely going to
end up. You are going to go from A to Z. What you are not certain of is
whether in between A and Z, you will have all the other letters of the
alphabet and what order they will appear in.
> trash, but if you're looking for popular storytelling that reaches a
> lot of devoted, page-turning readers, there it is. Caring about the
> outcome is at least as important as not knowing what it will be --
> probably much more important.
I agree. I would just think that the two modes are different when you are
reading/playing something for the first time and when you are doing so for
the third, fourth, and fifth times. I, as a reader, tend to get more
emotionally involved in the outcome the first time through because it is
truly new for me -- even if I sort of suspected where it was going. Upon
re-reading, the outcome is not in any way, shape or form unknown to me. So
upon second readings I am generally looking for nuances I might have missed
the first time through. In this case, my focus is not so much on the outcome
(since I know what it is) but on taking time to revisit the context of the
characters and the situations *in light of the knowledge I now have about
the outcome*. But on that first pass-through, I agree: your readers have to
care about the outcome. That said, I think readers will tend to care
(emotionally) because they have no idea what the outcome is! If the story
does not engage, however, we will probably not care what the outcome is one
way or the other and thus there is no tension: no drive to find out how
everything turns out.
I think the reality is that when a a story allows the reader to internalize
the tension over the course the story will take and the eventual outcome of
the story, that will propel the reader on because they will need to know the
conclusion of the story. They need to know the outcome. They need their
hypothesis validated or refuted. I do believe once that happens in static
fiction, further readings can engage but the tension can perhaps not be as
internalized as it was before because a crucial thing has changed: the
outcome is now known. In IF, however, perhaps that can be different if
different outcomes are possible, particularly if those outcomes are
radically different. (I think of the game "Blade Runner", for example.
Admittedly not a work of Interactive Fiction, but it was a game that had
numerous endings. Some were only subtly different from each other; others
were wildly divergent. That did at least allow some of the same internalized
tension because the decision points at which the final outcome would be
decided were spread throughout the game, and not just at one obvious branch
point.)
> This isn't impossible in IF. Varicella pulls it off. But the effect is
> comparatively unusual. A lot of IF sets out a clear goal and then makes
> the player work to get there, and then the ending is exactly what the
> player thought it was going to be. (Because "winning" means "getting
> what you wanted all along"? Maybe.
That is interesting. So I wonder if, relevant to this thread, the idea of
having clear goals is part of what might dissipate the narrative, as the
original poster suggested, because the reader/player is simply focused on
setting out on the path that seems to lead exactly where the author wants
them to go. In other words, if everything is immediately clear to the
player, perhaps that is what throws off some of the tension. There is no
need to formulate a hypothesis (except in the most simplistic manner)
because you are being lead along a quite obvious path. That said, I have
seen people complain about games that seem to have no focus early on or that
force the player to figure out the context on their own.
There is probably a balance there somewhere. Personally, I like stories
where a whole lot of things are introduced and I sort of have to piece
together the "world" from various clues as I go along. In novels, probably
one of the best examples of this I can think of is the "Night's Dawn
Trilogy" by Peter Hamilton. Here you have a future history that you
basically get tossed into and you have to figure out what the heck is going
on. For me that leads to narrative tension in that I am curious to figure
out more about this future history. In IF, however, that might be a bit
trickier because if I am the player and I am supposed to associate myself
with the player character, presumably the player character does not have to
"figure out" what nano-augmentation means or what a voidhawk starship is
because, after all, "they" know this. So the narrative tension is dissipated
by the fact that the player character would have to have knowledge that the
player does not; and yet by the way the player has to utilize the player
character in the game, that tension is broken via a stilted series of
actions that deny the premise of a protagonist who lives in this future
world. (This is just one example; I realize there are plot devices to get
around this kind of thing.)
It is interesting to me to consider if having an "investment in the outcome"
is predicated upon, as you say, "[knowing] what types of conclusion are
possible." I would agree that the player has to be given enough information
to form reasonable guesses about how the story could potentially develop.
Those are your hypotheses and it is our attempt to validate those hypotheses
(in reading further) that can lend a certain amount of tension from a
narrative standpoint.
- Jeff
Jdyer41
> I think the "rooms" paradigm tends to undercut
>IF's ability to create narrative tension
I don't necessarily agree with this, but a good example
of IF where room space is essentially ignored: the
last 2/3 of Perry Mason: The Case of the Mandarin Murder.
(1985, published by Trillium, developed by Paisano Productions)
That particular section of the game all takes place in
a courtroom and the actions consist of
asking questions to witnesses
making objections
posing to the jury
sending your investigators on tasks
I think the courtroom *probably* has an initial description (I can't
even remember), but it doesn't really matter.
-- Jason Dyer
Kevin Forchione
news:vasyd.1553$5R....@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com...
So pacing is the primary element trade-off in interactive fiction. It seems
to me that this would not necessarily weaken the two aspects of narrative
fiction that hold a reader's attention: suspense (what happens next?) and
mystery (How did we get here?). If these elements are sufficiently strong
then it seems to me that the aspect of pacing would have a less detrimental
impact, and would be counterbalanced and enhanced by the aspect of
simulation, which, if properly designed, naturally serve to augment the
narrative hooks of suspense and mystery.
--Kevin
Michael Roy
This would work for this particular game (maybe. I've never played it
and it seems like it might come across contrived), but it's not
something that someone could do for a generic game, while ditching rooms
is something that I would be interested in seeing some story based games
move towards.
Conventional fiction has a certain link between plot and setting that
I've found lacking in most IF. I'm not sure why I feel this way, but I
think that it has to do with the need to let the player do the wrong
thing--to peek into every meaningless closet, so to speak. Or to walk
around randomly waiting for the unicorn to pass by. I would like to see
a game that freed the player from the burden of having the freedom to do
meaningless things.
To a degree, I think that All Roads and Misdirection both made steps in
this direction, notably without eliminating rooms. Rather, I thought
that they minimized movement and let the player stay put at one place
for a longer time, connecting physical movement to plot advancement so
that changing rooms seemed significant and indicative of progress. This
drew attention away from the rooms and towards what was significant.
The dark section of Christminster is great because it makes the rooms so
uninteresting that I stopped thinking about them and instead focused on
the other elements that were developing while as I was moving. On the
opposite extreme, many movies place conversations in scenes where the
characters are walking through a circus, letting the elaborate chaos be
an unimportant backdrop that makes what would otherwise be a boring and
unrelated string of dialogue more interesting. On either extreme, we
shift our focus away from the mundane details of moving.
I wouldn't say that we need to physically eliminate rooms. I just want
to stop noticing that they're there.
Michael
ems...@mindspring.com
Michael Roy wrote:
> I would like to see
> a game that freed the player from the burden of having the freedom to
do
> meaningless things.
I'm not sure how you would do this without turning the game into a
Choose Your Own Adventure: if the player is constrained to do *only*
those things which can advance the plot, you're probably down to a set
of ten or twenty viable commands at any given time.
Jdyer41
Even if you could include more, imagine what Aisle would be like
if it went for *two* commands.
(Admittedly, one doesn't need to branch as violently as Aisle, but
to hold things up you'd need to accumulate mutually exclusive realities
to an extent that would be almost farcical.)
Now, it's possible to make game-advancing commands always
obvious (while still allowing >LICK FLOOR to be a mere time-waster),
but that's Been Done a number of times and I won't repeat
the list Emily gave.
-- Jason Dyer
Gene Wirchenko
><ems...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
>news:1103769050....@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
>
>> Hm. It's true that some tension comes from not knowing what's going to
>> happen, but I'm not sure this is the critical issue.
>
>I just meant that you will probably not feel the same amount of "tension"
>the second time through reading a book, for example. Tension generally comes
>from not knowing what is going to happen. After all, if you already know,
>there is no real tension, although that does not mean you are not engaged by
>the story, even on a second or third go around. As you say: we initially may
>form a hypothesis. We may believe we know what is going to happen. But, the
>first time around, we do not know. Thus the tension. Later, upon a second
>re-reading, we do not form a hypothesis - because we already know. Thus,
>right there, some of the tension is already let out of the narrative sail.
>Again, however, that does not mean the story would fail to engage us.
Most certainly not. In some cases, even knowing does not help.
LOTR is my personal example. I know that the hobbits will get away
from the Nazgul, but when I am reading, I still worry. It just seems
too likely that they are going to get caught.
[snip]
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
Computerese Irregular Verb Conjugation:
I have preferences.
You have biases.
He/She has prejudices.
Jeff Nyman
news:hhuyd.1585$5R....@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com...
> So pacing is the primary element trade-off in interactive fiction.
If we say that interactive fiction utilizes the same elements of static
fiction *in the same way*. That is not something I have been able to find
asserted in a way that is convincing. And I am not even sure it is a
trade-off in some categorical sense.
> It seems to me that this would not necessarily weaken the two aspects of
> narrative fiction that hold a reader's attention: suspense (what happens
> next?) and mystery (How did we get here?). If these elements are
> sufficiently strong then it seems to me that the aspect of pacing would
> have a less detrimental impact, and would be counterbalanced and enhanced
> by the aspect of simulation, which, if properly designed, naturally serve
> to augment the narrative hooks of suspense and mystery.
I would agree. Narrative pace and narrative tension do not necessarily have
to be thought of as feeding off of each other, even in static fiction. As
Mike says: "In static fiction, pacing is an essential tool for manipulating
narrative tension." For *manipulating* it, yes it can be a good tool. It is
not essential, however, for *generating* narrative tension. Narrative pace
is the speed at which the writer gives details of the story to the reader;
how often things happen that the reader/player can absorb and form opinions
about (and come up with hypotheses about, to go back to the conversation
Emily brought up). Obviously a writer will be shooting for a narrative pace
that allows them to slow down and speed up as need be so the story does not
become terribly monotonous.
Narrative tension, however, will be about how the characters respond to or
feel about the events that are happening and thus how the reader is brought
into those events by the degree to which they can symphatize with the
character(s). If a writer can evoke what an event or situation "feels like"
through a character, particularly if this is done in a way that is
accessible so that the reader can internalize it, then the reader will tend
to get "caught up" in that situations and in the world model. The means your
reader/player is invested and, again, going back to the conversation between
myself and Emily, the reader will "need/want" to get to the end because they
want to see how it all turns out. You have, in essence, hooked your reader.
As I said in my previous post: "Narrative tension can also be considered the
way to manage the flow and the conflict that occurs in a story." That can
speak to pace, but it does not speak to how fast that pace necessarily is.
So is the control of pacing taken away from an author of IF? To some degree,
definitely - particularly if we use the same sort of pacing model we would
use in static fiction or if we expect players of IF to have the same
expectations they might have while reading static fiction.
- Jeff
Jeff Nyman
news:cdpks0h6vi7n9hkgc...@4ax.com...
> Most certainly not. In some cases, even knowing does not help.
> LOTR is my personal example. I know that the hobbits will get away
> from the Nazgul, but when I am reading, I still worry. It just seems
> too likely that they are going to get caught.
That is interesting. I am not sure if every reader would share that same
worry that you do each time they read the books, with the knowledge of how
they ended. That was more my point. Maybe some will; maybe many will not. I
cannot imagine the same level of tension is there simply because the
situation is different: before you had no idea. Now even though you have
this "worry", you still *know* how things turn out.
Keep in mind, however, that this can be the dramatic tension of the books
for you. I have known many people who say they feel the same impact of the
drama of a book, even upon re-reading. For that, I would certainly agree. I
feel that same thing when I re-read books I have read before. I just said in
my post that you will "**probably** not feel the **same amount** of
'tension' the second time through reading a book..." [emphasis added].
Also note that "tension" the person feels reading a book (or playing a game)
is different from the narrative tension we have been talking about, which is
generated as part of the book or game. Certainly I would say you can still
be swayed by the narrative tension of a well-written book even upon
subsequent re-readings, just as you can be swayed by the narrative tension
of a well-written work of IF, even on subsequent re-playings.
- Jeff
Rexx Magnus
> That is interesting. I am not sure if every reader would share that same
> worry that you do each time they read the books, with the knowledge of
> how they ended. That was more my point. Maybe some will; maybe many will
> not. I cannot imagine the same level of tension is there simply because
> the situation is different: before you had no idea. Now even though you
> have this "worry", you still *know* how things turn out.
I don't worry about what will happen to the characters when I know.
Instead I get carried along by the writing, the tone and atmosphere that
it creates. I think that's the most important thing in any writing,
otherwise you don't develop that sense of immersion in the first place.
To email me, visit the site.
Jeff Nyman
news:Xns95C8ABBA6A1...@130.133.1.4...
> I don't worry about what will happen to the characters when I know.
> Instead I get carried along by the writing, the tone and atmosphere that
> it creates. I think that's the most important thing in any writing,
> otherwise you don't develop that sense of immersion in the first place.
I agree; I cannot see how the same level of worry could possibly be there
only because much of worry is generated by the anxiety of an unknown
outcome. ("Goodness, I hope those hobbits make it!", "I hope the survivors
are able to fend off the living dead!", "I really hope they do not kill off
Character B.") In my earlier post I had said: "So upon second readings I am
generally looking for nuances I might have missed the first time through. In
this case, my focus is not so much on the outcome (since I know what it is)
but on taking time to revisit the context of the characters and the
situations *in light of the knowledge I now have about the outcome*." So I
might say, "Ah, so that is what the heck Gandalf was talking about! Now that
makes a little more sense." Or I might recognize elements of foreshadowing
that I simply missed the first time through.
And this has an interesting application for IF, I think. Because if you have
a "nuanced" game (leaving aside what that might mean for now), you can
perhaps at least provide some of this for the returning player. Things make
sense in a certain context or you get more out of the game the second time
through. Games like "Shrapnel" or "Babel" might have this effect on some
players. (In movie script format, I might consider movies like "12 Monkeys",
"Identity" or "Mulholland Drive" that force you to re-look at things in the
context of the knowledge you now have about the outcome.)
- Jeff
Andrew Plotkin
>
> I think the reality is that when a a story allows the reader to internalize
> the tension over the course the story will take and the eventual outcome of
> the story, that will propel the reader on because they will need to know the
> conclusion of the story. They need to know the outcome. They need their
> hypothesis validated or refuted. I do believe once that happens in static
> fiction, further readings can engage but the tension can perhaps not be as
> internalized as it was before because a crucial thing has changed: the
> outcome is now known. In IF, however, perhaps that can be different if
> different outcomes are possible, particularly if those outcomes are
> radically different. (I think of the game "Blade Runner", for example.
> Admittedly not a work of Interactive Fiction, but it was a game that had
> numerous endings. Some were only subtly different from each other; others
> were wildly divergent. That did at least allow some of the same internalized
> tension because the decision points at which the final outcome would be
> decided were spread throughout the game, and not just at one obvious branch
> point.)
Remember though that the player is reacting to what he experiences,
not what the game can potentially do. If you play through a game and
reach one of several possible endings, that's *no different* from
playing to the end of a game that only has one ending. If you know
(metatextually, i.e., from the back cover blurb) that there are many
endings, then you might start over and find a different one; but that
doesn't add to the tension the first time around.
I'd say there are two equally weak extremes. One the one hand, games
where the player's actions influence the outcome in completely
invisible ways -- behind-the-scenes and not predictable at the time.
This might as well be a single-outcome game. Looking back, you can't
imagine what you could have done differently to make the game end
differently.
On the other hand, games where the available actions are completely
transparent; the player chooses the outcome in full knowledge of what
he's doing. That kills any tension or uncertainty about the
conclusion. The game outcome, from the player's point of view, is
*both* (and most players will go back and watch both, purely out of
curiosity).
The middle is the potentially fertile ground. Unsurprisingly, this is
analogous to the middle ground of the IF parser (in which you have
some sense of the commands available to you, and you can generally
predict what a given command will do, but there's always the potential
for a surprise or a new kind of action). It's the same balance at a
different level of granularity.
Jeff Nyman
news:cqeufv$ht2$1...@reader1.panix.com...
>
> Remember though that the player is reacting to what he experiences,
> not what the game can potentially do. If you play through a game and
> reach one of several possible endings, that's *no different* from
> playing to the end of a game that only has one ending. If you know
> (metatextually, i.e., from the back cover blurb) that there are many
> endings, then you might start over and find a different one; but that
> doesn't add to the tension the first time around.
I see what you are saying, but, speaking for myself anyway, it *could* add
to the tension the first time around. For example, if a game makes it clear
that I have a decision to make and I chose one decision that is clearly
mutually exclusive, I now have the tension of wondering (a) did I make the
"right" choice?, and (b) what would have happened with my other choice?
So here I am, in fact, responding to what the game can potentially do; what
narrative I might be missing by taking the path I took; how much harder (or
easier) the game might have been had I gone another route. Now, having said
this, I cannot relate this to too many IF games that I have played,
admittedly, because I am often not sure if there are multiple paths or
multiple solutions with different ramifications unless it is made blatantly
obvious. (This is why I only brought up games like "Blade Runner" or "Deus
Ex", outside the IF arena.)
> On the other hand, games where the available actions are completely
> transparent; the player chooses the outcome in full knowledge of what
> he's doing. That kills any tension or uncertainty about the
> conclusion. The game outcome, from the player's point of view, is
> *both* (and most players will go back and watch both, purely out of
> curiosity).
Well, yes, but what if the "full knowledge of what he's doing" leads to
ramifications in the game that are unanticipated? You save your NPC friend
in the game who later turns out to be your worst enemy (who decides he wants
the Sacred Treasure for himself). Or you decide to blow up the computer
system because it is "obvious" you need to do this to prevent your enemies
from using it, only to find that doing that early in the game made your
later puzzles that much more challenging (because the computer could have
helped you against those same enemies). So here your initial tension may
have been dissipated only to be brought back in force when you, as the
player, are forced to deal with the ramifications of your earlier actions.
(Unless what you are saying here is that the "completely transparent" part
means it is quite clear what all the ramifications of your current actions
will be. That still leaves open the ability of the writer to trick the
reader, I would think.)
> The middle is the potentially fertile ground. Unsurprisingly, this is
> analogous to the middle ground of the IF parser (in which you have
> some sense of the commands available to you, and you can generally
> predict what a given command will do, but there's always the potential
> for a surprise or a new kind of action). It's the same balance at a
> different level of granularity.
So that speaks to the commands that a player may issue and the results of
issuing those commands. From a narrative standpoint then, perhaps the
commands you issue at one point have ramifications you did not expect later
on. In other words, regardless of how I predict how certain commands will
work in a given situation, I am not sure (as the player) how the narrative
may develop as a result of my commands issued in that situation.
Does this make sense or am I completely missing your point?
- Jeff
PJ
>I don't think you're way off base, but I think you're focusing in too
much
>on the "room paradigm." As I see it, that's just a facet of the
general
>issue, which is the "interactive paradigm." I think the physical map
is an
>especially obvious manifestation of the interactivity because it's so
>concrete - each room gives you an enumerated set of choices for where
to go
>next. The thing is, the command prompt in general gives you a specific
(and
>finite) set of choices at any given time, too; it's just not as
obvious
>because the choices aren't openly listed for you.
>Conventional text IF has a
>relatively complex world model that gives the player a relatively
large
>amount of control (moving around on the map, sitting and standing and
lying
>on things, waiting, examining things, opening and closing containers,
taking
>and dropping objects, putting things inside and on top of other
things,
>pushing buttons, pulling levers, turning dials, switching switches,
>questioning characters about topic words). There's a lot more to the
basic
>world model than just moving around on a map, and all of those
possible
>actions take away from the author's control over the pacing.
Great post. I think you zeroed in on the major part of my argument. I
was wondering how fast this discussion would lead to the point that
much of traditional IF interaction - not just rooms and movement
between them - contributes to the problems with sustaining narrative
tension or "pacing," as you prefer. This is one of the central issues,
I think, in trying to advance IF as a form of compelling art.
One reason I am down on "rooms" in particular is that the "map"
structure within the world model of an IF game tends to get more
thought than the story, but is mostly meaningless in terms of advancing
the story. The truth is that movement between rooms and the various
standup, sitdown, lie on, etc. forms of movement within rooms almost
never has any real meaning in the game. At their best, these movements
are necessary to solve a puzzle. At their worst, they are simply
reflections of an author's misguided conviction that every physical
movement of the actor must be modeled and commanded.
(An example of this meaningless puppetry might go as follows: Stand
up. "You stand up." Walk to table. "You're at the table."
Take item. "Taken." Inspect item. "It appears to be a bomb.
There is a warning label on the bottom." Turn item over. "Done."
Read warning label. "Warning! If you're reading this, the bomb
has been activated and will explode in 30 seconds. Yikes!"
A better solution would be: Take item. "You get off your can and
walk over to the table. The item seems to be a homemade explosive
device. You pick it up and turn it over, just now seeing the red
warning label on the bottom, which says: Warning! If you're reading
this, the bomb has been activated and will explode in 30 seconds.
Yikes!") Both have some level of dramatic tension in them, but one
takes 6 steps or more to complete, the other 1. Which style is more
likely to both contribute to and sustain narrative tension over a long
game?)
The equivalent focus in a novel of all the inter and intra-room
movements would be stapling the pages together between scene cuts,
requiring the reader to master the staple remover before getting on to
the next plot point. Not a very compelling analogy, I know, but much
of IF is like that. When I look at the transcript of even a very good
game like Varicella, in which a walkthrough can take around only 100
turns or so, something like 70% of the commands are simply movement
from one room to the next. And that's probably a low percentage
compared to the typical adventure game. After all, Varicella is meant
to be a real story as well as a puzzle solver. While any fiction or
movie has to have "locations" and describe or show them, the best art
always makes use of those settings to frame meaningful events in the
story they are telling. Movement between these locations is usually
meaningless, and is therefore not described or shown, unless something
happens during the journey that drives a plot point. All the
unnecessary puppetry drains out the narrative tension, while the player
gropes for commands that actually deliver the next plot advancement.
The trick is how to focus the player on the actions that have real
meaning within the game, without simply saying, "attack the guard,"
dummy! (Apologies to All Roads). It's certainly not easy. There
are two choices as far as I can see (1) limit the choices by limiting
(and making obvious) the command interactions afforded to the player at
each point (which leans towards CYOA games), or (2) make every action
that can be thought of somehow "meaningful" in the game (which
leans towards mind-boggling complexity).
The second strategy is my preferred one, though it is tougher to
execute. But a simple example of a game that does so successfully is
Endgame, in the C32 Comp. You can do a series of meaningless acts if
you like, just to see what happens, but the fact is, you've got a
demon about to come out of the egg you've just summoned. The tension
in the scene is maintained, no matter how many times you play the game,
because after your first death, you realize that the ticking egg is
going to hatch at some point and you won't like the results. You
have to try a series of things to get the answer, but the simple
mechanism of counting turns and having the egg hatch makes even
meaningless acts meaningful: if you do too many of them, you're dead
meat. So focus and solve the problem.
But Endgame is a one-room and one puzzle game, and only a partial
example of what I am talking about more broadly. Sustaining this
technique of pacing without just chaining a series of one-room
challenges together is indeed very difficult. You can't have a
ticking time bomb or hatching demon in every scene of a game.
