#'why do you like parser-based interactive fiction so much' well.

[crustaceousfaggot]

Why you should give Text Adventure games a try (and how to do so)

There is not nearly enough love for Text Adventure Games here on Tumblr. Or anywhere really. But especially here, I feel like you guys would really get a kick out of them. Here's why:

(quick note, I'm gonna be using the words Text Adventure and Interactive Fiction pretty interchangeably here. Technically that's not perfectly accurate, they are technically different things, but I don't care to explain the difference Just roll with it.)

So

Do you like weird short stories told through unconventional mediums? That's most of what Interactive Fiction is

You like story based video games but hate the finicky combat? Congrats, there is literally no combat skill required beyond the ability to type "hit guard with crowbar"

Blind or visually impaired? Since these games are (with a few exceptions) entirely text based, they work great with a screen reader!

Sick of profit motivated AAA titles with no creative integrity? Well, these games are almost always produced by a single nerd (usually a horrid amalgamation of computer geek and literature geek) with no budget and no responsibilities of the product they're making. And they're usually not paid, since these games are free. Text Adventure is a labour of love, and in most games you can feel the care and effort the creator has put into the game.

Sick of spending $20-70 on a video game? Lucky you, I've been playing TA for years and I have not spent a cent in doing so (Fallen Londen will try to make you pay. But Fallen Londen sucks and is run by bigots. Fuck Fallen London.) Games are either available free on a browser, or as free, small downloadable files (most of which can be played using the Parchment Interpreter)

Wish you read more, but reliant on the quick dopamine of digital media? Well now you can read while also being an active participant in the narrative.

Bad at puzzles? Me too! Games from the 80s and 90s, as well as more famous newer games, have walkthroughs and hints easily available online. Newer games tend to either have a "hint" command, or come with a walkthrough file.

Do you like weird surrealist horror? Well there's... A lot of it.

Okay, but where do I start?

So there are two types of text adventure. The one you might be more accustomed to, and which sees more modern use, is called Hypertext Interactive Fiction. The other is called Parser Interactive Fiction, it's generally seen in older games, as well as games that are larger, feature more puzzles, or involve more exploration.

Hypertext games

Basically, the game will give you a scenario, and then a list of options (hypertext links) to click on to decide what to do next. These are usually more beginner friendly since you don't need to fiddle around with parsers, but personally I find them a bit limiting. Nonetheless, if you're new to Text Adventure, they're a good place to start.

Some of my favourites hypertext games (summaries in green)

My Father's Long, Long Legs is an interactive horror story about family, unease, and loss. Really more of a story than a game, but still good. Very nice use of sound. It does have some visual aspects, so this one might not work with screen readers

Scene Kid Simulator is pretty much what it says on the tin. A cute, nostalgic, coming-of-age slice of life story from the POV of a 2000s scene preteen. Nothing special, but a fun time.

The Uncle Who Works at Nintendo is a strange, unconventional, witty, and heartfelt horror game. Your friend has an uncle who he says works for Nintendo. You're about to meet him, or so he says. A fun and spooky look at childhood, childhood friendships, and childhood lies.

16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonald's is... A joy to play. The name says it all honestly. Witty, charming, tense, engaging, and emotional when it wants to be. I actually found this one through a lucky Tumblr Blaze, which makes sense since this is perfectly suited to Tumblr sensibilities. This one has more puzzle aspects than most hypertext games, but it's still relatively easy and beginner friendly. You're a vampire hunter. It's your night off, and you go to McDonald's. But there's something wrong with the customer sitting beside you...

Toadstools is a game about hunting mushrooms. You have trespassed in a national park and you are wandering blindly through the woods looking for rare fungi. Good luck :)

Parser games

Okay these fuckers are where I really get excited. These games have the classic flashing cursor line where you input text like "go north", "search bookshelf", or "kiss my husband", and the game's rudimentary AI parses your input to decide what happens next. These are my favourites. They really allow you the feeling of exploring the game world, immerse you in the protagonist and the story, using just text on a screen and simple inputs. This does make them considerably more difficult, since a) you need to decide the right way to phrase what you want to do, otherwise it won't work, and b) more possibilities means more chances to mess up and miss things. Unlike video games, your cursor won't light up when you see something important, you'll have to search stuff and work things out on your own But, in my opinion, it is so, so worth it. Summaries in red

The first text adventure game I ever played was One Eye Open. It's an extremely graphic and gory medical horror game (although I would consider it tasteful medical horror, in that it never derives horror from medical procedures, disability, or ooOoHh gross scary sick people) You play as a volunteer test subject for a medical research facility, having to unravel the mystery of the hospital's bloody past. It's good. It's fun. It's tense. It has some really dumb mechanics. Don't play if you're sensitive to descriptions of gore, death, or corpses. This one doesn't have a walkthrough, but I've played it enough times to know the puzzles by heart, DM me if you need help.