Varicella, for example, has a time element, though you don't realize
exactly how meaningful it is until you've played the game several
times. In a nutshell, I think we need to focus on developing and
employing techniques to provide and sustain the necessary narrative
tension throughout a longer IF exercise. In the meantime, reducing
unnecessary movements and "the burden of having the freedom to do
meaningless things" (see Michael Roy's excellent post below) should
certainly help sustain the pacing in any game.
Jdyer41
>(An example of this meaningless puppetry might go as follows: Stand
>up. "You stand up." Walk to table. "You're at the table."
>Take item. "Taken." Inspect item. "It appears to be a bomb.
>There is a warning label on the bottom." Turn item over. "Done."
>Read warning label. "Warning! If you're reading this, the bomb
>has been activated and will explode in 30 seconds. Yikes!"
>
>A better solution would be: Take item. "You get off your can and
>walk over to the table. The item seems to be a homemade explosive
>device. You pick it up and turn it over, just now seeing the red
>warning label on the bottom, which says: Warning! If you're reading
>this, the bomb has been activated and will explode in 30 seconds.
>Yikes!") Both have some level of dramatic tension in them, but one
>takes 6 steps or more to complete, the other 1. Which style is more
>likely to both contribute to and sustain narrative tension over a long
>game?)
There's been prior discussion on here about how many intermediate
commands should be removed. For a simple example, see the reviews
grumping about the first version of The Great Xavio forcing 'unlock door
with key' every time rather than just letting the player walk through
and unlock the door automatically.
The problems that can arise with this are mentioned in issue #35
of SPAG:
http://www.sparkynet.com/spag/backissues/SPAG35
I do think the amount of skipping you do in your
example isn't ideal. I would prefer at the very least:
>TAKE ITEM
(first standing up and walking to the table)
You pick up the mysterious item. The ticking noise gets louder.
Remember, IF isn't a novel. Part of the tension comes from the
interactivity itself. If you have add a creaking door and brush it
off as
(you pass through the door which opens with an unhealthy creak
and step into the next room)
it isn't nearly as effective as separating that action out in its
full glory.
>OPEN DOOR
You swing the door open. It groans unhealthily, like it hasn't
been moved in years.
For a good example what happens when the text takes over,
see The Legend Lives! The conversations essentially remove
the parser, and the effect isn't always for the best.
-- Jason Dyer
Jeff Nyman
> was wondering how fast this discussion would lead to the point that
> much of traditional IF interaction - not just rooms and movement
> between them - contributes to the problems with sustaining narrative
> tension or "pacing," as you prefer. This is one of the central issues,
> I think, in trying to advance IF as a form of compelling art.
I would agree with this. In my first post to you I said:
"So as I think on this, while narrative tension may be an issue, I am
wondering if putting it first is a 'cart before the horse' in that the other
elements of 'traditional' storytelling (that generate narrative tension) are
what are more lacking in some IF than just saying 'narrative tension' is
lacking."
It is not the pacing that is necessarily the problem, as I see it. Space
operas, for example, often have very slow pacing and yet are still capable
of generating a good deal of narrative and dramatic tension. Pacing can
manipulate tension, of course, if used appropriately. How that translates
into IF games is an interesting concept to me.
> One reason I am down on "rooms" in particular is that the "map"
> structure within the world model of an IF game tends to get more
> thought than the story, but is mostly meaningless in terms of advancing
> the story.
Well, in stories like "Rendezvous with Rama" (novel) or "Starcross" (IF)
moving from room to room is part of what advances the story as you discover
the nature of the craft that is the focus of the story. I would agree that
what you are describing might be the case with the game "A Mind Forever
Voyaging" where you are basically just going around this map because you
know you have to achieve these goals of recording things. So the story gets
put on hold a bit while you do that. Granted, you build up the story of this
future society, but it is pretty thin. On the other hand, consider
"Trinity" - here moving between rooms and figuring out how to get through
the mushrooms does invade the story narrative but that could be said to be
the pacing. You alter the narrative pace to keep the player trying to figure
out what to do. ("I know every time I go into these mushrooms, I get
transported in time and I'm going to have to do things quick.") Those times
are interleaved with the romping around the landscape and learning about the
world. The pace is adjusted accordingly. Very effective, in my opinion. (As
a constrast, consider "Border Zone" where you barely have time to stop and
think in some cases.)
> The truth is that movement between rooms and the various
> standup, sitdown, lie on, etc. forms of movement within rooms almost
> never has any real meaning in the game.
Unless the point of the game is exploration of a weird geography. I agree
about the "stand up", "sit down", etc. That can often get annoying. If I
start a game on a bed and I say "look out the window", it is a bit annoying
to be told "You can't do that while lying down." From a human perspective I
clearly would intend to get out of the bed to look out the window. But I
would not equate that problem with moving between rooms. While moving
between rooms in a novel would get tedious, IF is not a novel. I do not have
the same expectations of a work of IF that I do of a novel. In the novel you
are not directing the main character around; you are doing so in IF. Thus
movement does have meaning in the game and can be sustained as part of the
narrative.
> A better solution would be: Take item. "You get off your can and
> walk over to the table. The item seems to be a homemade explosive
> device. You pick it up and turn it over, just now seeing the red
> warning label on the bottom, which says: Warning! If you're reading
> this, the bomb has been activated and will explode in 30 seconds.
> Yikes!") Both have some level of dramatic tension in them, but one
> takes 6 steps or more to complete, the other 1. Which style is more
> likely to both contribute to and sustain narrative tension over a long
> game?)
Both styles could, depending on your player. Narrative tension is what is
brought to a story by a reader/player. So what sustains it can differ. What
you, as an author can do, are offer moments of dramatic tension for the
player and alter pacing so that the reader is more drawn in. This said, I
agree with your example in that what you are talking about is motivations.
If a player is motivated to pick up an item, they are probably motivated to
take a glance at it as well. A game could certainly model that and make that
assumption for the player. Then again, on subsequent times of taking that
item, the player would probably not want that full description. (In that
scenario, your "narrative tension" might be dissipated by a constant stream
of text the reader has already read.)
> While any fiction or
> movie has to have "locations" and describe or show them, the best art
> always makes use of those settings to frame meaningful events in the
> story they are telling. Movement between these locations is usually
> meaningless, and is therefore not described or shown, unless something
> happens during the journey that drives a plot point.
Again, however, it seems you are saying that a work of IF must conform to
how a novel is written to be "compelling art". You are correct that novels
do not describe this movement. Novels, however, do not have you manipulating
the main character. Works of IF do. That is a fundamental difference and
that has to be kept in mind when comparing novels and IF. Some works of
fiction and movies use locations not just to show "meaningful events" but
also to produce an atmosphere that the viewer/reader can partake of.
Locations can be used to describe elements of the five senses even when no
"meaningful events" are taking place. The same is true, I believe, of works
of IF.
> All the
> unnecessary puppetry drains out the narrative tension, while the player
> gropes for commands that actually deliver the next plot advancement.
Again, this may be in your opinion. It may not speak to the IF community as
a whole. I can say that it does not happen for me because my expectations
for narrative tension are different in a work of IF than they would be for a
novel. I will agree that being forced to "stand up", "sit down", "drop
chair. stand on chair. climb tree" can be a little exasperating. Does it
destroy the narrative tension for me? I would not say that because I
personally do not expect narrative tension to be sustained at one level
throughout. I more find those things exasperting simply because in many
cases, the motivation of my actions is not recognized by the game.
> The trick is how to focus the player on the actions that have real
> meaning within the game, without simply saying, "attack the guard,"
> dummy! (Apologies to All Roads). It's certainly not easy. There
> are two choices as far as I can see (1) limit the choices by limiting
> (and making obvious) the command interactions afforded to the player at
> each point (which leans towards CYOA games), or (2) make every action
> that can be thought of somehow "meaningful" in the game (which
> leans towards mind-boggling complexity).
Or realize that IF is not static fiction and that some actions are not going
to be "meaningful" in some wider, narrative sense, but are necessary
elements of exploring a the world that the game is presenting. I like games
where the goal that I am striving for is reasonably clear (even if I am not
always quite certain why I am striving for it quite yet) and then leave me
to figure out how to achieve that goal. (And maybe even along the way allow
me to realize that my original goal was not the way to go, and I need to
alter my thinking.) If the model world is rich enough and varied enough, it
might offer me numerous ways that I can achieve that goal and along those
various ways, I might learn more and more about the model world -- and thus
those actions become meaningful in that they tell me more about where I am.
The core assumption being made here is that the "non-meaningful" elements of
IF (which have not been established to be totally non-meaningful in all
cases) hurt the narrative elements of IF, to the detriment of being
"compelling art". I am just not sure I see that but I am definitely willing
to be persuaded as all of this is helping me consider how to try to craft
the game I am writing as we speak.
- Jeff
CardinalT
I haven't played "Shade" (nor any i-f to speak of from the last five or
six years), but it certainly is not the first "deconstruction of the rooms
paradigm" in existence. It may well be the first published, or finished,
one, but the idea that this approach is revolutionary and unprecedented is
just wrong. I, for instance, began writing a story (never finished) back
in 1995 that did away with rooms qua rooms entirely and used them only in
their capacity as containers and as determinants of output. That was in
1995, and there may well have been lots of people before me, including
Andrew.
A "room" is, at root, only another object, albeit one that is treated
specially by most i-f languages. A room is a container, and it is the
highest-order container in a story. One cannot put a room inside another
room, but one can put any other object in the story inside a room. Nor can
one divorce its "containerness" from it without destroying its character
as a room. So rule number one is that, unless you are going to completely
rework the way i-f is structured--something not so easily done as some may
imagine--your highest level object is going to be a container.
What else is peculiar about a room? Well, the fact that most i-f languages
tie it to certain outputting behaviors is another thing. Rooms typically
output their descriptions in a certain order and position on the screen.
For instance, in most cases, when the player enters a command and advances
the story, in the new output that follows the room description comes
first, followed by the descriptions of items that are both contained in it
and within the "scope" of the reader/player. Sometimes the room
description is suppressed--usually when the player hasn't moved to a new
"room"--but that is the order most libraries are written to follow.
So what is a room, then? It's simply a highest-level container that has
attached to it certain output behaviors. Again, these output behaviors are
completely changeable via the library, but I never went to much trouble to
do that. It's perfectly possible to utilize "rooms" as they exist in ways
that are, to the reader, "unroomlike," if one simply wishes to take
advantage of their outputting behaviors and work that into whatever one is
trying to do. We see cases like this all the time. It's just that most
don't consider, or simply don't desire, writing whole stories that use the
technique.
For example, you, the player, are lying in bed. You type "dream." You are
then whisked away to a dreamworld that is, behind the scenes, just another
room, but to you, the player, not conceptually really a room at all.
"Dream" in this case stands in for "north,""east,""south," and "west," and
the dream text that's displayed stands in for the room description.
Another example would be where you follow someone. Typing "follow Joe" may
well, in terms of the programming, cause you to go south to a connecting
room, but in terms of what you, the player, actually know, you're simply
"follow[ing] Joe" (and where you follow Joe to doesn't even have to be a
"room" per se; perhaps the programmer wants to take some time out for
exposition and simply uses the room description of the room you're now in
to do it).
In short, what I'm saying is that there's no necessity for a room to
actually be a room or physical area per se, nor for there to be direction
commands to get you from one "room" to another. There doesn't have to be a
"map" in the common, literal sense at all. These are simply conventions.
If you want to use "rooms" to do other things, it's perfectly possible to
do that. You simply have to program with the essential characteristics of
i-f rooms in mind: that they are highest-level containers and that they
output text (any text; just because it's called a "room description"
doesn't mean it has to be a room description) at certain times and in
certain areas of the screen.
Stephen Bond
> I
> haven't played as many "story-like" games (think Adam Cadre) as
> others may have,
Then perhaps you should play more of them before you pronounce on
the subject. Other respondents to this thread have cited several games
that are either roomless or have a strong linear narrative, or both.
but even the best ones still have that essential room
> structure with "pick a direction" as one of the major plot drivers.
> Despite often very good writing, narrative tension seems to be
> dissipated. You play at whatever pace you want, with the only real
> tension being, "can I find the author's preferred ending?"
What games in particular are you thinking of? Thus far, I've only seen
you mention _Varicella_, which is not the most obvious example of a
narrative-driven game. Don't get me wrong, I like the V-game as much as
the next girl, but its appeal comes more from exploring the game world
and interacting with its characters than from its narrative tension.
> While many undoubtedly will argue that a strict and somewhat linear
> narrative is not the point of IF, it may well be one reason that IF is
> not more broadly popular than it currently is.
I'd more or less agree with that -- at least, I have some anecdotal
evidence in favour, in that some of my non-IF-playing friends who
enjoyed _Rameses_ were disappointed to find there were few other IF
games that were narrative-driven to such an extreme. However, if you
want to see more story in your IF, the best way to go about it is to
write some story-driven games, not to tell people what they 'need' to
do.
Stephen.
ems...@mindspring.com
PJ wrote:
> One reason I am down on "rooms" in particular is that the "map"
> structure within the world model of an IF game tends to get more
> thought than the story, but is mostly meaningless in terms of
advancing
> the story.
I think of the geography of a game as a basic tool for controlling the
flow of the story, so I add or remove rooms, or move them around, in
order to serve the requirements of the plot. I suspect I'm not alone in
this.
> (An example of this meaningless puppetry might go as follows: Stand
> up. "You stand up." Walk to table. "You're at the table."
> Take item. "Taken." Inspect item. "It appears to be a bomb.
> There is a warning label on the bottom." Turn item over. "Done."
> Read warning label. "Warning! If you're reading this, the bomb
> has been activated and will explode in 30 seconds. Yikes!"
>
> A better solution would be: Take item. "You get off your can and
> walk over to the table. The item seems to be a homemade explosive
> device. You pick it up and turn it over, just now seeing the red
> warning label on the bottom, which says: Warning! If you're reading
> this, the bomb has been activated and will explode in 30 seconds.
> Yikes!") Both have some level of dramatic tension in them, but one
> takes 6 steps or more to complete, the other 1. Which style is more
> likely to both contribute to and sustain narrative tension over a
long
> game?)
I'll tell you something: the second is more likely to make me quit.
Yes, I'm with you on getting rid of fiddliness where possible. There
have, in fact, been a lot of advances on this score recently -- T3
automates a lot of intermediate actions like door-opening and leaving
containers before going places, and "Return to Ditch Day" does a great
job of minimizing the number of steps the player has to take before
doing an interesting action. It has become more and more common to have
locks and keys handle themselves semi-automatically. Etc.
What I don't like, though (again, a matter of personal opinion) is when
the game takes over to such an extent that it describes for me a lot of
activities I never intended. First of all, it makes me feel as though I
have less control, not more; second, I get the distinct sense that the
game could trundle along just fine without my help at all. All the more
so if the game makes me do a stupid and dangerous action (like
activating a bomb) when that isn't what I meant to do. It might be what
the AUTHOR meant me to do, but it makes me grumpy. Forcing the player's
hand like that -- while occasionally necessary -- requires a lot of
finesse.
The ideal thing (to my mind) is to make the player curious or nervous
about the item, so that he is more and more inclined to pick it up and
have a look. Then you have the guidance towards an important plot
event, but the player is still in control of the situation. If it takes
more than one move to resolve, that might actually become part of what
raises the emotional tension.
> The equivalent focus in a novel of all the inter and intra-room
> movements would be stapling the pages together between scene cuts,
> requiring the reader to master the staple remover before getting on
to
> the next plot point.
This sounds less like an indictment of movement per se and more like a
complaint about the existence of puzzles.
> Not a very compelling analogy, I know, but much
> of IF is like that. When I look at the transcript of even a very
good
> game like Varicella, in which a walkthrough can take around only 100
> turns or so, something like 70% of the commands are simply movement
> from one room to the next.
I don't speak for everyone, obviously, but I find movement commands --
especially once I know my way around the map reasonably well -- take
less of my attention than the other kind of command, and I zip quickly
around the map until I am getting where I wanted to go. So
experientially movement is not 70% of the gameplay, even if it is 70%
of the walkthrough. When I think back on Varicella, moving around the
castle is not what I remember as the dominant aspect of the experience.
For what it's worth, I think there are some analogous aspects of books
-- not every scene is crisis or climax, and there are intersticial
passages which are necessary only for setup. They can get boring if
done badly, but they usually can't be eliminated entirely.
> While any fiction or
> movie has to have "locations" and describe or show them, the best art
> always makes use of those settings to frame meaningful events in the
> story they are telling.
Hm, maybe. I submit to you, however, that fiction and movies use their
settings differently, and IF uses setting differently again.
> All the
> unnecessary puppetry drains out the narrative tension, while the
player
> gropes for commands that actually deliver the next plot advancement.
Now we're back to something that seems to be about puzzles rather than
about rooms as such. But it seems to me that some level of player
uncertainty is in fact useful in IF. I've played games where I felt
every single command was being spoonfed to me, and I don't like those
unless they have something else extraordinarily compelling going on.
They're boring. The tension in IF comes from a dynamic process, part
the game and part the player; I think if you try to locate all of it in
the game, what you have is a short story.
> The trick is how to focus the player on the actions that have real
> meaning within the game, without simply saying, "attack the guard,"
> dummy! (Apologies to All Roads). It's certainly not easy. There
> are two choices as far as I can see (1) limit the choices by limiting
> (and making obvious) the command interactions afforded to the player
at
> each point (which leans towards CYOA games), or (2) make every action
> that can be thought of somehow "meaningful" in the game (which
> leans towards mind-boggling complexity).
...hrm.
I've seen this come close to working in a few conversation games -- I
hate to keep dragging "Shadows in the Mirror" into this, but it's a
good example -- because conversations *are* made up of unique and
meaningful units, and because it's at least somewhat possible to tell
how things are affecting the state of the game.
Still, I think you can wind up with a situation where, if everything
is meaningful, then *nothing* is. Giving all possible commands an
important effect on game state can be hard for the player to keep track
of, even if the author is up to handling it.
Stephen Bond
> (An example of this meaningless puppetry might go as follows: Stand
> up. "You stand up." Walk to table. "You're at the table."
> Take item. "Taken." Inspect item. "It appears to be a bomb.
> There is a warning label on the bottom." Turn item over. "Done."
> Read warning label. "Warning! If you're reading this, the bomb
> has been activated and will explode in 30 seconds. Yikes!"
This at least is an example, but it's a phony made-up example.
(Intra-room movement like 'walk to table' isn't even part of the
standard Inform world model, and I suspect the same is true for TADS.)
Is there any work of modern IF that forces the player to
perform such a tedious sequence of actions? Or more to the point,
is there any work of IF that is highly regarded for doing so?
To be honest, the point you make is fairly old hat. It's a long
time since that kind of thing was considered good game design.
Stephen.
Michael Roy
> Movement between these locations is usually
> happens during the journey that drives a plot point. All the
> unnecessary puppetry drains out the narrative tension, while the player
> gropes for commands that actually deliver the next plot advancement.
I'm in full agreement with you about this. However, actually stripping
away this puppetry takes a bit of work. In a novel, the author knows
where the character wants to go/is going and thus can skim over the
boring mechanics of actually getting there. In wide map IF, the author
doesn't have a clue what the player is going to try next.
One obvious solution would be to eliminate the wide map (e.g., one room
games). This has disadvantages in that the game has to either be fairly
short, a sequence of prisons, or done very carefully.
Another is the "taxi" system used by Gumshoe, where the player can
summon a cab for transportation between many mini-maps. This had the
disadvantage that it was a bit difficult to even realize what locations
were available, plus creating frustration about other locations that
conceivably could have been reachable but were not (because it's hard to
know what locations are going to end up being important, and having the
taxi driver say "I've never heard of that place" isn't a good way to
find out).
Infocom's Sherlock did this a bit better by combining a wide map and
hansoms, letting the player walk if he insisted on acting out every
insignificant detail or letting him jump across the map to most anywhere
he wanted to go. This had the advantage that the player could explore
on foot while he was learning the geography and focusing on the
connections between areas and then skip over them when he was focused
more on the narrative aspects.
The Inform Platypus library makes an interesting step in this direction,
with the GO TO verb doing automatic path finding and movement to visited
locations, although it's more of an automation of the meaningless
actions than a skipping of them entirely, and for long paths in verbose
mode, it can result in a lot of text scrolling by.
Out of all of these, I liked the Sherlock method the best because it
eliminated meaningless motion while preserving meaningful exploration.
If you went through the walkthrough of it, I'd bet that it's move
percentage would be a good deal lower as a result. Granted, this
doesn't guarantee that the game will have a better narrative or be more
suspenseful (Sherlock wasn't either, for that matter), but I think it
helped the game world stand together as a cohesive and organic whole
rather than a series of rooms connected together to form a map.
In a way, eliminating rooms is impossible, if for no reason other than
the need of the player to have some place to stand. However, as authors
we could try harder to present them as "settings" or groupings of rooms
that stand together and share a common narrative/plot goal. Ideally, I
should be able to move within a setting without sensing that I am moving
because the story continues unabated after the move. For example,
consider the chase scene in almost any police movie: it features some of
the most rapid changes of location in the film with 90% of the "IF
commands" involved being movement with the occasional JUMP FENCE and
KICK DOOR OPEN thrown in for variety and yet the protagonist is still
trying to do the exact same thing after they moved as they were before.
This is possible partly because the locations serve only as a passing
backdrop and cannot be interacted with very much if the chaser wants to
keep up. For this to translate well to IF, one would need to add a bit
more variety because watching someone move a lot is more interesting
than moving a lot oneself, but I could see this being worked in as a
string of simple one-room puzzles with severe time constraints, perhaps
with a plot branch depending on whether the player was able to keep up
or got delayed too long on one of the puzzle obstacles.
What we can eliminate though, I think, are "cookie cutter rooms" where
the player's options are essentially to solve the puzzle presented or to
go to a different room and solve its puzzle. Even if an author takes
special care to create a mimetic environment where the rooms flow
naturally, they can still kill narrative tension if they're nothing more
than placeholders for the player to stand in while he "gropes for
commands that actually deliver the next plot advancement."
In most fiction, a character has the option to revisit an old setting,
whether they choose to do so or not. When they choose not to, the
author is implicitly indicating that there would be no real point to
return there at that point in time. Totally preventing the player from
doing this might be unrealistic in most cases, but by moving the
dramatic focus to different parts of the map at different times (and
thus letting the change of rooms aid the dramatic tension rather than
undercut it) we can set it up so that the players see the setting where
the action is occurring as being clearly more interesting for the time
being. Thus, they'll still have the freedom to go do what they want,
but they'll know ahead of time that things will be more interesting if
they go where the story is going. (Alternatively, under the heading of
"make every action that can be thought of somehow meaningful," an author
could try to bring the story to the player with the significant drama
capable of appearing in different ways in different locations.)
> The trick is how to focus the player on the actions that have real
> meaning within the game, without simply saying, "attack the guard,"
> dummy! (Apologies to All Roads).
One of my favorites is doing nothing in the prologue of YAGWAD.
> It's certainly not easy. There
> are two choices as far as I can see (1) limit the choices by limiting
> (and making obvious) the command interactions afforded to the player at
> each point (which leans towards CYOA games), or (2) make every action
> that can be thought of somehow "meaningful" in the game (which
> leans towards mind-boggling complexity). The second strategy is my preferred one, though it
> is tougher to execute.
I prefer it as well, although attempting to make _every_ action
meaningful seems doomed to failure. However, there are a lot of actions
which are obviously going to be meaningless (like jumping on the spot
fruitlessly). While there are certainly gray cases, for the most part
players can realize what actions are meaningless and the trick to
focusing them on the meaningful ones may just be reassuring them that
they don't have to bother doing the meaningless things (how to do this
is another question). Reinforce this with a dramatic ticking time bomb
and the player will hopefully know what to focus on.
> In a nutshell, I think we need to focus on developing and
> employing techniques to provide and sustain the necessary narrative
> tension throughout a longer IF exercise.
I think that this is definitely the root of the issue. What techniques
do you see for doing this?
Michael
Stephen Bond
> I haven't played "Shade" (nor any i-f to speak of from the last five or
> six years),
Why not? _Shade_ takes a short time to play, and it's more fun than
reading Usenet.
> but it certainly is not the first "deconstruction of the
> rooms paradigm" in existence. It may well be the first published, or
> finished, one, but the idea that this approach is revolutionary and
> unprecedented is just wrong. I, for instance, began writing a story
> (never finished) back in 1995 that
[etc.]
This is a wind-up, right?
Not that I'd necessarily agree _Shade_ was the first "deconstruction
of the rooms paradigm", though it may well be the best, depending on
what "deconstruction of the rooms paradigm" actually means. _The Space
Under the Window_, by the same author, pre-empted it by a few years, and
there may even have been some "roomless" games before that. By which I
mean actual released games that people could know or care about.
Stephen.
PJ
>However, if you
>want to see more story in your IF, the best way to go about it is to
>write some story-driven games, not to tell people what they 'need' to
>do.
Actually, I've played both Rameses and Cabal, as well as most of the
others mentioned in this post. I haven't written any similar games
myself, but I must have missed the line in the FAQ where only published
authors were allowed to post discussion to this site. The only way to
improve the art is to critique it and think about it. You seem to be
implying that I am instead knocking your games or those of other
authors who have adopted a more literary style. Quite the contrary, I
am suggesting that, in terms of progressing IF as a not-yet-mature art,
those games are the very examples and starting points of where we can
go to get to a new level. I'm sorry if I've offended you personally,
but I am puzzled and somewhat annoyed at the prevalence of authors on
this site who choose not to argue with the points I am making, but
rather with my right to make them. This thread -- in little more than
24 hours -- has accumulated 25 posts by folks other than you and me.
So there appears to be some interest in the question I originally
raised. Common courtesy would suggest that if I'm not personally
knocking you, that you either stick to my arguments or else resist the
temptation to post.
PJ
PJ
>This at least is an example, but it's a phony made-up example.
>(Intra-room movement like 'walk to table' isn't even part of the
>standard Inform world model, and I suspect the same is true for TADS.)
>Is there any work of modern IF that forces the player to
>perform such a tedious sequence of actions? Or more to the point,
>is there any work of IF that is highly regarded for doing so?
Well, of course the example is "phony" and "made up." Would you rather
I pick apart a "highly regarded" game for my examples instead? If so,
let's quickly discuss Cabal (though I don't know how well regarded the
game is, I liked it a lot). You're in the pyramid, you've quickly
performed all the necessary actions to get you back to the slab under
which lie the Protocols. Now you have to put the jewels in the right
place, then "lift slab" to see the Protocols. Given that the solution
was already given in the story previously, it should be relatively
simple. However, why even present it as a task to be done? Since I
forgot that the key verb after inserting the jewels was "lift slab" and
Inform has no scrollback, I literally had to restart the game to go
back and reread that bit of conversation, after fumbling with "turn
slab," "push," "pull," etc.
While solving that puzzle was part of the inside joke that the game is
making, forcing a restart for such a simple reason surely "dissipates
narrative tension" as I have been using it here. Overall, the game is
extremely successful in telling its humorous tale, and it's hard to get
off track. That's why I was willing to restart and go on. But
chalking a restart up to my stupidity as opposed to a potential flaw on
that minor point of design would be short-sighted. What does a forced
restart do for us there? Winnow out players to the old-timers who
remember that particular puzzle? (I first played Advent in 1977, if
you're interested in useless information like that.) Or is the restart
some part of the point the author is making? If so, excellent, keep
it. If not, then perhaps it's an opportunity for (minor) improvement.
But one reason that Cabal works is that the story itself is fairly
simple. Good, funny, tougue-in-cheek, but basically simple. So Cabal
is a great starting point, but for those who want either more depth,
complexity, or seriousness, maintaining a focus on narrative tension or
"pacing" and how you deliver it -- particularly over a large,
multiscene, multiplot game -- is a serious question of analysis. And
that's all I'm doing here, provoking discussion. I'm not lauding my
examples as perfect -- they are quite banal, in fact. Authors are
free to think about and use anything practical this dicussion provokes,
whether in agreement or disagreement with my particular point of view.
If that helps produce more games and more enjoyable "literary games,"
then that's about the best I'm hoping for here.
ems...@mindspring.com
> The only way to
> improve the art is to critique it and think about it...
> I am puzzled and somewhat annoyed at the prevalence of authors on
> this site who choose not to argue with the points I am making, but
> rather with my right to make them.
This kind of discussion used to be more common. Over the last couple of
years we've seen a number of new people show up, explain what the IF
community is doing wrong (everyone has his own theory), and vanish
again. The suggestions are of varying interest, and range in tone from
"perhaps someone should try X" to "you are all a bunch of nitwits not
to have thought of this before", but it is rare for the original poster
(or anyone else) to offer a game as proof-of-concept. Sometimes the
suggestion seems impractical, so more experienced authors try to
explain why (also in tones ranging from gentle to blistering), at which
point a nasty fight breaks out.
So the ethos of the group has shifted somewhat so that many regulars
are skeptical of ideas introduced without a finished game to back them
up. This can be stifling, and makes the groups quieter and less
interesting than they used to be, with the occasional outbreak of
violent (but also boring) flamewars. I miss the more energetic r*if of
a few years ago.
Still, some here -- and I've overreacted to this in the past -- are now
oversensitized to remarks of the form "I have a great idea which you
all should get to work implementing because it will be the salvation of
IF!!". If you sense wariness or mild antagonism, it may be because what
you're saying sounds that way sometimes. I suspect your posts read
differently than you intend to people who've had years of aversion
therapy to phrases like "we need to rethink [x] about IF!" Not exactly
your fault.
It's also true what Stephen said about writing a game -- if you want to
change the state of the art, the most effective way is to write a
compelling example of what you have in mind.
None of this is meant to discourage you from posting. I don't agree
with all your premises, let alone your conclusions, but that's where a
good argument comes from. I do agree with Stephen about the example
issue, though: if you want to argue about the status quo, it helps to
cite as many specific games as possible. I got the impression from your
initial posts that you weren't familiar with most of the linear IF
available. That doesn't mean you're not entitled to an opinion, but
it's harder to respond usefully if it's not clear what you're reacting
to. My suggested playing list wasn't meant to shut you up, but to
encourage you to try some of those games if you hadn't, or else to
elaborate on what you thought of them. General statements that begin
"even the best IF..." are too vague to grapple with, given that I don't
know what you consider the best IF to be.
With that said -- have you played Anchorhead? It's a long game with
complex plot, clear structure, and rising tension. It does have a few
bits where the verb management is fiddly, and it definitely has rooms,
but I think it might be a useful example in this conversation.
Michael Roy
> Well, of course the example is "phony" and "made up." Would you rather
> I pick apart a "highly regarded" game for my examples instead? If so,
> let's quickly discuss Cabal (though I don't know how well regarded the
> game is, I liked it a lot). You're in the pyramid, you've quickly
> performed all the necessary actions to get you back to the slab under
> which lie the Protocols. Now you have to put the jewels in the right
> place, then "lift slab" to see the Protocols. Given that the solution
> was already given in the story previously, it should be relatively
> simple. However, why even present it as a task to be done? Since I
> forgot that the key verb after inserting the jewels was "lift slab" and
> Inform has no scrollback, I literally had to restart the game to go
> back and reread that bit of conversation, after fumbling with "turn
> slab," "push," "pull," etc.
As I remember, I had a problem with this too and ended up checking the
walkthrough for Infidel to look it up. However, I think that part of
the problem is that the game did half the steps automatically and then
left me to do the last step of the puzzle (if I'm recalling it
correctly), which was sort of confusing because it was on the borderline
between not enough and too much assistance by the game. I wouldn't
remove it--it'd be too large of a jump without player involvement--but I
think it could stand to be better clued (even if it already tells you
the whole solution).
> I'm not lauding my
> examples as perfect -- they are quite banal, in fact. Authors are
> free to think about and use anything practical this dicussion provokes,
> whether in agreement or disagreement with my particular point of view.
> If that helps produce more games and more enjoyable "literary games,"
> then that's about the best I'm hoping for here.
As an additional plus, I think it's sparked an interesting discussion in
its own right.
Michael
Stephen Bond
> Stephen wrote:
>
>
>>This at least is an example, but it's a phony made-up example.
>>(Intra-room movement like 'walk to table' isn't even part of the
>>standard Inform world model, and I suspect the same is true for TADS.)
>>Is there any work of modern IF that forces the player to
>>perform such a tedious sequence of actions? Or more to the point,
>>is there any work of IF that is highly regarded for doing so?
>
> Well, of course the example is "phony" and "made up." Would you rather
> I pick apart a "highly regarded" game for my examples instead?
I'd rather you picked examples from actual games, instead of an
artificial example that doesn't reflect the way people think
games should be written anymore.
If so,
> let's quickly discuss Cabal (though I don't know how well regarded the
> game is, I liked it a lot).
Thank you.
You're in the pyramid, you've quickly
> performed all the necessary actions to get you back to the slab under
> which lie the Protocols. Now you have to put the jewels in the right
> place, then "lift slab" to see the Protocols. Given that the solution
> was already given in the story previously, it should be relatively
> simple. However, why even present it as a task to be done?
It has a satirical purpose, it's an in-joke (as you acknowledge),
and giving the solutions to puzzles before they occur is a running
joke in the game. (It also happens with the library maze and the
eyepatch. Okay, the game doesn't run long enough to have a proper
running joke, but you get the idea.)
Since I
> forgot that the key verb after inserting the jewels was "lift slab" and
> Inform has no scrollback, I literally had to restart the game to go
> back and reread that bit of conversation, after fumbling with "turn
> slab," "push," "pull," etc.
I'm sorry you had to restart the game. >OPEN SLAB works too. Push,
pull etc. aren't the right verbs, though perhaps I could give more
useful feedback. However, this is more a guess-the-verb problem than
anything else -- something that's also a problem for narrative-free
games.
>
> But one reason that Cabal works is that the story itself is fairly
> simple. Good, funny, tougue-in-cheek, but basically simple. So Cabal
> is a great starting point, but for those who want either more depth,
> complexity, or seriousness, maintaining a focus on narrative tension or
> "pacing" and how you deliver it -- particularly over a large,
> multiscene, multiplot game -- is a serious question of analysis.
I think it's more a question of doing it and then analysing what's
been done.
Stephen.
Stephen Bond
> Stephen wrote:
>
>
>>However, if you
>>want to see more story in your IF, the best way to go about it is to
>>write some story-driven games, not to tell people what they 'need' to
>>do.
>
> Actually, I've played both Rameses and Cabal, as well as most of the
> others mentioned in this post. I haven't written any similar games
> myself, but I must have missed the line in the FAQ where only published
> authors were allowed to post discussion to this site.
I also missed the line in my post where I claimed any such thing.
The only way to
> improve the art is to critique it and think about it.
I think the only way to improve the art is to make better art. The
link between art and art criticism is not so straightforward.
Which is not to say that criticism can't be fun. But please
base your critiques on actual games, rather than on handwaving.
You seem to be
> implying that I am instead knocking your games or those of other
> authors who have adopted a more literary style.
I didn't mean to imply that: I only meant to imply that you hadn't
played enough story-driven games. In particular, you seemed to
be advocating that authors should do what a lot of them are already
doing (writing roomless or story-driven games), and presenting it
as a new idea.
Quite the contrary, I
> am suggesting that, in terms of progressing IF as a not-yet-mature art,
> those games are the very examples and starting points of where we can
> go to get to a new level. I'm sorry if I've offended you personally,
Not at all....
Stephen.
Andrew Plotkin
> news:cqeufv$ht2$1...@reader1.panix.com...
> >
> > Remember though that the player is reacting to what he experiences,
> > not what the game can potentially do. If you play through a game and
> > reach one of several possible endings, that's *no different* from
> > playing to the end of a game that only has one ending. If you know
> > (metatextually, i.e., from the back cover blurb) that there are many
> > endings, then you might start over and find a different one; but that
> > doesn't add to the tension the first time around.
>
> I see what you are saying, but, speaking for myself anyway, it *could* add
> to the tension the first time around. For example, if a game makes it clear
> that I have a decision to make and I chose one decision that is clearly
> mutually exclusive, I now have the tension of wondering (a) did I make the
> "right" choice?, and (b) what would have happened with my other choice?
But doesn't that tension apply to every single significant command in
every game? If you go north, maybe you *should* have gone south. Maybe
you won't get a chance to explore south later.
> So here I am, in fact, responding to what the game can potentially do; what
> narrative I might be missing by taking the path I took; how much harder (or
> easier) the game might have been had I gone another route. Now, having said
> this, I cannot relate this to too many IF games that I have played,
> admittedly, because I am often not sure if there are multiple paths or
> multiple solutions with different ramifications unless it is made blatantly
> obvious.
So it seems you're relying either on metatextual information, or some
in-game technique for conveying "There are multiple paths here". My
questions then are: Does it matter to you which? (I'd think that a
work should convey its own expectations, not rely on a README file to
explain about multiple paths. Besides, the README can't describe
*which* choices are significant. Unless you add a metatextual flag in
the statue line or something.) And, what techniques work?
It's relatively easy to imply that multiple paths *existed* in a
previous scene. ("If only you'd gone south!" Or something subtler.)
It's harder to make it clear that your *upcoming* choice is that
significant -- not without breaking the fourth wall.
> > On the other hand, games where the available actions are completely
> > transparent; the player chooses the outcome in full knowledge of what
> > he's doing. That kills any tension or uncertainty about the
> > conclusion. The game outcome, from the player's point of view, is
> > *both* (and most players will go back and watch both, purely out of
> > curiosity).
>
> Well, yes, but what if the "full knowledge of what he's doing" leads to
> ramifications in the game that are unanticipated?
Then you're back in the middle ground. This is a good point: one way
of avoiding either extreme is to have short-term and long-term
consequences fall in different places on that scale.
> > The middle is the potentially fertile ground. Unsurprisingly, this is
> > analogous to the middle ground of the IF parser (in which you have
> > some sense of the commands available to you, and you can generally
> > predict what a given command will do, but there's always the potential
> > for a surprise or a new kind of action). It's the same balance at a
> > different level of granularity.
>
> So that speaks to the commands that a player may issue and the results of
> issuing those commands.
I'm making an analogy, here. The player makes low-level choices, which
are turn-by-turn commands. He also makes high-level choices, which are
scene-by-scene significant plot actions. (And there are intermediate
levels, like "which room/puzzle/dialogue shall I explore next.")
Andrew Plotkin
> PJ wrote: (in response to Stephen Bond)
>
> > The only way to
> > improve the art is to critique it and think about it...
> > I am puzzled and somewhat annoyed at the prevalence of authors on
> > this site who choose not to argue with the points I am making, but
> > rather with my right to make them.
>
> This kind of discussion used to be more common. Over the last couple of
> years we've seen a number of new people show up, explain what the IF
> community is doing wrong (everyone has his own theory), and vanish
> again.
If I may correct: over the last *ten* years.
> So the ethos of the group has shifted somewhat so that many regulars
> are skeptical of ideas introduced without a finished game to back them
> up.
Really I think this shift happened around the time of the first
IFComp. The "show us" newsgroup mentality was around before you
(Emily) or Stephen Bond started releasing IF. It may have gotten
stricter since then; I don't have a good sense of the history.
(Not coincidentally, the IFComp provided an outlet for people to write
small games demonstrating a new idea or approach. Although not all
new/experimental games since then have been entered in the IFComp.)
Jeff Nyman
> But doesn't that tension apply to every single significant command in
> every game? If you go north, maybe you *should* have gone south. Maybe
> you won't get a chance to explore south later.
I see what you are saying. We have to ask what action is "understood" to be
meaningful before the fact? For example, if the game makes it clear that I
can kill someone, I would have no way to know that *not* killing them is an
option necessarily. Unless I try it. Then the significance only comes after
the fact when I later learn what I could or could not have done.
> So it seems you're relying either on metatextual information, or some
> in-game technique for conveying "There are multiple paths here". My
> questions then are: Does it matter to you which?
I am not so sure it is always metatextual, but definitely in-game. I think
of "Blade Runner" again. There were choices you could make in that game and
it was very clear that the game would let you make whatever one you wanted.
What was not clear is whether that was a "good" choice or not. (Just like in
life.) Then, later on in the game, I would find that events played out as
they did because I made that choice. Note that neither choice I made would
necessarily "kill off" my character. Rather, it would effect how later parts
of the game played out because of actions I took that impacted the state of
the model world. I realized that, however, early on when it was clear that
the game was responding to things I did in a specific way (as opposed to a
general way that would have been in place no matter what I did).
So to your first question ("does it matter which path?"), I guess part of
what matters for me is the feeling that the choice itself will have some
ramifications; that the choice made will impact later game play or even
later decisions that I have to make. A good contrast to "Blade Runner" is
"Deus Ex". (Again, I apologize for using non-IF.) In "Deus Ex" near the end
of the game you are presented with what is quite obviously three paths to
take. Which one you take determines the end-game. However, since this
decision point takes place right near the end of the game and since it is
very clear what the end result will be, it only "mattered" to me to take one
path, see how it works, then go back and try the other ones. In "Blade
Runner" the decision points came at various times. Some were subtle in terms
of their effects on game play. Some were not so subtle. So in that case I
was thinking about how the actions I would take now would affect my later
play. ("Geez, I should kill this replicant. But I'm pretty sure if I do,
that informant is not going to talk to me since I'm pretty sure she *is* a
replicant. But if I do kill him, I know the Captain will let me in on what
he knows. And I can still probably beat the information out of the other one
if it comes down to it.") In other words, I was engaged in the story because
it was clear the story was allowing me to make decisions but then holding me
accountable for how I made those decisions.
> And, what techniques work?
Good question and it is one I am trying to think about now. I would think it
needs to be clear to the player that a choice is possible and, further, that
this choice could have some ramifications down the line. Clues, in other
words, in the writing that indicate events. If something relatively
arbitrary happens, like a cave-in blocking me from going south ever again, I
would hope that something in the game text would indicate this possibility
rather than just having it happen, particularly if going south was really
important to completing the game.
Maybe had I gone south, I could have found the Exotic Matter Nullifer, for
example, that would have made a later part of the game much easier to play.
I did not go south and thus the cave in happened and now when I get to that
same later part of the game, I can still get through it but it is clear that
having the Nullifier would have helped. Or going back to an example I threw
out there before: you and an NPC are going through the game trying to find
the Sacred Treasure. At one point the NPC is in danger of dying. You can
save him; you can let him die. If you save him, he helps you through some
other perils up ahead but he turns on you in the end and you have to fight
him. Had you let him die, you would have had a harder time getting through
the perils but your final endgame is a bit easier since you do not have to
fight him.
The technique might be that the game makes it clear to the player via
"simple" decisions at first that what you do in the game world will have
effects and ramifications. Later, as the plot develops, the player is
already aware that the game is a "living" world and actions do have
consquences so the decision points get a little more "complex". Maybe I am
not saying this right so I need to think this through but I guess what I am
shooting for here is that the game makes it clear that a choice can be made
and that the choice made can have some ramifications down the road. That
goes to what you say here, I think:
> It's relatively easy to imply that multiple paths *existed* in a
> previous scene. ("If only you'd gone south!" Or something subtler.)
> It's harder to make it clear that your *upcoming* choice is that
> significant -- not without breaking the fourth wall.
Excellent point. I think this is what you were saying all along and I was
simply not thinking it through. So you are correct: this is what I am
struggling with. How do you make it clear to the player that they do have
choices? In the example of going south, that would be tricky. In the case of
the NPC dying, it would presumably be clear to the player that they could
take some action or take no action to save him. But in terms of making it
clear that both possibilities are open and will change how the game is
played -- I am not sure. I am going to make a generalization here but I
think the genre is perhaps such that players are automatically inclined to
think that there is a "right" action to take and not taking that action is
bad. ("The NPC is about to die! Well, I *must* have to save them. That leads
'automatically' to: >SAVE NPC.") In other words, maybe this is just one of
those changes that happens in games gradually such that the convention
becomes "obvious" to players as the convention is more used. Right now, the
convention is (or seems to be): make the right choices along a relatively
pre-determined path and you will get to the endgame. The convention might
eventually become different. How much this ties into rethinking narrative, I
am not sure yet. (Personally, I think a lot of it has to do with the idea of
the narrator viewpoint. I am thinking that the way you narrate will, by
definition, tend to constrain how you can make things "obvious" or make
things "seem significant".)
This is a very interesting discussion, so I thank you for your inputs. This
is all helping me at least think things through as I go through writing my
first game. My hope is that some of this is also helping PJ with his queries
regarding the idea of rethinking narrative.
- Jeff
Mike Roberts
> The trick is how to focus the player on the actions that have real
> meaning within the game, without simply saying, "attack the guard,"
> dummy! (Apologies to All Roads). It's certainly not easy. There
> are two choices as far as I can see (1) limit the choices by limiting
> (and making obvious) the command interactions afforded to the
> player at each point (which leans towards CYOA games), or (2)
> make every action that can be thought of somehow "meaningful"
> in the game (which leans towards mind-boggling complexity).
>
> The second strategy is my preferred one, though it is tougher to
> execute.
A couple of thoughts about this, and a suggestion.
First thought: text IF of the adventure game sort has a somewhat different
thrust from what you're proposing, so to some extent you're talking not
about a refinement of what we now think of as IF so much as a new form.
Current text IF has a significant experiential component - part of the
appeal is that it's a simulation of an artificial environment, sort of a
character-mode holodeck. That part relies upon a detailed, concrete,
internally consistent simulation, where you can actually map out the full
extent of the accessible physical setting, arbitrarily move objects around,
and so on. The experiential appeal is separate from the story part - I
don't think you can remove the fine-grained simulation without fundamentally
changing the nature of the game. I'm not saying that doing so would be
objectively bad (or good); it just makes it a different sort of game that
might appeal to a different (probably somewhat overlapping) set of players.
Second thought: I think "tougher to execute" understates it. Doing (2)
fully is probably beyond the capabilities of current or foreseeable
technology - I think you're in strong AI territory.
The suggestion: Since the programming problem seems intractable for now,
maybe the thing to do is to try approach (2) as a live role-playing
exercise. That is, design a scenario as though you were going to make a
(2)-style computer game out of it, but instead of programming it into a
computer, just sketch it out on paper. Enlist a friend to be the player,
and sit down with her for a couple of hours while you pretend to be the
parser. Maybe videotape the session so that you can review it afterwards
and write up some notes. The point is to gain some experience with the
game-design issues before confronting the technical challenges of
implementing it on a computer. You might also get some insights about how
to extract a subset of the design that's small enough to implement in
software but still big enough to make an interesting game.
--Mike
mjr underscore at hotmail dot com
ems...@mindspring.com
> Here, ems...@mindspring.com wrote:
> > So the ethos of the group has shifted somewhat so that many
regulars
> > are skeptical of ideas introduced without a finished game to back
them
> > up.
>
> Really I think this shift happened around the time of the first
> IFComp. The "show us" newsgroup mentality was around before you
> (Emily) or Stephen Bond started releasing IF. It may have gotten
> stricter since then; I don't have a good sense of the history.
I would say it has, yeah. I suppose I could've been more clear that I
don't know precisely when this trend began, not having been here since
the Beginning, but that has been my observation of events since about
1998.
Hm. 1998 is more than a couple of years ago. I'm getting old.
ems...@mindspring.com
Jeff Nyman wrote:
> "Andrew Plotkin" <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in message
> news:cqhg02$bqn$2...@reader1.panix.com...
>
> > But doesn't that tension apply to every single significant command
in
> > every game? If you go north, maybe you *should* have gone south.
Maybe
> > you won't get a chance to explore south later.
>
> I see what you are saying. We have to ask what action is "understood"
to be
> meaningful before the fact? For example, if the game makes it clear
that I
> can kill someone, I would have no way to know that *not* killing them
is an
> option necessarily. Unless I try it. Then the significance only comes
after
> the fact when I later learn what I could or could not have done.
I think my favorite solution to this problem is of the following form:
-- build a simulation which turns on a specific kind of interaction
(conversation; using a collection of spy gadgets; even just using the
standard command set, but applying it to one kind of problem in
particular);
-- teach the player the rules of this interaction, through easy puzzles
or introductory scenes;
-- present a plot in which the significant choices depend on the player
using the rules of the game world to cause the desired effect, because
at this point he knows both what sorts of things are possible in this
game world and how to bring them about.
Slouching Towards Bedlam does this; so does Spider and Web.
In a recent (commercial) game, I was presented at the end with a choice
of the form, "If you believe person X, press this button; if you
believe Y, press that other one." Of course I saved, and then I went
and watched what happened in both cases -- though as it happened the
plot was simply enough laid out that I never had any doubt of the
*correct* answer. This struck me as lame.
(Part of what made Slouching so effective, to my mind, was the sense
that it was my choice to change the final outcome, and that the way I
went about doing so was also my own idea. Obviously it wouldn't have
*worked* if the authors hadn't anticipated the ending I wanted to try
to achieve. Still, the illusion was there, and effective.)
> So to your first question ("does it matter which path?"), I guess
part of
> what matters for me is the feeling that the choice itself will have
some
> ramifications; that the choice made will impact later game play or
even
> later decisions that I have to make.
In "City of Secrets" I tried to create a lot of interlocking choices
and events, so that much of what the player does has ramifications
further down the line. Some players objected that a) they did things
they didn't think were important and then were annoyed afterwards by
the results; or b) they were presented with a decision point but didn't
feel they had enough information to choose wisely, and they found that
experience unpleasant.
I suspect the lesson for game design here is that if you do weave
decision points through the game, you have to make it at least
semi-obvious to the player what kinds of things are likely to result
from those decisions. (The Blade Runner example about wanting to keep
the replicant alive vs. not seems like a successful version of this
technique.) Being too subtle may in fact be counterproductive.
Andrew Plotkin
> Would you rather I pick apart a "highly regarded" game for my
> examples instead? If so, let's quickly discuss Cabal (though I don't
> know how well regarded the game is, I liked it a lot).
I liked it (and not just because I'm a star).
> You're in the pyramid, you've quickly
> performed all the necessary actions to get you back to the slab under
> which lie the Protocols. Now you have to put the jewels in the right
> place, then "lift slab" to see the Protocols. Given that the solution
> was already given in the story previously, it should be relatively
> simple. However, why even present it as a task to be done?
There's a long-standing truism -- old enough that we take it for
granted -- that it's better to give the player something to do, during
long event sequences, than to have him just page through a long block
of non-interactive text. I first saw this stated by Gareth Rees,
describing _Christminster_. He wanted an NPC to tell you a long story;
so he set up a scene in which you solve a multi-step puzzle (with the
NPC's help). The NPC tells the story, paragraph by paragraph, as you
proceed.
In that example, the "long sequence" is something done (spoken) by
another character, but the same idea applies to the protagonist's
actions. I took this advice to heart early, because it's what works
for me as a player. I *want* to be involved in the progression of the
scene. If too much happens without my interaction, I lose my sense of
complicity.
Obviously there's a balance, and there are also subtleties which can
be used for narrative effect.
(For example, at the end of a game, switching from one mode to the
other -- from "player entering specific commands" to "long
non-interactive sequence of results" -- can demark the boundary
between the climax and the denoument. Although falling straight into a
cut-scene ending is disinvolving, again, which is why many games have
a few turns of denoument or epilogue interaction.)
> Since I forgot that the key verb after inserting the jewels was
> "lift slab" and Inform has no scrollback, I literally had to restart
> the game to go back and reread that bit of conversation, after
> fumbling with "turn slab," "push," "pull," etc.
I think here you're confusing a guess-the-verb problem (which can
happen in any sort of game) with the kind of puppetry problem you were
discussing. Forgetting the verb was unusually bad luck for you. The
intent was not (I confidently assume) to force you to restart.
(Also, scrollback is handled by the interpreter, not by Inform. Most
interpreters have a way to display scrollback, although I forget how
it works in Frotz.)
PJ
>First thought: text IF of the adventure game sort has a somewhat
different
>thrust from what you're proposing, so to some extent you're talking
not
>about a refinement of what we now think of as IF so much as a new
form.
That may be true. I think of it more as an evolution, but perhaps it
becomes something completely different at some point. I'll have to
think about that somewhat.
>Current text IF has a significant experiential component - part of the
>appeal is that it's a simulation of an artificial environment, sort of
a
>character-mode holodeck. That part relies upon a detailed, concrete,
>internally consistent simulation, where you can actually map out the
full
>extent of the accessible physical setting, arbitrarily move objects
around,
>and so on. The experiential appeal is separate from the story part - I
>don't think you can remove the fine-grained simulation without
>fundamentally changing the nature of the game.
Again, that may or may not be true. I think what I am advocating is
that the "experiential appeal" needs to be so closely linked to moving
the game forward that literally every action by the players serves some
purpose, even if it's only to advance a counter or change the
randomization you have set for the next event to occur. I.e., certain
actions have direct, obvious consequences -- you are taking an item or
opening a door or whatever in a way that is obvious to the user -- but
even minor actions -- repeating looks over and over -- have some sort
of logical internal consequence that may be apparent later to the user,
even if it's not in this playing iteration but in the next one.
>I'm not saying that doing so would be
>objectively bad (or good); it just makes it a different sort of game
that
>might appeal to a different (probably somewhat overlapping) set of
>players.
Yep. It's fairly clear that some players want more puzzle
solving/experimenting and others want more story. I am more on the
story side, because having played these things for years, I am daunted
by the prospect of tackling something like Anchorhead without a
walkthru. The story is great, but the effort in "experimentation"
needed to work the solution yourself is orders of magnitude higher than
most story-enthralled folks can muster. Only the hard-core IF
experimenters glory in such complex exploration and puzzle solving, no
matter how fundamentally good the story and game may be.
>Second thought: I think "tougher to execute" understates it. Doing (2)
>fully is probably beyond the capabilities of current or foreseeable
>technology - I think you're in strong AI territory.
Maybe. I actually think the coding would be mundane (a lot of ugly IF
-THEN - ELSE statements) although incredibly intricate. What is harder
is to actually write the story variations and endings necessary to give
this sort of dynamic, action-based meaning the right consistency and
feel. Maybe that's why the AI is necessary -- let the computer write
the variations whenever they happen. But, obviously, we're eons away
from something like that.
>The suggestion: Since the programming problem seems intractable for
>now, maybe the thing to do is to try approach (2) as a live
role-playing
>exercise. That is, design a scenario as though you were going to make
a
>(2)-style computer game out of it, but instead of programming it into
a
>computer, just sketch it out on paper. Enlist a friend to be the
player,
>and sit down with her for a couple of hours while you pretend to be
the
>parser. Maybe videotape the session so that you can review it
afterwards
>and write up some notes. The point is to gain some experience with the
>game-design issues before confronting the technical challenges of
>implementing it on a computer. You might also get some insights about
>how to extract a subset of the design that's small enough to implement
in
>software but still big enough to make an interesting game.
Excellent suggestion. Others on this thread keep beating the drum to
say I should write a game before discussing the idea, but this is
actually a great idea at how to scope and delineate whether such a game
is feasible first. Thanks for your really thoughtful response to my
posts and a great suggestion.
ems...@mindspring.com
> There's a long-standing truism -- old enough that we take it for
> granted -- that it's better to give the player something to do,
during
> long event sequences, than to have him just page through a long block
> of non-interactive text. I first saw this stated by Gareth Rees,
> describing _Christminster_. He wanted an NPC to tell you a long
story;
> so he set up a scene in which you solve a multi-step puzzle (with the
> NPC's help). The NPC tells the story, paragraph by paragraph, as you
> proceed.
Rameses comes to mind here again, in the sense that most of what
you-the-player get to do is play the character, saying some lines and
doing some things that seem in-character and discovering the nature of
the PC, while the story trundles along on its own. The player's
activity is important mostly because of what it reveals about the
character.
I tend to think of this kind of play as something like improv
performance -- the author has given me a very clearly defined situation
and invites me to have some fun and ham it up a little in my assigned
role, while the other actors continue with the story. There are
elements of the same thing in the first scene of Act of Misdirection
(though mingled with a real puzzle or two) and in Kissing Bandit (TWIRL
MOUSTACHE being an unnecessary command, but excellent nonetheless).
I thought this worked out well in Rameses. In fact, in general it
strikes me that this is a technique especially well-suited to
PC-centric IF. There's not a huge amount of that out there, though, and
some of it is less successful. (Solitude, for instance, took a shot at
dealing with player character and background as revealed by setting; I
think it had some design and writing flaws that kept it from being as
effective as it could have been. There are no doubt some others, but
I'm not thinking of them at the moment.)
Incidentally, I apologize for forking the thread earlier -- google
groups beta, in its infinite wisdom, removes the [DISCUSSION] tag from
the subject line when I reply to things unless I type it back in
manually. Lame, lame, lame. I should get me a real newsreader, except
most of the ones I've tried I don't like.
neil.t...@gmail.com
won't let me in from 1000 miles away. Does anybody know how to get this
stupid beta interface to quote a previous poster? I had to copy the
text and put the '>' thingies in myself...
> While many undoubtedly will argue that a strict and somewhat linear
> narrative is not the point of IF, it may well be one reason that IF
is
> not more broadly popular than it currently is. Debatable, I realize.
Definitely debatable. I think it's the command line, actually, that
makes IF not as popular as it could be.
I expect at least one reply extolling the virtues and glories of the
interactive parser, so let me head that person off. Yes, I know. The
problem is - and this is fact - most users are either frightened of, or
extremely uncomfortable with, a prompt and a flashing cursor. In user
interface design, we say that a command line interface lacks
"transparency." It's very usable, and it's *extremely* flexible - but
it gives you no clues about how to use it. Whether we like it or not,
people just don't like taking the time to learn a new interface.
With IF games, you even have the phenomenon of each game requiring you
to learn a new interface. Photopia (while being very well-written and
engaging) made me give up compass directions. (Ack!) The only way to
get somewhere is to infer it from the text, and guess. NOT GOOD, when
someone is drowning. Spider and Web made me learn the words that put
the gadgets together, even after I understood in my head how they
should be coupled. Rematch made me learn how to string a bunch of
commands together.
All great games - and all flawed, from a usability standpoint. Most IF
games have some element of "learn what the parser wants." I have the
patience for this. Heck, I have enough patience to use a Unix command
line. Most people don't. They just want to sit down and play.
An IF game has a much higher barrier to entry than a regular video
game, let alone a novel.
> But if we are to advance IF, it may be worth thinking about how games
> or stories can be developed without relying on the compass and a set
of
> "rooms", and instead think about how a story develops, how the
> interaction can affect the story and vice versa, and how to keep
> essential dramatic tension throughout the course of a long IF game. I
> think we need to develop games where the most casual players says "I
> literally couldn't quit until I reached the end of the story."
> Not, "I refused to quit until I reached an acceptable endgame."
> The one is evidence of popular storytelling; the other, the obsession
> of us abiding fans in the fairly narrow confines of the IF community.
This has been hashed and rehashed a bit here, and I especially enjoyed
reading Mike Roberts's, Jeff Nyman's, and Emily Short's takes on it. I
have one paltry thing to add.
It might be helpful to explicitly identify which distractions to
narrative tension are intrinsic to IF, and which are a result of IF
culture.
For example, choice is intrinsic. It's not interactive, otherwise.
Others have noted that this influences the pacing of the story, which
can distract from the tension. Tension, then, has to be introduced in
other ways. So it would be helpful for IF authors to remember that they
simply *do not* have pacing at their disposal, except in cut scenes.
Action-oriented: intrinsic. You can write a whole novel about
somebody's reminisces about what somebody else did, but it doesn't work
so well with IF. In IF, you *do* things. There have been occasional
breaks from this - Galatea comes to mind - but even those require the
player to take a turn in order to move the story along.
Puzzles: they definitely can distract, especially if done wrong. Are
these intrinsic? Not especially - Adam Cadre is famous for writing very
engaging games that don't have any. They tend to show up a lot, though.
I'll put this down to culture.
Myriad of rooms joined by compass directions: culture, and partially
intrinsic. The compass directions are nearly necessary, because they
become a set of commands that you are sure are always at your disposal
to get places. That's the *only* reason we rely on them (and it's a
good reason). Another type of interface - a clicky one, like hypertext
- could allow a very different way of putting these IF "action
containers" together. Spreading the action out into a bunch of
different containers, though: culture, definitely.
One more paltry idea: how about we identify the elements unique to IF
that can be used to create narrative tension? The OP suggested this,
and I've seen little so far. I'll start.
Limited time: often used to great effect. There is only a weak analog
to this in static fiction. A static fiction author can do a great deal
to suggest urgency, but can never actually *enforce* it.
Consequences: good fiction requires them, but it can't have a *set of
mutually-exclusive* consequences. This is one of IF's greatest
strengths. It's been talked about already. One conclusion was that the
player has to recognize that a serious consequence will follow from
some action, or it's not a useful device. Additionally, to be good
fiction, the player (as a reader) should realize this based on
inferences from the story, not on explicit text.
(Ironically, our reliance on conveniences like "undo" and "save"
mitigate the effects of one of IF's greatest strengths. How much
tension can you gain from consequences when you're not forced to live
with them? On the other hand, how fun is it to be forced to play the
same sequence over and over again in order to finally progress? Static
fiction's singular consequences have an advantage here. I haven't got a
solution.)
Real puzzles: which is probably why they show up so much. In a novel,
the reader can just wait for the protagonist to figure it out. In IF,
the reader is pushed in right in front of it, and forced to deal. What
I would like to see less of, though, is one-room puzzles that feel like
puzzles. In my favorite games (especially Spider and Web), the puzzle
naturally arises from the environment's first principles. This,
combined with limited time, can be very engaging and tense - and also
extremely frustrating.
Being Right There: real puzzles is a limited special case of this.
Photopia brought tears to my eyes in half an hour. (People who know me
would know that that's hard to do.) A novel would have required many
hours to achieve the same thing. Walking in people's shoes creates a
strong emotional investment very quickly.
I think there's a big untapped market for IF in which that is done
particularly well. Adam would probably hang me for heresy for
suggesting it, but I think Photopia reworked with a clicky interface
would spread like wildfire in the Palm-Pilot-verse. In general, I'd
just like to see more.
Neil
ems...@mindspring.com
neil.t...@gmail.com wrote:
> OT: I have to use Google Groups to post because my campus news server
> won't let me in from 1000 miles away. Does anybody know how to get
this
> stupid beta interface to quote a previous poster? I had to copy the
> text and put the '>' thingies in myself...
Go to the top of the message, click Show Options, and then Reply. For
some reason this gets you the quoted text, while replying at the bottom
of the message doesn't.
(Speaking of interface transparency or the lack thereof...)
Andrew Plotkin
>
> > While many undoubtedly will argue that a strict and somewhat linear
> > narrative is not the point of IF, it may well be one reason that IF
> > is not more broadly popular than it currently is. Debatable, I realize.
>
> Definitely debatable. I think it's the command line, actually, that
> makes IF not as popular as it could be.
You mean, "than other kinds of games". That's not exactly a
controversial point. But it's also a completely different topic.
> The problem is - and this is fact - most users are either frightened
> of, or extremely uncomfortable with, a prompt and a flashing cursor.
Sure. This was one of my motivations behind _Dreamhold_. That seems to
be reasonably successful, at least among text-adventure newbies who
are motivated enough to try it in the first place.
> With IF games, you even have the phenomenon of each game requiring you
> to learn a new interface.
Considerably less so than platformers, say, or (lord help us) CRPGs.
Text IF is very consistent these days.
Back to the subject of narrative:
> It might be helpful to explicitly identify which distractions to
> narrative tension are intrinsic to IF, and which are a result of IF
> culture.
>
> For example, choice is intrinsic. It's not interactive, otherwise.
> Others have noted that this influences the pacing of the story, which
> can distract from the tension. Tension, then, has to be introduced in
> other ways. So it would be helpful for IF authors to remember that they
> simply *do not* have pacing at their disposal, except in cut scenes.
Huh? We do all *sorts* of stuff to control pacing. Weren't we just
giving examples?
> Action-oriented: intrinsic. You can write a whole novel about
> somebody's reminisces about what somebody else did, but it doesn't work
> so well with IF. In IF, you *do* things. There have been occasional
> breaks from this - Galatea comes to mind - but even those require the
> player to take a turn in order to move the story along.
This is a confusion of levels. Certainly you *do* things, but doing
isn't action. Doing is a set of verbs. That can include reminiscing,
examining, reading, talking, or thinking. Nobody has done a game which
is all reminiscing, but if the range of choice for reminiscence is
interestingly large and explorable, I can't see any reason why it
wouldn't work.
(Your example is reminiscing *about actions*, which is a bit
different. A game like that would bring up the question of why it
wasn't told in flashback, with the player taking the active role.
But surely that's an example of convention, *not* intrinsic nature.)
> Puzzles: they definitely can distract, especially if done wrong. Are
> these intrinsic?
Whenever we go around the "what's a puzzle?" discussion, I wind up
saying "A puzzle is any authorial mechanism for controlling the pace."
By that broad definition, nothing interactive is truly puzzle-free.
(Every design decision about interactivity affects pacing.) I can't
see _Photopia_ as puzzleless. The puzzles are designed to permit the
player to move smoothly through the story, with as little getting-
hung-up as possible (consistent with still feeling in control of the
protagonist).
ems...@mindspring.com
Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> Nobody has done a game which
> is all reminiscing, but if the range of choice for reminiscence is
> interestingly large and explorable, I can't see any reason why it
> wouldn't work.
Most of the examples I can think of -- "Exhibition", "The Cove", and
"Photograph" come to mind -- use the setting to trigger the
reminiscences/discoveries, rather than setting the game completely as a
daydream.
I suspect that a pure reminiscence IF would be a great deal like a
conversation game, and that some people would find it too
guess-the-noun-y. The major distinction is that in a conversation game,
the order of topics introduced can be important, and the NPC has some
state to keep track of. Unless there were some statefulness in a
reminiscence IF, it might be better rendered as hypertext.
neil.t...@gmail.com
like "puzzle" and "action," but I will respond to these:
Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> Here, neil.t...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Definitely debatable. I think it's the command line, actually, that
> > makes IF not as popular as it could be.
>
> You mean, "than other kinds of games". That's not exactly a
> controversial point. But it's also a completely different topic.
It's controversial if you suggest making IF without a command line. (Is
it still IF?) I'm working on that right now. If I continue to have the
time, I'll have a proof-of-concept game done sometime next year.
It's been suggested before, but I haven't seen a full proof-of-concept
yet. (It's possible I haven't searched hard enough.) Nothing I've
experienced so far in making the IF system and accompanying demo
suggests that it isn't possible, or wouldn't provide the reader with a
good, interactive experience.
Yes, it's a different topic. We'll have fun discussing it when I post
my results.
> > For example, choice is intrinsic. It's not interactive, otherwise.
> > Others have noted that this influences the pacing of the story,
which
> > can distract from the tension. Tension, then, has to be introduced
in
> > other ways. So it would be helpful for IF authors to remember that
they
> > simply *do not* have pacing at their disposal, except in cut
scenes.
>
> Huh? We do all *sorts* of stuff to control pacing. Weren't we just
> giving examples?
We've been giving examples of maintaining narrative tension, which is
different. I don't think pacing is in the hands of the IF author,
unless the author either 1) presents a cut scene; or 2) forces the
reader through a series of scripted actions and responses, which is
basically the same thing. Trivial proof: outside of these techniques,
the reader can always find a way to stall the action.
Neil
Andrew Plotkin
>
> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> > Nobody has done a game which
> > is all reminiscing, but if the range of choice for reminiscence is
> > interestingly large and explorable, I can't see any reason why it
> > wouldn't work.
>
> Most of the examples I can think of -- "Exhibition", "The Cove", and
> "Photograph" come to mind -- use the setting to trigger the
> reminiscences/discoveries, rather than setting the game completely as a
> daydream.
>
> I suspect that a pure reminiscence IF would be a great deal like a
> conversation game
Agreed.
> and that some people would find it too guess-the-noun-y.
Maybe, maybe not. The stuff you've done with lists of known
conversation topics seemed to work pretty well.
> The major distinction is that in a conversation game, the order of
> topics introduced can be important, and the NPC has some state to
> keep track of. Unless there were some statefulness in a reminiscence
> IF, it might be better rendered as hypertext.
I was certainly imagining statefulness. How that would work in game
terms, well, you'd have to make something up.
I think I've hit the limits of how much I can handwave without writing
a game, so I'll stop. :)
Stephen Bond
> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
>>Here, neil.t...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>>Definitely debatable. I think it's the command line, actually, that
>>>makes IF not as popular as it could be.
>>
>>You mean, "than other kinds of games". That's not exactly a
>>controversial point. But it's also a completely different topic.
>
>
> It's controversial if you suggest making IF without a command line.
Not as controversial as you might hope. It's been done before,
several times. Consult the "Point-and-click text interface" thread
from last August for examples. (That thread is only one of the
more recent times the subject has come up on r*if).
Stephen.
j...@jrwdigitalmedia.com
> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> > Neil Toronto wrote:
> > > For example, choice is intrinsic. It's not interactive,
> > > otherwise. Others have noted that this influences the pacing
> > > of the story, which can distract from the tension. Tension,
> > > then, has to be introduced in other ways. So it would be
> > > helpful for IF authors to remember that they simply *do not*
> > > have pacing at their disposal, except in cut scenes.
> >
> > Huh? We do all *sorts* of stuff to control pacing. Weren't we
> > just giving examples?
>
> We've been giving examples of maintaining narrative tension, which
> is different. I don't think pacing is in the hands of the IF author,
> unless the author either 1) presents a cut scene; or 2) forces the
> reader through a series of scripted actions and responses, which is
> basically the same thing. Trivial proof: outside of these
> techniques, the reader can always find a way to stall the action.
Yes, but the player will not always *choose* to stall the action,
especially if the author has gotten that player fully engaged.
I also really disagree with your repeated assertion about cut
scenes. I don't think that changing from interactive to static
text suddenly puts pacing control in the author's hands. It
seems to me that it puts it back entirely in the hands of the
player (now the reader), to take however long they feel like to
read the scene. Or skim it and not really read it at all,
depending on how dense it is.
On the other hand, I don't really know what you're defining as
a cutscene. There's always chunks of special text that come
up as the response to successful actions, and some are longer
than others.
I probably shouldn't take such a hard stance on this, because
I just remembered something that possibly undercuts what I just
said. There was a restaurant scene in the middle of Being Andrew
Plotkin that I implemented two ways: one as a cutscene, and one
as a normal scene with turn-by-turn interaction. It took me a
lot of dithering to decide which one to use in the final release.
I didn't like using a cutscene, but you only had to hit the
spacebar a couple of times to get through it, whereas the other
way seemed to slow things down too much. The scene itself was
just a bridge between two scenes where the player had interesting
things to do. I opted for the cutscene.
But, in this way, it was just one more tool to use to control
the pacing of that game, and it definitely was not the only
time I was in control of the pacing.
--
J. Robinson Wheeler Games - http://raddial.com/if/
JRW Digital Media Movie - http://thekroneexperiment.com
j...@jrwdigitalmedia.com Comic - http://adamcadre.ac/comics.html
Glenn P.,
> One cannot put a room inside another room...
For God's sake, what game system are you using? I've heard-tell that there
ARE systems which DO allow nested rooms.
The concept isn't even that strange, even if it might be difficult to
program. "Rooms within rooms" occur all the time in Real Life; consider
if you will the following examples:
Office -> Cubicle
Movie theatre -> Projector room
Subway station -> Token booth
Bathroom -> Shower stall
Airport -> Phone booth
Bedroom -> Closet
Every one of these are logically "nested rooms". I particularly love the subway
station example: for a subway station is nothing if not one huge subterranean
room... and a token booth is nothing if not a freestanding structure, usually
at least somewhat fortified, with its own walls, window, door, and even
ceiling, and its own heater and air conditioner, erected within the said
subway station. A subway token booth, in other words, absolutely exemplifies
the idea of a "room within a room".
Of course how the game actually IMPLEMENTS such things may be VASTLY different
from how they are DESCRIBED. Your game may SAY that the token booth is a small
room within the larger, cavernous subway station; but internally, it is MUCH
easier for the game to simply handle the token booth as a separate and
independent room. The connection between "station" and "token booth" may be
IN and OUT or ENTER and LEAVE, but this is purely for the illusion of the
PLAYER. Internally they are independent rooms. Only in the description is
the one said to be situated inside the other.
In other words, you LIE. You SAY to the player that the token booth is
"inside" the subway station, but in truth the game sees these as independent
locations. :)
I imagine that actually and faithfully implementing such a "one-room-inside-
another" relationship INTERNALLY would be a lot of trouble, even in those
systems which make such things possible, and that most gamewriters probably
wouldn't consider it to be worth the effort. Has anyone ever actually gone
to the trouble of constructing a (genuine, internal) "nested room", and if
so, for what reason?
-- _____ "Glenn P.," <C128UserD...@FVI.Net> _____
{~._.~} ------------------------------------------ {~._.~}
_( Y )_ :: OUT OF ORDER :: _( Y )_
(:_~*~_:) :: Do You Dare To Ride It Anyway? :: (:_~*~_:)
(_)-(_) ------------------------------------------ (_)-(_)
========= Sign On A Roller Coaster, In R. L. Stine's =========
========= Goosebumbps book, "One Day At HorrorLand". =========
:: Take Note Of The Spam Block On My E-Mail Address! ::
Andrew Plotkin
> I'm not going to wander into an argument over the semantics of words
> like "puzzle" and "action," but I will respond to these:
>
> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> > Here, neil.t...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > Definitely debatable. I think it's the command line, actually, that
> > > makes IF not as popular as it could be.
> >
> > You mean, "than other kinds of games". That's not exactly a
> > controversial point. But it's also a completely different topic.
>
> It's controversial if you suggest making IF without a command line. (Is
> it still IF?) I'm working on that right now. If I continue to have the
> time, I'll have a proof-of-concept game done sometime next year.
Keep in mind that I call Myst "interactive fiction". (Graphical IF,
rather than text IF.)
Yes, it's controversial if you make text IF without a command line.
Except for CYOA games and simple hypertext -- which are well-known,
but (IMHO) simpler and less interactive forms. A couple of CYOA-style
games have been entered in the IFComp, but I think it's safe to say
that neither authors nor players in this community are very excited by
that form.
I have generally held that text IF *requires* a command line, or
something of equivalent... non-transparency. (Your term.) A control
mechanism which is easier to use will inevitably be less powerful. The
resulting game can be interactive, but the interactivity will be
equivalent to a CYOA, not to a classic text-parser game.
This is entirely my theory. It's floated around for a couple of years
without much argument, proof, or disproof. I look forward to your
proof-of-concept.
(Yes, I can argue that Myst has a control scheme which lacks
transparency. It's a completely different form of non-obviousness than
Adventure, of course.)
Andrew Plotkin
> Neil Toronto wrote:
> > Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> > > Neil Toronto wrote:
> > > > For example, choice is intrinsic. It's not interactive,
> > > > otherwise. Others have noted that this influences the pacing
> > > > of the story, which can distract from the tension. Tension,
> > > > then, has to be introduced in other ways. So it would be
> > > > helpful for IF authors to remember that they simply *do not*
> > > > have pacing at their disposal, except in cut scenes.
> > >
> > > Huh? We do all *sorts* of stuff to control pacing. Weren't we
> > > just giving examples?
> >
> > We've been giving examples of maintaining narrative tension, which
> > is different. I don't think pacing is in the hands of the IF author,
> > unless the author either 1) presents a cut scene; or 2) forces the
> > reader through a series of scripted actions and responses, which is
> > basically the same thing. Trivial proof: outside of these
> > techniques, the reader can always find a way to stall the action.
>
> Yes, but the player will not always *choose* to stall the action,
> especially if the author has gotten that player fully engaged.
Agreed. (A reader of a novel can always stall his page-turning, too!
We don't consider that to be "putting pacing in the reader's hands".)
I find that if I'm in a tense interactive scene, typing "wait" -- or
walking away from the keyboard -- does not alleviate the tension, or
change my sense of the pacing of the scene.
I want to say that "pacing" (in both static and interactive fiction)
is not measured by plot events per unit time. (Neither unit time in
the story, nor in the real world.) Instead, it's plot events per unit
of the reader's attention. "Attention" isn't quite the right term, but
anyway.
We assume that a novel reader reads at a constant pace (for a given
book), and his attention level is roughly constant -- or perhaps it
goes up during the fight scenes and down during the backstory
exposition.
In IF, the player's attention level varies hugely. Cut scenes are
"fast" (relatively low attention rate) because I'm not deciding what
to do. I can zip through eight rooms in three seconds while traversing
a familiar section of the game. If I'm dropped into a complex and
dangerous puzzle, I slow way down and start paying more attention.
Being stuck on one puzzle is a different experience than engaging
several puzzles in a row and solving them quickly. (Maybe I shouldn't
be trying to put all these measures on one scale!) Anyway, all that is
part of what I think of as "pacing in IF".
neil.t...@gmail.com
Not exactly. The problem with that argument is that you can use a
variation of it to dismiss any literary device. "An integral part of
writing a novel is starting with a good hook." "Nope. The reader can
always skip past it and start on page 2."
In other words, in evaluating literary devices, we always make an
unstated assumption that the reader will keep reading, and will read
sequentially. In IF (outside of cutscenes and forced scripts), the
reader can always stall by *changing the text* and reading something
that's part of the story and sequentially "next," yet not in the
control of the author. Therefore, under the standard assumptions, the
reader can stall (which isn't possible in static fiction), and the
author hasn't got control over the pacing.
Neil
ems...@mindspring.com
> > We don't consider that to be "putting pacing in the reader's
hands".)
>
> Not exactly. The problem with that argument is that you can use a
> variation of it to dismiss any literary device. "An integral part of
> writing a novel is starting with a good hook." "Nope. The reader can
> always skip past it and start on page 2."
>
> In other words, in evaluating literary devices, we always make an
> unstated assumption that the reader will keep reading, and will read
> sequentially. In IF (outside of cutscenes and forced scripts), the
> reader can always stall by *changing the text* and reading something
> that's part of the story and sequentially "next," yet not in the
> control of the author. Therefore, under the standard assumptions, the
> reader can stall (which isn't possible in static fiction), and the
> author hasn't got control over the pacing.
IF can't control the rate at which the prose flows unless it completely
disregards the player's input. This is obvious and trivial.
What the author can control is the rate at which an efficient player
can make progress. Progress I'll define as a significant change in the
world model that opens up new possibilities of interaction in a way
that the player can perceive: opening a door, introducing a new NPC,
moving to the next scene, etc. Progress is often, though not always,
accompanied by a passage of unique prose, revealing some plot
advancement. (I've said something much like this before, I know. I
still think it.) If the author wants, he can control these events with
a timer without completely removing the player's agency in other parts
of the game: see timed puzzles, but also "Rameses".
This isn't the same thing as pacing in static fiction, but I think it's
the most useful measure of pacing in IF.
So, on this measure, "Being Andrew Plotkin" is very fast-paced (in this
IFfy sense of pacing): at each point the player has only a few tasks to
do to advance the game to the next segment and open new interactive
possibilities. But it's not fully author-controlled, in the sense that
advancement does depend on player action. "Rameses" I call
moderate-to-fast-paced, with advancement pretty much entirely
independent of what the player does in the meantime. Something like,
say, "Jigsaw", with its extremely complex puzzles, is slow through
parts of the midgame, though (appropriately) faster at the beginning
and end. "Narcolepsy", though it has very little I would think of as a
puzzle in the classical sense, does require the player to wander around
a lot in order to trigger new events and opportunities; it feels slow
even though it's not very difficult. (I also found the narrative
tension to be fairly slight, mostly because what was happening was so
surreal that I had no sense for where things were going next, or what I
should be afraid of.)
At the other end of the spectrum, one technique I've seen used only a
few times (but usually to interesting effect) is pacing so fast that
the player doesn't have time to explore all the apparently-important
interactions available in State A before being hustled along to State
B. In the beginning of "Centipede", the player is given a big inventory
of interesting stuff, and a bunch of surrounding objects to look at. At
the same time, the surrounding activity is moving along so quickly that
there isn't time to examine everything thoroughly before the situation
changes and the player has to do something else. This would be hugely
aggravating if it were possible to miss vital puzzle information that
way, but that's not the kind of game "Centipede" is. So it works, I
think, pretty well as a way to make the player feel rushed. Since
"Centipede" is a re-interpretation of a fast-paced arcade game, that's
perfect.
I also tend to feel, when presented with this kind of scene, as though
it's not just a game any more -- the objects in the surrounding world
are there whether or not I have time to do anything with them. I don't
think this would be useful all the time -- or even in most contexts --
but the effect is kind of cool sometimes.
Having a large amount of unique prose (ie, responses that do not occur
more than once in a given playthrough) does *not* make a game
fast-paced. Conversation games are almost entirely unique prose, but if
they don't present significant (and obvious) changes in what the player
can do from moment to moment, they can still feel slow. Players of
"Galatea" have complained that the range of useful action is not clear;
I've tried pointing out that most things have some effect, but in fact
that seems to be part of the problem. From the player's point of view
the important question is, "When have I done something that makes an
IMPORTANT difference in what I can do next?" Though her emotional state
and availability for certain actions is variable, the player can't make
use of that, or perceive any structure in the changes, without clearer
feedback than I provided. "Shadows on the Mirror" does more with
presenting definite breakpoints in the state of the conversation, where
new things become possible.
The definition of narrative tension emerging in this thread is a bit
different. The phrase mostly seems to be being used for something like
"the degree of motivation the player feels to proceed efficiently,
rather than dawdling". One of the reasons I cheated a lot on "Jigsaw"
was that I was sufficiently motivated by the narrative that I didn't
want to spend the time figuring out the intricacies of each puzzle
before finding out what happened next in the story. (As Jeff Nyman
might have predicted, I had more patience when, a couple of years
later, I replayed the game -- at that point I particularly enjoyed
working through the Enigma machine, which had driven me nuts the first
time.)
If you build a story in which there's pressure to move quickly, and
then present the player with oodles of very difficult tasks to perform,
you may frustrate the player and break the illusion that it's anything
but a game. This struck me most obviously when I was playing "Myst IV"
a few days ago: there're some situations there where the player
character would want (one assumes) to move quickly because important
things are happening, and there's no reason to think that these events
are going to wait for the PC to show up. At the same time, there are
massive, multipart Things To Do first. As I played through one of the
more heinous puzzles, I found myself thinking, "Okay, my guy has been
working on this puzzle for approximately three days of game time... so
all the bad things I'm supposed to prevent have probably already
happened..." ("Max Blaster" apparently pushed too hard here with the
sandwich machine, too -- a number of players muttered darkly about
being slowed down enough to solve it, in a game that otherwise tended
to move relatively fast and where there was some plot pressure to get a
move on.)
If the interaction is more uniformly challenging and the narrative
tension is low, then I suspect players are less likely to cheat (by
getting a walkthrough/hints), but also less likely to finish the game.
I've played the first segment of "1893", but never gotten back for the
rest -- it's so *big* and fiddly, and so frankly a game, that I don't
feel too worried about it. I fully intend to play the rest sometime.
I'm just not sure when that'll be.
Anyway. I have some even vaguer and more rambly thoughts about what
this all means for long story-based IF, but I'll wait until they've
become more coherent.
Andrew Plotkin
>
> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> > Here, j...@jrwdigitalmedia.com wrote:
> > > Neil Toronto wrote:
> > > > We've been giving examples of maintaining narrative tension,
> > > > which is different. I don't think pacing is in the hands of
> > > > the IF author, unless the author either 1) presents a cut
> > > > scene; or 2) forces the reader through a series of scripted
> > > > actions and responses, which is basically the same thing.
> > > > Trivial proof: outside of these techniques, the reader can
> > > > always find a way to stall the action.
> > >
> > > Yes, but the player will not always *choose* to stall the action,
> > > especially if the author has gotten that player fully engaged.
> >
> > Agreed. (A reader of a novel can always stall his page-turning, too!
> > We don't consider that to be "putting pacing in the reader's hands".)
>
> Not exactly. The problem with that argument is that you can use a
> variation of it to dismiss any literary device. "An integral part of
> writing a novel is starting with a good hook." "Nope. The reader can
> always skip past it and start on page 2."
I meant the analogy seriously. Why should we take the player's
turn-by-turn control over events to be *significant* control over
pacing, rather than insignificant? As I said in my post, it *feels*
insignificant to me, as a player.
> In other words, in evaluating literary devices, we always make an
> unstated assumption that the reader will keep reading, and will read
> sequentially. In IF (outside of cutscenes and forced scripts), the
> reader can always stall by *changing the text* and reading something
> that's part of the story and sequentially "next," yet not in the
> control of the author. Therefore, under the standard assumptions, the
> reader can stall (which isn't possible in static fiction), and the
> author hasn't got control over the pacing.
What is the *equivalent* standard assumption *for IF*? As Emily said
in her reply -- that the player is actually playing the game. (Losing
interest and quitting is a separate problem, but that's general to all
sorts of art.)
I'm basing this assumption on observation of how players play games.
Well, on how I play games (but also how I hear other players
describing their experiences).
In a book, if the author puts in ten pages of irrelevant digression[*]
then the author is stalling. If the reader picks up a magazine and
reads ten pages, then the reader is stalling, but we don't consider
that relevant to the pacing of the novel. In IF, player footling
around is much more like the magazine than the novel digression.
[* Yes, I've given up on Neal Stephenson.]
Damien Neil
<erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
> > So the ethos of the group has shifted somewhat so that many regulars
> > are skeptical of ideas introduced without a finished game to back them
> > up.
>
> Really I think this shift happened around the time of the first
> IFComp. The "show us" newsgroup mentality was around before you
> (Emily) or Stephen Bond started releasing IF. It may have gotten
> stricter since then; I don't have a good sense of the history.
I think that there's been a related shift since the formation of the
IFMud. My impression is that a lot of the interesting conversation
between regulars moved to there, leaving newcomers without much of the
context that a few months of lurking in an active newsgroup can
provide.
As a non-participent in the IFMud, I regret this.
- Damien
Andrew Plotkin
Some. Less than you'd think.
The current thread on this newsgroup is way more detailed than
anything I've heard on the Mud.
Also, I don't see that it's related at all. Throwing around ideas
isn't considered any closer to a working game on the Mud than it is
here. There's less "yeah whatever show us a game", but that's because
there are fewer newcomers showing up with their grand schemes to
reinvent IF.
You could take that as a sign that Usenet is more central to IF
development, if you like.
Matthew Russotto
Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>
>I have generally held that text IF *requires* a command line, or
>something of equivalent... non-transparency. (Your term.) A control
>mechanism which is easier to use will inevitably be less powerful. The
>resulting game can be interactive, but the interactivity will be
>equivalent to a CYOA, not to a classic text-parser game.
>
>This is entirely my theory. It's floated around for a couple of years
>without much argument, proof, or disproof. I look forward to your
>proof-of-concept.
I'd say it's false, but I can demonstrate it only if we assume
the possibility of true artifical intelligence.
Andrew Plotkin
I *do* assume the *possibility* of true AI.
But you're right -- my definition of IF is based on observation of the
current state of the art. An AI game-master would render my categories
meaningless.
This doesn't bother me. :)
Michael Roy
> Here, Matthew Russotto <russ...@grace.speakeasy.net> wrote:
>
>>In article <cqn0u2$r9p$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
>>Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>>
>>>I have generally held that text IF *requires* a command line, or
>>>something of equivalent... non-transparency. (Your term.) A control
>>>mechanism which is easier to use will inevitably be less powerful. The
>>>resulting game can be interactive, but the interactivity will be
>>>equivalent to a CYOA, not to a classic text-parser game.
>>>
>>>This is entirely my theory. It's floated around for a couple of years
>>>without much argument, proof, or disproof. I look forward to your
>>>proof-of-concept.
>>
>>I'd say it's false, but I can demonstrate it only if we assume
>>the possibility of true artifical intelligence.
>
>
> I *do* assume the *possibility* of true AI.
>
> But you're right -- my definition of IF is based on observation of the
> current state of the art. An AI game-master would render my categories
> meaningless.
>
> This doesn't bother me. :)
How would an AI game-master work without a command-line like interface?
It might be able to understand the player better, but it still has to
get it's input somehow.
Michael
PJ
> I think it's the command line, actually, that
> makes IF not as popular as it could be.
Certainly there is a lack of transparency in the command line that
intimidates new players, but even in a point and click world, there are
usually subtle differences in how the point and click works, or in a
joystick world, how the joystick/associated buttons work. So even in
graphics-based games, you are usually learning a new interface in the
sense of how it is applied to the particular game you are playing.
While I'm not in love with the command line, I think the broader
audience IF might seek will never include those who *only* play games
that are point and click. If that's you're mentality, you're also not
likely to want to *read* the action in IF, and I don't think we can get
rid of the reading without changing IF into graphical adventures.
> An IF game has a much higher barrier to entry than a regular video
> game, let alone a novel.
I agree that is it higher, but how much higher is a question. Again,
unless all IF turns into graphical IF, the barrier is probably
reading/writing/typing, and while you could eliminate writing/typing by
point and click, you still will have the reading barrier. I think it
is maybe too much to hope that you can tailor IF to appeal to folks who
truly aren't in love with reading.
> It might be helpful to explicitly identify which distractions to
> narrative tension are intrinsic to IF, and which are a result of IF
> culture.
>
> For example, choice is intrinsic. It's not interactive, otherwise.
> Others have noted that this influences the pacing of the story, which
> can distract from the tension. Tension, then, has to be introduced in
> other ways. So it would be helpful for IF authors to remember that
they
> simply *do not* have pacing at their disposal, except in cut scenes.
I think what this thread is coming to is a definition of narrative
tension -- which is where I started the discussion -- as separate from
pacing. Narrative tension, I think, is the sum total of how effective
are the devices -- plot devices, puzzles, pacing, NPC interaction,
choice of many sorts, even the room structure -- that either help or
hinder the overall dramatic structure of the game and how it moves
forward. It is the "art" part of the game, a measure of how effective
the author is at weaving these things together to convey the sense of
the game and its world to the user, and of how well the author succeeds
at getting the players to keep "turning the page," in a novelistic
sense.
Pacing, on the other hand, is a device within a particular scene as
well as the transition between scenes. Where IF has trouble, as you
point out, is the pacing within a scene. The players can dawdle,
stall, examine things that are meaningless over and over, lose the
thread by ignoring or simply missing what the author thinks are major
clues, etc. Within a scene, pacing is simply difficult to maintain,
which is why the cutscene is so handy in moving the player along.
My original question on eliminating rooms, I think, relates to the fact
that, in most IF games, "the scene" is generally the entire world
model, or most of the world model, of the game. The mechanism for
controlling pacing is usually a puzzle that "opens up" new parts of the
world (sometimes as simple as a key for a locked door), but once opened
up, generally the rest of the scene remains open. And often it is
necessary: authors include puzzles that require you to race around
scenery that you may have traversed numerous times in order to open up
the next bit of the world and thus move closer to the end-game.
Which, I think, also reinforces my original point in some ways.
Authors can't control pacing inside a huge map architecture, which
diminishes their ability to sustain narrative tension, but they also
don't have to include a huge map architecture or even "rooms" in a
traditional sense to maintain choice. When authors not only allow, but
often demand, significant player movement back and forth between rooms
within a scene, they are contributing to the problem of controlling
pacing in their games. By including a complex room architecture and
the ability to wander through it repeatedly without the basic scene
changing or the plot advancing, the author is essentially saying,
"pacing does not matter to this story." Which I disagree with, as
pacing is one of the key devices in sustaining player interest.
So my theory (revised a bit) is that while there is nothing
intrinsically bad about rooms, the central nature of the "world map"
may be distracting authors from the even more critical nature of the
plot, narrative tension, and pacing. Instead of "room oriented"
planning of the IF world model, we may need to focus more on "scene
oriented" planning, with pacing both within and between the scenes one
of the most critical elements of game/story design.
> Action-oriented: intrinsic. You can write a whole novel about
> somebody's reminisces about what somebody else did, but it doesn't
work
> so well with IF. In IF, you *do* things. There have been occasional
> breaks from this - Galatea comes to mind - but even those require the
> player to take a turn in order to move the story along.
I'm not sure there's much of a distinction between "action-oriented"
and "choice" in the way you're using them. Choice is certainly
intrinsic as it is the basis of what makes the games "interactive."
But many actions that people include in games comprise "the burden of
doing meaningless things," to quote another poster. Even the best
authors fall into this trap. In I-0, for example, Adam Cadre makes you
"unbuckle seat belt" in order to exit the car in the opening scene.
There's no real game-related reason for that action (other than to
suggest you buckle up later in the loser's car). But IF tradition says
"make the player do everything a real human being would." Yet in the
same game, if you "open hood" of the car, the description has you open
the hood, look in, and immediately close it. You can't leave it open,
although that's the classic way of signaling a car in distress. The
author obviously includes the traditional way and the untraditional way
of carrying out actions for entirely different reasons, but it is not
intrinsic that the most mundane actions must be performed in each case
as if the player were precisely mimicking the real world.
The problem with too strict a mimesis is it's boring and interferes
with story progress. The author is always telling the player how dumb
he is. Shade, which is often raised above as a primary deconstruction
of room architecture, suffers a little from this odd affection for too
strict a mimetic effect. You begin the game lying on a futon. You can
see a to-do list and a travel guide on the desk. You type "Take list."
"First, you'll have to get off the futon." Unless there was some event
trigger that you want the player to choose to do, that action should be
automated (as much of it is as Shade progresses). Narcolepsy starts
pretty much the same way "First you'll have to stand up." There is no
reason for most of this in most games, and even the best occasionally
get tripped up including these "meaningless burdens" for the player.
> Puzzles: they definitely can distract, especially if done wrong. Are
> these intrinsic? Not especially - Adam Cadre is famous for writing
very
> engaging games that don't have any. They tend to show up a lot,
though.
> I'll put this down to culture.
I agree. While all end-to-end plots could be said to represent a
"puzzle" of sorts, the culture of IF heavily uses a different type of
puzzle: how do I open the door/portal, in infinite varieties, in order
to make a scene transition? There is really no reason why other types
of choices, other events, time passage, turns taken, etc., shouldn't be
used more often to control scene changes, but, there it is, IF folks
like puzzles and even some of the least puzzle-like games use
puzzle-like mechanisms for moving the story from scene to scene. Here
I am thinking again of Shade, where to get the plot to progress
initially, you have to find the (nonexistent) plane tickets, and to get
it to progress again, you have to make everything in the apartment turn
into sand. While this doesn't distract from the story, other events --
a phone call, the helicopter sound, etc. and the player response to
them might have cued the scene change as well. But IF gamers like
puzzles, even when they aren't strictly necessary to the plot.
> Myriad of rooms joined by compass directions: culture, and partially
> intrinsic. The compass directions are nearly necessary, because they
> become a set of commands that you are sure are always at your
disposal
> to get places. That's the *only* reason we rely on them (and it's a
> good reason). Another type of interface - a clicky one, like
hypertext
> - could allow a very different way of putting these IF "action
> containers" together. Spreading the action out into a bunch of
> different containers, though: culture, definitely.
Here I would disagree. There is nothing impossible about executing an
interface where the compass directions are not necessary. In terms of
"mimesis" -- a concept I struggle with sometimes, I admit -- relying on
the compass directions is probably the most unlifelike action in most
IF games. Other than driving on a freeway, how many of us really "go
north" or "east" and so forth in our daily lives? We "walk toward
town," "drive up the road," "enter store," "leave work," "go to lunch,"
etc. Many games incorporate these types of commands, some brilliantly
(Narcolepsy, most obviously), but I think we fall back on the compass
points because they're easy and authors generally have us racing around
multiple rooms solving puzzles, a la Advent & Zork. Change the culture
of rooms & puzzles, and you also eliminate a lot of the reason that
compass directions are so necessary.
> One more paltry idea: how about we identify the elements unique to IF
> that can be used to create narrative tension? The OP suggested this,
> and I've seen little so far. I'll start.
>
> Limited time: often used to great effect. There is only a weak analog
> to this in static fiction. A static fiction author can do a great
deal
> to suggest urgency, but can never actually *enforce* it.
I agree. Even going back to Zork, the fact that the brass lantern
would burn out put a time urgency into the game, as sprawling as it
was. Time constraints and turn constraints are probably the most
underutilized assets that IF has over static fiction. What I would
like to see -- maybe it's a comp idea -- is a game that completes in
EXACTLY 100 turns. Even if all the player does is type wait 100 times,
something should happen, a story should be told, and a conclusion
reached (other than that the player is a bit of a goof). To do that,
of course, requires the author to be in tight control of the pacing
(probably through very tight scenes & cut scenes), the events, the
plot, and the overall story, else you could scarcely come up with the
variety of potential endings that would be required otherwise.
> Consequences: good fiction requires them, but it can't have a *set of
> mutually-exclusive* consequences. This is one of IF's greatest
> strengths. It's been talked about already. One conclusion was that
the
> player has to recognize that a serious consequence will follow from
> some action, or it's not a useful device. Additionally, to be good
> fiction, the player (as a reader) should realize this based on
> inferences from the story, not on explicit text.
Yes. Show, don't tell. And also, because you can, some unintended
actions should have consequences as well. That's life, after all.
Make choice matter, even if the choice is the choice to stall, dawdle,
etc. Multiple endings, multiple paths to reach the endings, mulitple
meanings for endings, these are all the true power of IF.
> (Ironically, our reliance on conveniences like "undo" and "save"
> mitigate the effects of one of IF's greatest strengths. How much
> tension can you gain from consequences when you're not forced to live
> with them? On the other hand, how fun is it to be forced to play the
> same sequence over and over again in order to finally progress?
Static
> fiction's singular consequences have an advantage here. I haven't got
a
> solution.)
Yes. Undo is an awful command, although it became necessary because so
many stories insisted on killing you for any mistake. I think a
save/restore is a kinder, gentler version because you have to think
about when to save and why to restore, as well as when. On the other
hand, eliminating the "sudden death" prevalent in so many games over
the years would also ensure that "undo" is not used so promiscuously.
Why undo unless you know you have died and/or put the game into an
unwinnable state?
> Real puzzles: which is probably why they show up so much. In a novel,
> the reader can just wait for the protagonist to figure it out. In IF,
> the reader is pushed in right in front of it, and forced to deal.
What
> I would like to see less of, though, is one-room puzzles that feel
like
> puzzles. In my favorite games (especially Spider and Web), the puzzle
> naturally arises from the environment's first principles. This,
> combined with limited time, can be very engaging and tense - and also
> extremely frustrating.
Again, I agree. We may be thinking differently about what real puzzles
are, but there are certainly a world of artificial ones out there that
are only appropriate to one general type of adventure game. Focusing
on the "natural" conundrums that the world model of the game present
would be a much better use of the concept of puzzles.
> Being Right There: real puzzles is a limited special case of this.
> Photopia brought tears to my eyes in half an hour. (People who know
me
> would know that that's hard to do.) A novel would have required many
> hours to achieve the same thing. Walking in people's shoes creates a
> strong emotional investment very quickly.
Yes! And, I think to reinforce this, authors need to quit relying so
much on the 2nd person and start thinking how games can be written in
the first person or third person. 1st person requires a greater mental
dialogue to lay out the motivations -- show, don't tell -- your
character is feeling, so it is definitely harder. 3rd person
objectifies the PC as well as the NPC, but allows external events and
their description to be richer and the motivations of all the
characters to be plumbed. IF has been stuck in a 2nd person voice that
makes the machine obvious to you -- "you feel frightened." I do? How
do you know? And what is that little voice that keeps telling me all
these things?
> I think there's a big untapped market for IF in which that is done
> particularly well. Adam would probably hang me for heresy for
> suggesting it, but I think Photopia reworked with a clicky interface
> would spread like wildfire in the Palm-Pilot-verse. In general, I'd
> just like to see more.
I'm not necessarily with you on the point and click thing. It would be
handy for something like the Palm, but I think most IF players don't
want to have to scroll through a list of available commands. On the
other hand, constraining the choice to 2 or 3 options limits the
player's ability to test the other 15-20 choices that are usually
present in any situation.
Overall, however, this is a great post and a definite advancement of
the original thread. Classifying the devices that inhibit or
build/sustain narrative tension in IF is a highly useful idea. I will
have to give some more thought to other ideas I've been kicking around
in that regard and post them to this thread later.
PJ
Stephen Bond
By including a complex room architecture and
> the ability to wander through it repeatedly without the basic scene
> changing or the plot advancing, the author is essentially saying,
> "pacing does not matter to this story."
Not really. _Babel_ was well-paced, though you could wander
around its map indefinitely. Ditto _Anchorhead_. Just because
the player is complicit in the pacing doesn't mean the author
has to surrender control.
Which I disagree with, as
> pacing is one of the key devices in sustaining player interest.
But it's not the only device. What if the purpose of a game is not
to have a fast-paced story? In _Narcolepsy_ the emphasis is not the
story, but on having fun just hanging out in the game world,
with some wacky, unimportant, almost incidental story going on in the
background. (In this respect it's rather like _The Big Lebowski_, one of
the game's inspirations. The game and the movie are both favourites of
mine.)
But IF tradition says
> "make the player do everything a real human being would."
It does? Urination is not compulsory in most games. Hunger puzzles
may be found in some traditional games, but they are now frowned upon.
> The problem with too strict a mimesis is it's boring and interferes
> with story progress. The author is always telling the player how dumb
> he is. Shade, which is often raised above as a primary deconstruction
> of room architecture, suffers a little from this odd affection for too
> strict a mimetic effect. You begin the game lying on a futon. You can
> see a to-do list and a travel guide on the desk. You type "Take list."
> "First, you'll have to get off the futon."
This is not what people generally mean by mimesis. (In fact, some
people would argue that the "you'll have to get off the futon"
message breaks mimesis.) But why assume the message is for "mimetic
effect"? Perhaps it's there to emphasise that the PC begins the game
lying down -- which is easy to miss in the room title.
It might encourage to player to think about why the PC is lying
there, though not necessarily on the first playthrough.
Even if you don't buy that argument, there remains the fact that
"you'll have to get off it first" is the default way supporters are
implemented in the Inform library. It takes extra effort to implement
them otherwise, and for most games it's not such a big deal. My
overwhelming memory of _Shade_ is not "Damn, I had to get off the
futon to do anything!".
>
> IF folks
> like puzzles and even some of the least puzzle-like games use
> puzzle-like mechanisms for moving the story from scene to scene. Here
> I am thinking again of Shade, where to get the plot to progress
> initially, you have to find the (nonexistent) plane tickets, and to get
> it to progress again, you have to make everything in the apartment turn
> into sand. While this doesn't distract from the story, other events --
> a phone call, the helicopter sound, etc. and the player response to
> them might have cued the scene change as well. But IF gamers like
> puzzles, even when they aren't strictly necessary to the plot.
But puzzles aren't always mere plot triggers, and can have some
artistic or symbolic or gameplay significance in themselves. Why do
you assume there's no reason to find the plane tickets? (You
raised the same point about _The Cabal_ a few days ago: I gave you
three reasons for the slab puzzle, and Zarf gave you a fourth. But
by all means ignore them and continue on your hobby horse.)
(I never thought I'd be arguing in favour of puzzles in games.)
> Time constraints and turn constraints are probably the most
> underutilized assets that IF has over static fiction. What I would
> like to see -- maybe it's a comp idea -- is a game that completes in
> EXACTLY 100 turns. Even if all the player does is type wait 100 times,
> something should happen, a story should be told, and a conclusion
> reached (other than that the player is a bit of a goof).
I can't remember if _Rameses_ completes in exactly 100 turns of typing
>Z, but it's certainly several dozen. (Similarly, look at _All Things
Devours_ and _Varicella_.) What's so significant about the number 100?
We may be thinking differently about what real puzzles
> are, but there are certainly a world of artificial ones out there that
> are only appropriate to one general type of adventure game. Focusing
> on the "natural" conundrums that the world model of the game present
> would be a much better use of the concept of puzzles.
*This* is what people mean by mimesis. (See the section "Puzzles out of
Context", from Roger Giner-Sorolla's "Crimes against Mimesis", 1996.)
... authors need to quit relying so
> much on the 2nd person and start thinking how games can be written in
> the first person or third person. 1st person requires a greater mental
> dialogue to lay out the motivations -- show, don't tell -- your
> character is feeling, so it is definitely harder.
I think it's easier to write in the first person -- once the PC is
clearly separate from the player, you can always describe how the PC is
feeling without having to worry if the player feels the same way.
Doing this in the second person requires more subtlety.
3rd person
> objectifies the PC as well as the NPC, but allows external events and
> their description to be richer and the motivations of all the
> characters to be plumbed. IF has been stuck in a 2nd person voice
I've never felt that IF is stuck in the second person. Neither
have many other authors.
that
> makes the machine obvious to you -- "you feel frightened." I do? How
> do you know?
This is bad second-person prose, rather than typical second-person
prose. Show, don't tell, remember?
And what is that little voice that keeps telling me all
> these things?
Sometimes, it's explained in the game (e.g. Bellclap, LASH). More often,
it doesn't matter. The same goes for 3rd person prose.
Stephen.
Andrew Plotkin
> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> >
> > But you're right -- my definition of IF is based on observation of the
> > current state of the art. An AI game-master would render my categories
> > meaningless.
> >
> > This doesn't bother me. :)
>
> How would an AI game-master work without a command-line like interface?
>
> It might be able to understand the player better, but it still has to
> get it's input somehow.
It can understand English. Whether the player wants to type English or
speak it is an implementation detail (and probably the player's
decision). People demonstratably have no aversion to typing in English
-- the popularity of instant messaging and IRC (and email) prove that.
(No jokes about whether IM-ese is really English. :) It's
communication evolved between people.)
PJ
> PJ wrote:
> By including a complex room architecture and
> > the ability to wander through it repeatedly without the basic scene
> > changing or the plot advancing, the author is essentially saying,
> > "pacing does not matter to this story."
>
> Not really. _Babel_ was well-paced, though you could wander
> around its map indefinitely. Ditto _Anchorhead_. Just because
> the player is complicit in the pacing doesn't mean the author
> has to surrender control.
I should clarify that to say: "pacing is not one of the major concerns
in progressing this story."
> Which I disagree with, as
> > pacing is one of the key devices in sustaining player interest.
>
> But it's not the only device. What if the purpose of a game is not
> to have a fast-paced story? In _Narcolepsy_ the emphasis is not the
> story, but on having fun just hanging out in the game world,
> with some wacky, unimportant, almost incidental story going on in the
> background. (In this respect it's rather like _The Big Lebowski_, one
of
> the game's inspirations. The game and the movie are both favourites
of
> mine.)
Different types of stories have a different pace, yes. I am more
concerned in this post with games that seem to want to have a "lean
forward" type of story momentum but undercut it with excess rooms and
ability to wander around. But you can certainly have different paces
in different games, and different paces in different scenes in the same
game. The question is, is the author controlling that pacing as best
he can, or having it happen (perhaps negatively in consequence) because
the game design is not on a firm enough set of rails to let him/her
achieve the pacing required for success? That's all I'm suggesting
here.
> But IF tradition says
> > "make the player do everything a real human being would."
>
> It does? Urination is not compulsory in most games. Hunger puzzles
> may be found in some traditional games, but they are now frowned
upon.
I think you're straining a bit on this one. Most games (or novels)
elide over things that are truly unimportant, like going to the
bathroom in a short game. But there are a particular class of actions
that are mundane in IF but are often implemented as being required to
do. I agree with your comment below -- most of them have to do with
the way containers and certain actions are implemented in the major
authoring systems. But the programming load required to eliminate them
is not really an excuse for an author to let the game constantly tell
the player useless stuff. If there is an authorial reason for it to be
there, then so be it. Otherwise, it is just one more thing getting in
the way of story delivery.
Well, you, Emily, and Andrew have all implied I should use specific
game examples to discuss my points, so I am using them. My
overwhelming memory of Shade is not getting off the futon either, but
if I were asked what my first gripe about the game is, that would be
it. I agree that it "breaks mimesis" in the sense that I think it
should mean and which you apparently also beleive in. Absolutely. But
in many games, if not most, this is a routine occurrence in the game.
I am simply asserting that it's the author's responsibility to get rid
of those occurrences unless he/she truly wants that to happen to the
player.
> >
> > IF folks
> > like puzzles and even some of the least puzzle-like games use
> > puzzle-like mechanisms for moving the story from scene to scene.
Here
> > I am thinking again of Shade, where to get the plot to progress
> > initially, you have to find the (nonexistent) plane tickets, and to
get
> > it to progress again, you have to make everything in the apartment
turn
> > into sand. While this doesn't distract from the story, other
events --
> > a phone call, the helicopter sound, etc. and the player response to
> > them might have cued the scene change as well. But IF gamers like
> > puzzles, even when they aren't strictly necessary to the plot.
>
> But puzzles aren't always mere plot triggers, and can have some
> artistic or symbolic or gameplay significance in themselves. Why do
> you assume there's no reason to find the plane tickets? (You
> raised the same point about _The Cabal_ a few days ago: I gave you
> three reasons for the slab puzzle, and Zarf gave you a fourth. But
> by all means ignore them and continue on your hobby horse.)
> (I never thought I'd be arguing in favour of puzzles in games.)
I assume that there is a reason to find the plane tickets -- it's a
plot trigger, for one. There may be other symbolic readings more
obvious to others than to me. I am saying, however, that this trigger
didn't necessarily have to resemble a puzzle (hunt the tickets), but
could have been driven by something else. Actually, not finding the
tickets might have been better, or maybe just finding the return ticket
(just as there is no phone in the apartment to call for help). There
is nothing wrong with that approach: the choice is always the
author's. But I am saying that too much of IF is based on solving
puzzles as plot or cutscene triggers. Your games don't really require
that, except for the minor examples in Cabal. Applause. And many
other stories could get along without the puzzle-style component.
> > Time constraints and turn constraints are probably the most
> > underutilized assets that IF has over static fiction. What I would
> > like to see -- maybe it's a comp idea -- is a game that completes
in
> > EXACTLY 100 turns. Even if all the player does is type wait 100
times,
> > something should happen, a story should be told, and a conclusion
> > reached (other than that the player is a bit of a goof).
>
> I can't remember if _Rameses_ completes in exactly 100 turns of
typing
> >Z, but it's certainly several dozen. (Similarly, look at _All
Things
> Devours_ and _Varicella_.) What's so significant about the number
100?
There is no significance to 100. The significance is in the level of
authorial control necessary to have an endgame reached at precisely X
turns, no matter how efficiently or inefficiently the player plays the
game. And, note, I don't mean a mushroom cloud forms at turn X, no
matter what, but that events occur, paths are opened, plot lines are
followed, so that by X turns, you have completed "an ending" -- not the
only ending -- for the game. It would imply that the author has all
his tools of pacing and narrative development/tension perfectly under
control, no matter how much freedom of choice there might appear to be
available to the player in the game.
> We may be thinking differently about what real puzzles
> > are, but there are certainly a world of artificial ones out there
that
> > are only appropriate to one general type of adventure game.
Focusing
> > on the "natural" conundrums that the world model of the game
present
> > would be a much better use of the concept of puzzles.
>
> *This* is what people mean by mimesis. (See the section "Puzzles out
of
> Context", from Roger Giner-Sorolla's "Crimes against Mimesis", 1996.)
I agree. Many of the game systems, unfortunately, implement mimesis
with a very small "m." That's unfortunate.
> ... authors need to quit relying so
> > much on the 2nd person and start thinking how games can be written
in
> > the first person or third person. 1st person requires a greater
mental
> > dialogue to lay out the motivations -- show, don't tell -- your
> > character is feeling, so it is definitely harder.
>
> I think it's easier to write in the first person -- once the PC is
> clearly separate from the player, you can always describe how the PC
is
> feeling without having to worry if the player feels the same way.
> Doing this in the second person requires more subtlety.
I guess we are at this point talking about two different types of first
person writing vs. second person writing. One is where you merely have
the player read a lot of text that starts with the pronoun "I."
Certainly no harder and perhaps easier than the 2nd person "you." I am
talking, however, about having the player read text where essentially
there are NO pronouns. I.e., stream of consciousness style text, where
the writing itself evokes the feeling or description in you, the
player, not the PC. You are the PC, in a stream of consciousness
approach, in a way that you aren't in any other voice. That's the only
1st person that really solves the distancing of the player from the PC.
I think stream of consciousness type text is much more difficult to
compose, but in its best form, would lead necessarily to a closer
association with the PC. Instead of hearing about what "you" are
thinking are what "you" are currently doing, the author would have to
describe it as a conscious thought that lets you know, for example,
that you are lying down on something soft. I'm not going to attempt it
at the moment, because I've found my made up examples tend to draw an
unnecessary focus from other posters on this thread. But imagine
rewriting Shade in a stream of consciousness style that is
understandable and I think you'll find that it's not "easier" than 2nd
person.
> 3rd person
> > objectifies the PC as well as the NPC, but allows external events
and
> > their description to be richer and the motivations of all the
> > characters to be plumbed. IF has been stuck in a 2nd person voice
>
> I've never felt that IF is stuck in the second person. Neither
> have many other authors.
>
> that
> > makes the machine obvious to you -- "you feel frightened." I do?
How
> > do you know?
>
> This is bad second-person prose, rather than typical second-person
> prose. Show, don't tell, remember?
>
> And what is that little voice that keeps telling me all
> > these things?
>
> Sometimes, it's explained in the game (e.g. Bellclap, LASH). More
often,
> it doesn't matter. The same goes for 3rd person prose.
Yes, but in 3rd person you are making no pretense of looking at the
game other than through the author's view, the objective view.
Virtually no one writes book-based fiction in the 2nd person, but IF is
in it because it seems to suit the medium's approach. That's also how
Zork and Advent presented themselves. There's no reason to assert that
2nd person is useless, but I think richly detailed and imaginged games,
and more well-written games, could come from the other two styles more
consistently. At a minimum, it would broaden the medium's base and
give more room for experimenting with the concepts and confines of the
IF medium.
I appreciate your posting these detailed responses because it helps me
sharpen up my arguments. But you seem to take the position that many
of the problems/opportunities for improvement I suggest have either
been done, have been solved, or have been tested and discarded. I
don't really think that's true. The best writers have played with many
of the concepts in many ways and advanced the art tremendously. But
even they don't deliver on these principles all the time. Text like
"You feel frightened" IS bad writing, but you see similar stuff all the
time, even in very good games. I'm not taking anyone in specific to
task here, but there is nothing wrong with trying to improve IF. So I
will continue to make comments such as these, and I assume that you and
others will continue to harp on me to "prove" some of these things
through a game. Maybe I will get there someday. But, in the meantime,
I will continue to enjoy the exchange here on r.a.i.f.
PJ
ems...@mindspring.com
> Pacing, on the other hand, is a device within a particular scene as
> well as the transition between scenes. Where IF has trouble, as you
> point out, is the pacing within a scene. The players can dawdle,
> stall, examine things that are meaningless over and over, lose the
> thread by ignoring or simply missing what the author thinks are major
> clues, etc.
I've said this elsewhere, but I'm not sure it's useful to call "bad
pacing" whatever the player might experience if he's ignoring the
authorial hints and prodding. Obviously, there's a fine line here.
> My original question on eliminating rooms, I think, relates to the
fact
> that, in most IF games, "the scene" is generally the entire world
> model, or most of the world model, of the game. The mechanism for
> controlling pacing is usually a puzzle that "opens up" new parts of
the
> world (sometimes as simple as a key for a locked door), but once
opened
> up, generally the rest of the scene remains open.
Many -- perhaps most -- linear, narrative-focused games *do* put the
map at the service of the plot rather than vice-versa. Photopia,
Rameses, Being Andrew Plotkin, Centipede, I-0, Kissing Bandit, Cabal
all involve places you can't get back to; to the best of my
recollection so do Masquerade, and No Time to Squeal, and a number of
other pieces.
There are also a number of puzzle games that close parts of the map
behind you (Curses comes to mind, as does Plundered Hearts, to reach
further back). It's not always done, but I think many authors are in
fact aware of various ways to use the map (and other features of the
game) to control pacing.
The thing is that authors are not *all* trying to accomplish exactly
what you describe. You started the thread by saying that everyone's
primary goal is narrative tension ("Telling a gripping story - a tense
narrative -- is what we are all trying to do"), but this is false.
Dan Shiovitz
PJ <pete_...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>neil.t...@gmail.com wrote:
[..]
>pacing in their games. By including a complex room architecture and
>the ability to wander through it repeatedly without the basic scene
>changing or the plot advancing, the author is essentially saying,
>"pacing does not matter to this story." Which I disagree with, as
>pacing is one of the key devices in sustaining player interest.
Certainly movement on the story map is one of the major things players
are concerned with. But movement on the world map -- which is to say,
low-level interactions with objects -- is the other major thing.
[..]
>I agree. While all end-to-end plots could be said to represent a
>"puzzle" of sorts, the culture of IF heavily uses a different type of
>puzzle: how do I open the door/portal, in infinite varieties, in order
>to make a scene transition? There is really no reason why other types
>of choices, other events, time passage, turns taken, etc., shouldn't be
>used more often to control scene changes, but, there it is, IF folks
>like puzzles and even some of the least puzzle-like games use
>puzzle-like mechanisms for moving the story from scene to scene. Here
[..]
>into sand. While this doesn't distract from the story, other events --
>a phone call, the helicopter sound, etc. and the player response to
>them might have cued the scene change as well. But IF gamers like
>puzzles, even when they aren't strictly necessary to the plot.
I think regardless of what sort of interactive thing you're creating --
a board game, an IF game, a CRPG, an MMORPG -- there has to be some
sort of low-level activity which is what the player does most of the
time. In Monopoly, the main things players do are roll dice and move
around the board, collect money and buy properties. In a CRPG or
MMORPG the main things are usually fighting monsters and going on
quests. In an IF game, the main thing is solving puzzles. There are
still higher level actions of negotation, plot advancement, and story
building that go on, but they're built out of these lower-level
actions.
You don't have to go with the standard thing. You could write an IF
game where the low-level action was combat; it'd be called Half-Life
2 or Thief. You could write an MMORPG where the low-level action was
puzzles; it'd be Puzzle Pirates. But there has to be *something*. I'm
not sure exactly what you're suggested with respect to Shade there --
it seems like you are still talking about puzzles, if the player has
to do "HIDE UNDER COUCH" or "GO CRAZY" upon hearing the helicopter
noise to advance the story or something.
>I agree. Even going back to Zork, the fact that the brass lantern
>would burn out put a time urgency into the game, as sprawling as it
>was. Time constraints and turn constraints are probably the most
>underutilized assets that IF has over static fiction. What I would
>like to see -- maybe it's a comp idea -- is a game that completes in
>EXACTLY 100 turns. Even if all the player does is type wait 100 times,
People *have* done lots of games with time limits, you know. Varicella
and All Things Devours are recent examples, but there is a long and
horrid tradition of the PC needing to eat every so often or light
sources getting low. They generally add little to the game unless,
like in the two examples I cited, they're a major puzzle in
themselves.
But, yes, you could write a game where the low-level activity the
player does is waiting. The thing is this would not be a very
interesting game (and no, Rameses isn't an example of this kind of
game).
If you have a suggestion for other activities the player can engage in
I'd like to hear them. I suspect, though, that what you're thinking of
is what other people would still label puzzles -- you're just talking
about specific *sorts* of puzzles you don't like (unrealistic ones, or
ones based on fiddly object manipulation, or ones that are out of
place in the setting).
>PJ
--
Dan Shiovitz :: d...@cs.wisc.edu :: http://www.drizzle.com/~dans
"He settled down to dictate a letter to the Consolidated Nailfile and
Eyebrow Tweezer Corporation of Scranton, Pa., which would make them
realize that life is stern and earnest and Nailfile and Eyebrow Tweezer
Corporations are not put in this world for pleasure alone." -PGW
Andrew Plotkin
>
> The problem with too strict a mimesis is it's boring and interferes
> with story progress. The author is always telling the player how dumb
> he is. Shade, which is often raised above as a primary deconstruction
> of room architecture, suffers a little from this odd affection for too
> strict a mimetic effect. You begin the game lying on a futon. You can
> see a to-do list and a travel guide on the desk. You type "Take list."
> "First, you'll have to get off the futon." Unless there was some event
> trigger that you want the player to choose to do, that action should be
> automated (as much of it is as Shade progresses).
Yes, there was an event which I wanted the player to choose to do. It
was to get off the futon.
I set up a game mechanism which allowed automatic zone movement, as
you observe. Then I deliberately disabled it for the futon on the
first move. It is part of the game that you begin in a lethargic,
unmotivated state, in which standing up takes conscious effort. That's
not "interfering with story progress" -- it *is* the story!
It's also an example of setting the pace of the game (initially: slow)
by fine control of the mechanism of interaction. Later, I speed up the
pace substantially -- both by prose, and by allowing the player to
make progress (in game terms) with every single action, for several
turns in a row.
Quintin Stone
> I guess we are at this point talking about two different types of first
> person writing vs. second person writing. One is where you merely have
> the player read a lot of text that starts with the pronoun "I."
> Certainly no harder and perhaps easier than the 2nd person "you." I am
> talking, however, about having the player read text where essentially
> there are NO pronouns. I.e., stream of consciousness style text, where
> the writing itself evokes the feeling or description in you, the player,
> not the PC. You are the PC, in a stream of consciousness approach, in a
> way that you aren't in any other voice. That's the only 1st person that
> really solves the distancing of the player from the PC.
I'm not sure anyone else here would consider that to be "1st person"
writing. However, you may want to play Slouching Towards Bedlam (if you
haven't already) and note that, except for dialog and a few slight
instances involving James, it lacks any pronouns for referring to the PC.
==--- --=--=-- ---==
Quintin Stone "You speak of necessary evil? One of those necessities
st...@rps.net is that if innocents must suffer, the guilty must suffer
www.rps.net more." - Mackenzie Calhoun, "Once Burned" by Peter David
Andrew Plotkin
> I am saying, however, that this trigger didn't necessarily have to
> resemble a puzzle (hunt the tickets), but could have been driven by
> something else. Actually, not finding the tickets might have been
> better, or maybe just finding the return ticket (just as there is no
> phone in the apartment to call for help). There is nothing wrong
> with that approach: the choice is always the author's. But I am
> saying that too much of IF is based on solving puzzles as plot or
> cutscene triggers.
This seems like a particularly bad example for your argument.
"Hunt the tickets" is not a puzzle; it's a motivation for the player
(and for the story). It is in the form of a puzzle, but...
First, from an IF point of view, it is the simplest form of puzzle:
you have to examine stuff. This is what players will be doing anyway.
Second, from a logical point of view, it *isn't* a puzzle. The game
cheats; the plot trigger is in the last place you look. There is no
logical path that can lead to you the correct hiding place.
Looking back, my intention was more to elicit the assumption of a
classic IF-style puzzle, and then undercut it, for dramatic effect.
And also to get the player to explore and orient himself, of course.
> And, note, I don't mean a mushroom cloud forms at turn X, no
> matter what, but that events occur, paths are opened, plot lines are
> followed, so that by X turns, you have completed "an ending" -- not the
> only ending -- for the game. It would imply that the author has all
> his tools of pacing and narrative development/tension perfectly under
> control, no matter how much freedom of choice there might appear to be
> available to the player in the game.
Then you're assuming your conclusion, then, aren't you?
> I appreciate your posting these detailed responses because it helps me
> sharpen up my arguments. But you seem to take the position that many
> of the problems/opportunities for improvement I suggest have either
> been done, have been solved, or have been tested and discarded. I
> don't really think that's true.
Look, they *have* been tested. In the past couple of posts, you have
said...
> There is nothing impossible about executing an interface where the
> compass directions are not necessary.
> There's no reason to assert that 2nd person is useless, but I think
> richly detailed and imaginged games, and more well-written games,
> could come from the other two styles more consistently.
Well, we've had games without compass directions, and games which were
not in second person. We've had games where the plot progressed
without player action. We've also had (a lot more) people *discussing*
those things -- often with the exact same tone of "Hey! You never
thought of this, but it would make your games a lot better!"
I'm not trying to shut you up, but that's exactly where the newsgroup
response of "Ok, how about you write a game and show us?" comes from.
There is a lot of theoretical discussion from the past ten years that
you seem to have just missed.
These are not new ideas. They certainly have not been fully explored,
but posting about how great and new they are isn't exploring them.
Trying them out and seeing what happens is exploring them.
PJ
> Here, PJ <pete_...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > Shade, which is often raised above as a primary deconstruction
> > of room architecture, suffers a little from this odd affection for
too
> > strict a mimetic effect. You begin the game lying on a futon. You
can
> > see a to-do list and a travel guide on the desk. You type "Take
list."
> > "First, you'll have to get off the futon." Unless there was some
event
> > trigger that you want the player to choose to do, that action
should be
> > automated (as much of it is as Shade progresses).
>
> Yes, there was an event which I wanted the player to choose to do. It
> was to get off the futon.
Maybe I was thinking more about Narcolepsy than Shade on this one--bad
example. I can't seem to win either way -- if I use an example that I
make up, everyone says: "bad writing, nobody does it that way." If I
use an example from a game, the author always finds a way to correct my
interpretation. But I am arguing at a generic level -- across the
spectrum of games -- and for, not against, the components of the better
games that make them work. I can't seem to find the middle ground on
this, so just continue to slam me whenever you find an incorrect
assumption.
> I set up a game mechanism which allowed automatic zone movement, as
> you observe. Then I deliberately disabled it for the futon on the
> first move. It is part of the game that you begin in a lethargic,
> unmotivated state, in which standing up takes conscious effort.
That's
> not "interfering with story progress" -- it *is* the story!
I would say, however, that being IFers, the first move in almost
everyone's case is going to be to get up and move around in an effort
to find out what's going on. So, the subtlety of your beginning may be
lost on some of us.
> It's also an example of setting the pace of the game (initially:
slow)
> by fine control of the mechanism of interaction. Later, I speed up
the
> pace substantially -- both by prose, and by allowing the player to
> make progress (in game terms) with every single action, for several
> turns in a row.
Yes, I don't think there's a real problem with the pace in Shade. I
was using it more as an example of a very good piece of IF which,
despite its avant garde nature, nevertheless uses some of the IF
conventions I was discussing above that can create problems for less
skilled authors. I wasn't actually meaning to critique the game or its
specific merits, though perhaps you had a different impression on that.
PJ
Michael Roy
> The problem with too strict a mimesis is it's boring and interferes
> with story progress. The author is always telling the player how dumb
> he is. Shade, which is often raised above as a primary deconstruction
> of room architecture, suffers a little from this odd affection for too
> strict a mimetic effect. You begin the game lying on a futon. You can
> see a to-do list and a travel guide on the desk. You type "Take list."
> "First, you'll have to get off the futon." Unless there was some event
> trigger that you want the player to choose to do, that action should be
> automated (as much of it is as Shade progresses). Narcolepsy starts
> pretty much the same way "First you'll have to stand up." There is no
> reason for most of this in most games, and even the best occasionally
> get tripped up including these "meaningless burdens" for the player.
I'm always surprised when things like this make it into final releases.
I used to have a WIP (lost when a power source went out; it'll happen
to all of you too; make a backup :-) ) which required a first move
similar to that and I very quickly got sick of having to type it every
time. It didn't take long for it to get converted into an implicit action.
> I agree. While all end-to-end plots could be said to represent a
> "puzzle" of sorts, the culture of IF heavily uses a different type of
> puzzle: how do I open the door/portal, in infinite varieties, in order
> to make a scene transition? There is really no reason why other types
> of choices, other events, time passage, turns taken, etc., shouldn't be
> used more often to control scene changes, but, there it is, IF folks
> like puzzles and even some of the least puzzle-like games use
> puzzle-like mechanisms for moving the story from scene to scene.
I think this happens because of the connection between rooms and
puzzles. Pretty clearly, a new scene either has to occur in a room that
the player is visiting for the first time or a room that a player has
visited before. If the new scene occurs in a room being visited for the
first time, you've got a lock-and-key puzzle no matter how masterfully
you disguise it as something else.
Something I've looked at (with limited success, because it's sometimes
difficult to do without feeling contrived) is reusing map space from
previous scenes in new scenes. Since the players could visit the room
before if they really wanted to, this shifts the focus away from a
puzzle of getting to the room and towards the plot context that inspires
the player to want to go there. Anchorhead does a great job of this.
BTW, a bit of spoiler space would've been nice before that Shade ref.
> In terms of
> "mimesis" -- a concept I struggle with sometimes, I admit -- relying on
> the compass directions is probably the most unlifelike action in most
> IF games. Other than driving on a freeway, how many of us really "go
> north" or "east" and so forth in our daily lives? We "walk toward
> town," "drive up the road," "enter store," "leave work," "go to lunch,"
> etc. Many games incorporate these types of commands, some brilliantly
> (Narcolepsy, most obviously), but I think we fall back on the compass
> points because they're easy and authors generally have us racing around
> multiple rooms solving puzzles, a la Advent & Zork. Change the culture
> of rooms & puzzles, and you also eliminate a lot of the reason that
> compass directions are so necessary.
I'll agree that Advent is the reason that we have compass directions,
but I don't think that it's a bad thing. You said yourself earlier in
this post that authors shouldn't do things just because they're that way
in the real world and I'd argue that the compass directions are more of
a shorthand convenience--it's easier to type N five times than WALK
TOWARDS TOWN and both LEAVE WORK and GO TO LUNCH are too abstract for
parsing in IF (and I don't want a game to ask me "Where would you like
to go to lunch at?").
Also, we're all used to compass directions. Reducing the reliance on
them is great, but by all means leave them in. Otherwise, I'm just
going to spend all of my time thinking about how to get from one place
to another and I'm going to be too busy notice the significant aspects
of each scene.
>
>>One more paltry idea: how about we identify the elements unique to IF
>>that can be used to create narrative tension? The OP suggested this,
>>and I've seen little so far. I'll start.
>>
>>Limited time: often used to great effect. There is only a weak analog
>>to this in static fiction. A static fiction author can do a great
>
> deal
>
>>to suggest urgency, but can never actually *enforce* it.
>
>
> I agree. Even going back to Zork, the fact that the brass lantern
> would burn out put a time urgency into the game, as sprawling as it
> was. Time constraints and turn constraints are probably the most
> underutilized assets that IF has over static fiction. What I would
> like to see -- maybe it's a comp idea -- is a game that completes in
> EXACTLY 100 turns. Even if all the player does is type wait 100 times,
> something should happen, a story should be told, and a conclusion
> reached (other than that the player is a bit of a goof). To do that,
> of course, requires the author to be in tight control of the pacing
> (probably through very tight scenes & cut scenes), the events, the
> plot, and the overall story, else you could scarcely come up with the
> variety of potential endings that would be required otherwise.
This sounds like a great idea to me. I'd encourage you to give it a
try. Although, be aware of combinatorial expansion: if there are N
possible actions a player can perform and M nouns that they can perform
them on, you've potentially got (MN)^100 different outcomes. Obviously,
most of them are insignificant variants that will collapse on each
other, but there are some combinations may not be obvious.
> WAIT 100 TIMES
Time passes 100 times.
*** Wow, that was boring. ***
--
> JUMP 100 TIMES
You jump on the spot, fruitlessly 100 times.
*** You suffer a massive heart attack. ***
Of course, Aisle already did a one-turn version of this, so you'd have
to be sure that the additional moves added something unique to the game.
> Yes. Undo is an awful command, although it became necessary because so
> many stories insisted on killing you for any mistake. I think a
> save/restore is a kinder, gentler version because you have to think
> about when to save and why to restore, as well as when. On the other
> hand, eliminating the "sudden death" prevalent in so many games over
> the years would also ensure that "undo" is not used so promiscuously.
> Why undo unless you know you have died and/or put the game into an
> unwinnable state?
Time pressure paranoia also plays a factor. There are times when I'll
type UNDO after every LOOK, INVENTORY, or EXAMINE.
Michael
Michael Roy
> There are also a number of puzzle games that close parts of the map
> behind you (Curses comes to mind, as does Plundered Hearts, to reach
> further back). It's not always done, but I think many authors are in
> fact aware of various ways to use the map (and other features of the
> game) to control pacing.
Where did Plundered Hearts do this?
Michael
Mike Rozak
> Certainly there is a lack of transparency in the command line that
> intimidates new players, but even in a point and click world, there are
> usually subtle differences in how the point and click works, or in a
> joystick world, how the joystick/associated buttons work.
I've been pondering this for awhile (and implimenting code based on my
ponderings). I think that "intimidation" is not why command-lines are taboo
in mass-market games. Command lines aren't used because they're not
necessary in mass-market games...
If you look at mass market versions of IF, their underlying mechanics
(physics) are simpler than adventure games from the early the 1980's. Myst,
Syberia, or whatever are really rooms with a list of N choices along with a
few flags indicating if a user has "picked up" one of the handful of items
provided in the IF. The simpler physics means that users can get away with
point-and-click most of the time. With 90% of the interaction easily handled
by point-and-click, the authors change their design for that last 10% so it
doesn't need a keyboard either.
Physics is not just simplified for dumbing-down reasons. Part of the reason
that the physics are simplified is because more complex physics also
requires more expensive eye candy. "tear page from book" and "burn book" get
to be pretty expensive commands if you have to animate each action taking
place. Text is infinitely cheaper.
The same goes for MMORPGs, which are graphical mass-market versions of text
MUDs. The underlying physics of modern MMORPGs is simpler than text MUDs
from the early 1990's. The reason why MMORPGs cost $20M is because of eye
candy, not because of the vastly superior physics or AI.
The underlying physics and AI in mass-market IF and MMORPGs are going
backwards, not forwards, which reminds me of something from evolution...
Fish in underground rivers have no eyes because they don't need them. Mass
market games are simplified (or dumbed down) to appeal to the mass market
(just as most movies and TV shows are). Simpler physics don't require a
command line, so mass-market games don't use one.
--
Mike Rozak
http://www.mxac.com.au
PJ
> I'm not trying to shut you up, but that's exactly where the newsgroup
> response of "Ok, how about you write a game and show us?" comes from.
> There is a lot of theoretical discussion from the past ten years that
> you seem to have just missed.
>
> These are not new ideas. They certainly have not been fully explored,
> but posting about how great and new they are isn't exploring them.
> Trying them out and seeing what happens is exploring them.
I would debate whether I have claimed that these ideas are "new and
great." You are reading an opinion piece, after all, so the ideas are
purposely challenging, but not necessarily "hot off the press." What
may be new is the way I am trying to tie them systematically together
to challenge certain conventional notions of IF. Even that may not be
totally new, but if this has *all* been hashed and rehashed so many
times, why have so many people and so many posts been put up on this
thread in the last week? I'm happy to defer to your expertise in
regards to your games, or to those of other authors regarding their
games, but I really don't see why I can't discuss the potential
directions of IF in this fashion without getting this type of
exasperated (and exasperating) response.
I appreciate your pedagogical bent -- you're right that I haven't read
*every* post over the last 10 years -- and any corrections you can
provide. Please feel free to point me to specific posts that
anticipate or parallel the content here. But judging from this year's
comp and last year's, however, there are many folks who still haven't
internalized these types of messages. I am writing for them, myself,
and anyone else who is interested. As I presume the bulk of the
respondents are as well. In the event that this type of discussion
quits getting reasonable responses, I'll presumably stop posting to it.
And if I never write a game based on these ideas, shame on me. But I
really see no reason to stop in mid-thread, run off and write a game,
then resume only when the top authors invovled in IF have agreed that I
"proved" something with my game. The point of r.a.i.f. is supposedly
to discuss the art of IF. Whether I've written a game recently or not,
that's all I'm doing here.
ems...@mindspring.com
SPOILER SPACE
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As I recall, once you've dealt with the situation aboard the ship and
gotten ashore, you can't return there during the main portion of the
game.
There are also several points in the game where you can't move freely
until you resolve a scene -- when you're trapped with the lecherous
governor whose name I forget, and (I think) also when you're down in
the prison area with the alligator. These scenes provide temporary
blockages that make old areas inaccessible for a while, and give some
more shape to the plot.
But I was mostly thinking of the ship.
ems...@mindspring.com
He didn't slam you; he disagreed with you. This is an essential
component of having a discussion about nontrivial issues.
Tobias Thelen
> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
[...]
> > These are not new ideas. They certainly have not been fully explored,
> > but posting about how great and new they are isn't exploring them.
> > Trying them out and seeing what happens is exploring them.
[...]
> I appreciate your pedagogical bent -- you're right that I haven't read
> *every* post over the last 10 years -- and any corrections you can
> provide. Please feel free to point me to specific posts that
> anticipate or parallel the content here. But judging from this year's
> comp and last year's, however, there are many folks who still haven't
> internalized these types of messages. I am writing for them, myself,
> and anyone else who is interested. As I presume the bulk of the
> respondents are as well. In the event that this type of discussion
> quits getting reasonable responses, I'll presumably stop posting to it.
> And if I never write a game based on these ideas, shame on me. But I
> really see no reason to stop in mid-thread, run off and write a game,
> then resume only when the top authors invovled in IF have agreed that I
> "proved" something with my game. The point of r.a.i.f. is supposedly
> to discuss the art of IF. Whether I've written a game recently or not,
> that's all I'm doing here.
Dee
"Dreamhold does not appear to be a very good game -- it doesn't break
any new ground, puzzles aren't that exciting, memory palace concept not
totally new -- certainly not worth all the analysis that's been posted
here and elsewhere. The only purpose it seems to have is to provide a
tutorial for new players. It doesn't seem fun enough and the hints
don't work well enough, to justify all the commentary. Would people be
giving it this much thought if it weren't one of AP's games? Just
wondering."
Plotkin's response:
"Come on, folks, don't do the troll's work for him."
Later, after Dee wondered why he/she is being called a troll:
"I haven't decided about you yet.
Your first post was not just "slightly negative", but *prescriptively*
negative. You picked the least positive points of everything anyone
had said, distorted them (why *should* the memory palace idea have
been "totally new"? That was a discussion of influence, not a
criticism) and then presented the result as if it were the agreed
concensus of the newsgroup so far.
You also ended with "Just wondering", which in my experience is
invariably a lie wrapped around a nasty innuendo."
Myself on Dreamhold:
"The writing is forced and heavy-handed and the back-story is
vague enough to be profound, but the playing experience was fun enough to
justify investing two hours of my time, which is more than I can say about
the majority of the comp games."
Plotkin's response:
"Same troll. Same ISP, same IP address."
Walter S on Dreamhold:
"The find-white-key-to-open-white-door-type puzzles, the awkward writing,
the generic fantasy setting, the amnesia, the faceless PC, everything
screams "Staple food!" at you."
Plotkin's response:
"You call prominent games "mediocre" (or "bad") at random, using random
false names, to annoy people."
Plotkin isn't slamming you because you haven't read ten years of archived
posts. That would be absurd, even by his standards. He's slamming you
because of this:
PJ on Shade:
> I am saying, however, that this trigger didn't necessarily have to
> resemble a puzzle (hunt the tickets), but could have been driven by
> something else. Actually, not finding the tickets might have been
> better, or maybe just finding the return ticket (just as there is no
> phone in the apartment to call for help). There is nothing wrong
> with that approach: the choice is always the author's. But I am
> saying that too much of IF is based on solving puzzles as plot or
> cutscene triggers.
Plotkin's response:
"This seems like a particularly bad example for your argument."
Notice how snarky he gets when you critisize Shade. I'm not even sure
"critisize" is the correct choice of word here. It seems that anything other
than uncritical worship is likely to set him off.
Andrew Plotkin
>
> If you look at mass market versions of IF, their underlying mechanics
> (physics) are simpler than adventure games from the early the 1980's. Myst,
> Syberia, or whatever are really rooms with a list of N choices along with a
> few flags indicating if a user has "picked up" one of the handful of items
> provided in the IF. The simpler physics means that users can get away with
> point-and-click most of the time. With 90% of the interaction easily handled
> by point-and-click, the authors change their design for that last 10% so it
> doesn't need a keyboard either.
Yes and no. "Mass market" is a generalization which lumps together too
many different things.
For Syberia, I'd agree -- the simplification has progressed to the
point where there *are* just a few choices, and they're all obvious. I
found Syberia simplistic and boring, puzzle-wise. (Bad writing too,
but that's a separate matter.)
Myst (and many of the first-person graphical adventures since) are
*mechanically* simple. But I claim that this is counterbalanced by a
*visually* rich world, which has to be interpreted in a complex way
(not just as a bunch of hotspots). You are presented with detailed
images to examine. Picking important objects out of the scenery is
just as tricky as picking important nouns out of a textual room
description, *and for the same reason*: to force the player to inhabit
the game world, rather than the game mechanics. It's exactly the "last
10%" you're talking about that makes the game interesting.
Now, you could point out that graphical adventures have evolved from
Myst to Syberia. I'd agree. However, I think that trend is crossing
into not being very adventure-y any more. And it's not all of
graphical adventures, either. There is a viable strain of old-style,
Myst-like games. They have fewer adherents -- but that *doesn't* mean
those adherents want everything to become like Syberia.
Since I am interested in (what I call) adventure gaming, I stick to
the narrow current, even though it's got a smaller audience. Yes, I am
interested in expanding that audience -- but not enough to switch to
making a different kind of game.
Michael Roy
I'm not sure about the other two (don't think you can move while with
Lafond; think you might be able to retreat from the alligator), but it
so happens that you can get back on the ship.
*SPOILER SPACE*
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Enter the skiff floating near the shore and row east a few times.
Michael
David Doty
@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
> Maybe I was thinking more about Narcolepsy than Shade on this one--bad
> example. I can't seem to win either way -- if I use an example that I
> make up, everyone says: "bad writing, nobody does it that way." If I
> use an example from a game, the author always finds a way to correct my
> interpretation.
Maybe they want examples that fit. If you can't come up with a game that
doesn't fit the parameters you suggest, that says something in itself. The
futon *wasn't* a pointless action. So what is?
They asked for examples to have a point of reference for the discussion.
It doesn't require them to accept your interpretation. You not only have
to provide an example of the problem, you have to argue and convince that
it is a problem.
And if you come in and say everyone is doing it wrong, you've got to expect
an uphill battle to convince them.
Dave Doty
Andrew Plotkin
> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
>
> > I'm not trying to shut you up, but that's exactly where the newsgroup
> > response of "Ok, how about you write a game and show us?" comes from.
> > There is a lot of theoretical discussion from the past ten years that
> > you seem to have just missed.
> >
> > These are not new ideas. They certainly have not been fully explored,
> > but posting about how great and new they are isn't exploring them.
> > Trying them out and seeing what happens is exploring them.
>
> I would debate whether I have claimed that these ideas are "new and
> great."
I think I'm reacting to the way you're phrasing this stuff. "...would
lead *necessarily* to a closer association with the PC..." "There is
nothing impossible about executing an interface..."
Predicting how a change will *necessarily* work isn't even possible
*after* you write a game -- players are perverse! And saying that an
interface is *possible* is the wrong emphasis when, in fact, it's been
done.
It's not that you're treading on forbidden topics here -- I think you
come off as standing on an interesting topic, and then charging either
off a cliff or into a brick wall.
> What may be new is the way I am trying to tie them systematically
> together to challenge certain conventional notions of IF.
I have spent years trying to tie ideas together systematically in
order to *describe* conventional notions of IF -- on the theory that,
once I understand them, I can climb out of them.
Just another clash between the descriptivists and the prescriptivists?
Are we working at cross purposes, or towards the same thing in
different terms? I ain't gonna try to answer that. However,
description is how I've gotten as far as I have.
> but if this has *all* been hashed and rehashed so many times, why
> have so many people and so many posts been put up on this thread in
> the last week?
Because you keep posting 250-line messages. :)
> But I really see no reason to stop in mid-thread, run off and write
> a game, then resume only when the top authors invovled in IF have
> agreed that I "proved" something with my game.
Despite appearances, I'm not telling you to stop. The worst case is,
nobody listens to you. (Which clearly isn't happening.) Or, people
reply only to disagree with you. (Which is what you probably feel like
right now, but it doesn't make the conversation valueless.)
> I can't seem to win either way -- if I use an example that I make
> up, everyone says: "bad writing, nobody does it that way." If I use
> an example from a game, the author always finds a way to correct my
> interpretation. But I am arguing at a generic level -- across the
> spectrum of games -- and for, not against, the components of the
> better games that make them work. I can't seem to find the middle
> ground on this, so just continue to slam me whenever you find an
> incorrect assumption.
I still recommend working from examples, rather than trying to find a
middle ground. (Like I said, *my* approach has always been trying to
describe what works in existing games.) Either you'll find examples
that people agree on, or you'll find that people disagree with your
interpretation of *every* example. I assume the two-way street here is
obvious.
Jdyer41
>If you have a suggestion for other activities the player can engage in
>I'd like to hear them. I suspect, though, that what you're thinking of
>is what other people would still label puzzles -- you're just talking
>about specific *sorts* of puzzles you don't like (unrealistic ones, or
>ones based on fiddly object manipulation, or ones that are out of
>place in the setting).
I believe it is possible to pull off IF with solely a simulation
management mechanic. Thomas Disch's _Amnesia_ tried this
as part of the gameplay but it came out lacking -- possibly because
it came off as a gigantic hunger puzzle.
(I'm not counting the geisha section of _When Help Collides_ as one,
because it is used more as a minigame than an actual story
mechanic.)
Here's an example Jacob Weinstein came up with posting in 1996:
To turn this from the theoretical to the more specific: I'm arguing that
one can do away with traditional IF puzzles and still provide a challenge
to the reader/player. Imagine you're playing Lonesome Dove, the
interactive version. You couldn't simply start off in Lonesome Dove,
Texas, and type:
>drive cattle to montana
Congratulations! You've driven the cattle across country. The end.
Well, no, you couldn't just type DRIVE CATTLE, but most of the
activities cattle drivers engage in are more along the lines of
resource management (how far to travel, how much food to eat, how
much ammo to carry, etc.).
-- Jason Dyer
ems...@mindspring.com
Michael Roy wrote:
(re. Plundered Hearts)
> *SPOILER SPACE*
>
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
>
> Enter the skiff floating near the shore and row east a few times.
Hunh. Okay, clearly I have either forgotten some details or else didn't
actually try to return. Thanks for the correction.
Mike Rozak
> *mechanically* simple. But I claim that this is counterbalanced by a
> *visually* rich world, which has to be interpreted in a complex way
> (not just as a bunch of hotspots). You are presented with detailed
> images to examine. Picking important objects out of the scenery is
> just as tricky as picking important nouns out of a textual room
> description, *and for the same reason*: to force the player to inhabit
> the game world, rather than the game mechanics. It's exactly the "last
> 10%" you're talking about that makes the game interesting.
Sorry, I didn't explain myself clearly enough...
I'm not saying that Myst doesn't have many choices, although the number of
choices at any given state is still far less than a text adventure (because
you don't have as many verbs as items).
What is I wanted to point out is that myst has a very simple "physics"
system underneath. You can pick up an occasional object, but you can't pick
up an object and manipulate it, combine it with another object, taste it,
etc. You can't try to put your journal object into the crevice. You can't
break a branch off a tree and use it to turn on an inaccessible switch. Etc.
Basically, if you were to write Myst as a text adventure game it would be
fairly trivial, much easier to code than a traditional text adventure.
MMORPGs have the same problem. All you can do in a MMORPG (at a cynical
level) is move NSEW. If you run into a monster you can press the auto-attack
button or run. If you have spells you can use those. There's no opportunity
to talk to the monster, throw sand in its eyes, trip it, try to capture it,
etc. Futhermore, monsters in MMORPGs don't call in their friends or do
anything you'd call intelligent. Their AI and physics aren't that different
from Ultima I or Wizardy I. (Circa 1981)
Because the physics isn't complex, a command line isn't really required.
Michael Roy
Yeah, it's not something that you have to do, so it's easy to miss.
IIRC, I first found out about it when I was reading over the Invisiclues.
Plus there's not any special reason that I recall why a skiff should
happen to be sitting there, other than it being the coast.
ems...@mindspring.com
Michael Roy wrote:
> Something I've looked at (with limited success, because it's
sometimes
> difficult to do without feeling contrived) is reusing map space from
> previous scenes in new scenes.
It seems like there are a couple of different ways to approach
map-space reuse:
1) After a location has already been used one way, provide information
or inventory equipment that makes it interesting again for a different
reason. (This is not much different from finding ways to reuse objects
in multiple puzzles, I suppose -- still, I usually find it gratifying
when a location I thought I had plumbed fully becomes interesting again
because of a new kind of interaction I hadn't anticipated.)
2) Move NPCs around, staging new NPC interactions in a location that
was previously empty or used for something else. "Anchorhead" pulls off
much of its late game this way -- plot events cause the characters to
move around, setting up new blockages and laying the groundwork for new
scenes. And of course it's possible to cheat and move the NPC to
wherever the player happens to go, rather than waiting for the player
to get around to showing up in a specific place -- I did this quite a
bit in "City of Secrets", and I'm sure other people have also, though
I'm not thinking of examples at the moment. (This sort of sleight of
hand is more obvious to the author than to the player, anyway.)
In "City of Secrets" I tried sometimes dropping NPCs into the game at
the moment when the player was moving to a new room -- that is, rather
than having someone stroll in when the player had been waiting in a
location for ten turns, put that same NPC into a location just as the
player moved there. The theory (possibly incorrect -- I don't think
I've gotten any specific feedback on this) was that it would feel to
the player more as though the encounter had been triggered by his own
action, even though in fact it was the result of the game engine
deciding he had made too little progress for a while and needed a
nudge.
3) Make the environment time-responsive, so that time of day changes
what the location looks like and what can be done there. "Change in the
Weather" is probably the classic example; Jacqueline Lott's "Firetower"
also does it. Time can correlate strictly to number of moves (one
move/minute, say), or advance, as in "Anchorhead", only when the player
has achieved certain goals. (I'm sure you realize this, having played
"Anchorhead", but I'm trying to be semi-thorough anyway.) Telling the
player that the environment is *going* to change is sometimes a useful
way to let him know which puzzles are accessible now and which will be
accessible at a subsequent point, and provides the motivation to
re-explore at the right time. (Shop X will be open at 3 pm, so you
can't do anything with that YET -- go away and come back later!)
I'm probably missing some obvious stuff, though.
Jdyer41
>It seems like there are a couple of different ways to approach
>map-space reuse:
>1) After a location has already been used one way, provide information
>or inventory equipment that makes it interesting again for a different
>reason.
I'd add that if the room is a bottleneck that needs to be passed
through more than once, a classic method of reuse is to add some
sort of obstacle that wasn't there before. For example, guards that
don't get alerted until a safe is opened, at which point they must be
evaded.
-- Jason Dyer
Dan Shiovitz
Jdyer41 <jdy...@aol.com> wrote:
>>Dan Shiovitz wrote:
>>If you have a suggestion for other activities the player can engage in
>>I'd like to hear them. I suspect, though, that what you're thinking of
>>is what other people would still label puzzles -- you're just talking
>>about specific *sorts* of puzzles you don't like (unrealistic ones, or
>>ones based on fiddly object manipulation, or ones that are out of
>>place in the setting).
>
>I believe it is possible to pull off IF with solely a simulation
>management mechanic. Thomas Disch's _Amnesia_ tried this
>as part of the gameplay but it came out lacking -- possibly because
>it came off as a gigantic hunger puzzle.
Yeah, this is another workable one. To some extent IF already has some
resource-management leanings, but you could make gameplay much more
explicitly about that. You'd probably end up with something like
Oregon Trail. Or, hey, One Week is an existing example of an IF game
where the base action is resource management. I guess you could think
of Lock & Key as being another borderline example, but I think it's
still more about the individual puzzles than it is about the overall
management (still, the fact that it switches to a different interface
for parts of the play session is pretty suggestive).
>-- Jason Dyer
ems...@mindspring.com
> Myst (and many of the first-person graphical adventures since) are
> *mechanically* simple. But I claim that this is counterbalanced by a
> *visually* rich world, which has to be interpreted in a complex way
> (not just as a bunch of hotspots). You are presented with detailed
> images to examine. Picking important objects out of the scenery is
> just as tricky as picking important nouns out of a textual room
> description, *and for the same reason*: to force the player to
inhabit
> the game world, rather than the game mechanics.
Sometimes the images are confusing. I don't consider this to be a
positive thing, though. I remember spending a long time in the
Mechanical Age of Myst trying to open something that turned out to be a
shadow, not a door. But then, I also wasted a lot of time in Zork I
trying to pry open a crack in a wall that was just never meant to be
pried, so I suppose text IF offers similar opportunities for
misconstruction. The tapping hand in Myst IV was a huge help with this
sort of problem, since it meant I could tell a) which objects were
supposed to be close enough to touch and which were further back, and
b) what material unfamiliar items were supposed to be made of.
But if what you mean by "picking important objects out of the scenery"
is "figuring out, of objects which are obviously identifiable, which
are important", then yeah, I suppose I agree with this assessment.
It's still occasionally frustrating (at least to me) not to have a
fuller suite of possible actions. Once during one of the canned
conversations in Myst IV, I found myself jiggling the cursor up and
down to make my PC's head nod. Didn't do any good, of course.
Damien Neil
Rozak <Mike...@bigpond.com> wrote:
> MMORPGs have the same problem. All you can do in a MMORPG (at a cynical
> level) is move NSEW. If you run into a monster you can press the auto-attack
> button or run. If you have spells you can use those. There's no opportunity
> to talk to the monster, throw sand in its eyes, trip it, try to capture it,
> etc. Futhermore, monsters in MMORPGs don't call in their friends or do
> anything you'd call intelligent. Their AI and physics aren't that different
> from Ultima I or Wizardy I. (Circa 1981)
This isn't really true--most MMORPGs these days offer quite a few ways
to interact with the world, or at least the enemies in it. You may not
be able to throw sand in their eyes or trip them, but you can probably
cast a spell reducing their chance to hit or execute a combat move that
slows or stops them. And several games do allow you to capture (some)
foes.
MMORPG monsters generally aren't the brightest of things, but they
aren't always complete idiots either. Many do know how to call
friends, and they can have reasonably complex behavior in a
fight--healing their friends, targetting anyone who tries to heal their
current target, and so on.
- Damien
PJ
wrong." I can take it. What I'm having more of a problem with is the
seeming impulse on this site to tell me not to even talk about these
issues until I've written a game that expounds upon them. PJ
PJ
Andrew could have implemented the scene -- he could have gone out of
his way to make a Rameses-like "I can't/won't get off the futon yet" to
make it clear how lethargic you are. Dropped in to the scene, in media
res, as it were, you don't feel the lethargy he is implying so his
message about getting off the futon initially *feels like* "authorial
intrusion" of the type I was talking about. That's why I mistakenly
used it, though I was probably thinking about Narcolepsy more than
Shade, since I take the *in the sand* intro to Narcolepsy to be
something of a homage to Shade.
Where Andrew is correct, though, is that he had a reason for this
action to be there and he purposely implemented in that fashion. I
went back and checked, and agreed that within the logic of the game, he
had covered himself on that. So it was not a perfect example on my
part, although I will still always think there were other, potentially
better ways to implement the suggestion he was making there.
The challenge I have here, is that many people on this thread seem to
be insisting I make examples of "bad practice" while at the same time I
am directed to consider what are mostly the best games/stories. The
best games/stories don't have *lots* of bad practice. What I am
aruging, however, is that they had to overcome certain built-in biases
within IF -- and even within IF authoring systems -- in order to reach
the status of good or superior IF. And that, perphaps, doing something
as radical as "eliminating rooms," which is where I started this
thread, might help eliminate some of the bias and the difficulty
authors have in overcoming it.
Right now, IF's most basic conventions still tilt towards adventure
games and the concept of "winning" an end-game. That, obviously, is
not a new thought. The authoring systems are engineered primarily to
construct those types of games. Also, not a new thought. To create a
great story and a gripping narrative, you have to overcome those
conventions, which games like Slouching Towards Bedlam, Photopia,
Varicella, Shade and others do successfully. So using them as a
negative example is difficult, while using "bad" games as negative
examples is somewhat mean-spirited, trivial, and ultimately pointless.
Macro level arguments are not always best-illustrated by micro-level
examples, as you can see from my clumsay attempts so far.
PJ
Cal Harrison
> What I am
> aruging, however, is that they had to overcome certain built-in
biases
> within IF -- and even within IF authoring systems -- in order to
reach
> the status of good or superior IF. And that, perphaps, doing
something
> as radical as "eliminating rooms," which is where I started this
> thread, might help eliminate some of the bias and the difficulty
> authors have in overcoming it.
Since no-one's mentioned it so far, I might chip in -- if you ever
played Jon Ingold's "My Angel" it basically does this -- it doesn't use
locations in the classic sense, and they've been removed to allow,
well, a stream-of-consciousness 1st person narrator to babble on
unrestrictedly. It builds towards a plot climax and, although it has
puzzles, they're mostly story points.
Plotkin's review of this might, then, be of interest:
"On the one hand, this is really good -- good writing, good use of
background, good story well-knitted into IF conventions."
and
"The extremely narrational descriptions are striking, but again, I have
real trouble with them. Without a stable description, the locations
refuse to come clear in my head; I don't have the reminders of what's
present that I normally rely on. (In fact, half the time, typing "look"
causes me to go elsewhere. When that happens, I lose the interactivity
entirely; I'm just turning pages.)"
Also, mine-own Misdirection has very few rooms, and each one acts as a
container for a long, complex interaction. It seemed to me a very
compelling way to construct a game mechanic -- none of this messy,
loose, wandering around. I'm not sure I'd ever write a game any other
way.
-- Cal
Andrew Plotkin
Or, give the player a new ability, so that when he comes back through,
the room offers more opportunities for doing cool stuff. This is a
classic in console action games: you go through an area and there's
only one way out, but then you learn to jump high, so you come back
and reach a ledge, and later you learn to climb walls, and after that
you learn to break through walls... etc.
Dan Shiovitz
>Here's an example Jacob Weinstein came up with posting in 1996:
>
> To turn this from the theoretical to the more specific: I'm arguing that
> one can do away with traditional IF puzzles and still provide a challenge
> to the reader/player. Imagine you're playing Lonesome Dove, the
> interactive version. You couldn't simply start off in Lonesome Dove,
> Texas, and type:
>
> >drive cattle to montana
>
> Congratulations! You've driven the cattle across country. The end.
>
>Well, no, you couldn't just type DRIVE CATTLE, but most of the
>activities cattle drivers engage in are more along the lines of
>resource management (how far to travel, how much food to eat, how
>much ammo to carry, etc.).
I also wanted to belatedly mention that the flip side of what I was
mentioning earlier is that you can implement the same story (cowboys
get the cattle from Texas to Montana) in several different ways with
different low-level actions. Although, like you say, it lends itself
most directly to a resource-management sort of implementation, you
could just as well do a puzzle implementation (presumably it'd be sort
of a railroaded storyline with different puzzles -- "oh no, the calf
has wandered away, can you find it?" or "the wagon wheel has broken
down; can you improvise a different one?" keeping you from proceeding
until you solved them) or even a combat one (first you fight the
grizzly bear menacing the cattle, then you disarm the avalanche trap
or lose ten hit points (each hit point represents a cow), then you
fight dysentery with its special attack).
Obviously which base actions you choose make a big difference in how
the story feels to the player and which pieces are focused on, even if
it's roughly the same overall story.
Andrew Plotkin
>
> Right now, IF's most basic conventions still tilt towards adventure
> games and the concept of "winning" an end-game. That, obviously, is
> not a new thought. The authoring systems are engineered primarily to
> construct those types of games.
How?
Biased towards having rooms, yes. Towards "winning", no -- not that I
can see. (Inform's mechanism for game-ending conditions is called
"deadflag". Someone once argued that Inform was therefore biased,
versus it being called "winflag" or something, but it wasn't very
convincing.) Towards "adventure games"? Well, define that.
Inform (and TADS, from what I can see) are biased towards a
shallow, discrete hierarchical worldmap, organized by compass
directions. And (of course) towards the classic IF parser model and
command set. And the classic IF world model, which I'd call
"nonhierarchical ordered discrete event conditions", except that's too
many damn syllables, and the "nonhierarchical" part is my personal
druthers anyhow.
> To create a great story and a gripping narrative, you have to
> overcome those conventions
I think this is what you started out trying to argue, but can you go
back to it? I think we slipped away from that point before you made a
clear argument.
The conventions we've got have lasted this long because they *work*,
not because they interfere with the story. There's certainly been
evolution. Hunger timers used to be conventional, but they fell out of
common use because they got in the way of the game/story/narrative.
Rooms have *not* fallen out of common use. I didn't write _Shade_ to
discredit the idea of rooms -- it was a fun variation, but I went back
to ordinary map layouts with _Hunter_. I did _Hunter_ without compass
directions, but I never considered making _Dreamhold_ a compassless
game. That wouldn't have worked at all.