Anchorhead is possibly my favourite piece of interactive fiction I've ever played. It's incredible. You play as a newlywed woman, moving to the small seaside town of Anchorhead after your husband Michael inherited a mansion from some distant relatives. There's something wrong with the town though. There's definitely something wrong with your husband's mysterious ancestors. And you're starting to think that there might be something strange happening to Michael. Get ready for some wonderfully atmospheric and immersive Lovecraftian horror, action sequences that are incredibly vibrant for Text Adventure, and a super compelling mystery that the game lets you work out on your own. The puzzles here are hard. I'm not gonna lie, I used a walkthrough at several points during this game. But my god it's worth it. Big massive huge content warning here for mentions of incest, sexual assault, and pedophilia. Not in excess, and nothing explicit, but it will be mentioned as part of the story.

Little Blue Men is a short, strange, sci-fi-ish horror-ish comedy-ish game by the same author as Anchorhead, though the two games are wildly different. You are an office worker. Cope with it. Take The Stanley Parable, Stella Firma, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, mash 'em together, and you have Little Blue Men. It's bizarre. It's evocative. It's pretty darn good.

Coloratura is a strangely beautiful sci-fi story. You're a weird little alien blob. You've been separated from your home and are trapped aboard a human spaceship. You need to get home, need to make the humans understand in the only ways you can: color and song.

Slouching Towards Bedlam is a brilliant little steampunk game about language, choice, cults, Armageddon, and triangles. This game has multiple endings. It's neat in that none of the endings are really "good" or "bad". Rather, you need to decide where you stand, and act in the way you think is best.

The Lurking Horror is the grandparent of horror interactive fiction, released in the late 80s. You're a tech student in university. Something more than electricity is powering the school's computers. Find it, but don't die along the way. Besides the comically archaic descriptions of computers, this game doesn't feel all that dated. It's tricky, puzzle-heavy, and charmingly surreal. (Fun fact, this game and another old TA game called Zork inspired the "darkness kills you" mechanic which would later be popularized in Don't Starve!)

Nine Lives is a very short, very weird, very cartoony game where you play a cat that is very bad at staying alive. Cw for non-graphic but repeated cat death.

Spider and Web is one of the most ingenious uses of Text Adventure as a medium I've ever seen. It's famous for having one of, if not the singular best puzzles in video game history. It's tense, it's fast-paced, it introduces you to mechanics slowly and then lets you test them out on your own. I won't spoil too much, but you play as a very badass spy, reliving your brilliant heist during an interrogation. This game even features a character destined to be a Tumblr Sexyman. It really has it all.

If anyone actually read through all this, and has even considered playing any of these games, I'll be a little surprised. This post turned out a lot longer than I wanted it to be. It was meant to just be "hey interactive fiction is a cool and underappreciated medium, go check it out", but this is my special interest, and not one I often get to talk about. I guess this was me infodumping to the only place that will listen, the empty void of the internet. But these games are fun. And they do not get enough love. Text games are a dying genre, if they're not dead already. Give them a chance, show them some love.

#video games #games #text adventures #interactive fiction #horror #horror games #lovecraftian horror #anchorhead #if #decided not to mention Cragne Manor #because that's a beast all it's own #and it isn't really worth reccomending unless you're already an Anchorhead fan and seasoned IF player #swarm's nonsense #gaming

[manonamora-if]

My problems with this IFcomp judging thing was the requirement to rate minimally 5 games to be considered a judge. They should have raised the bar, like to become a judge you have to judge at least 15 games or more to make the judging process more fair for the entries. You have entries that have gotten more votes than some other ones which translates to raising their score compared to the other entries. It's NOT a fair competition neither real results this way.

There is also the "create an account" problem. There aren't many people who would want to go through the hassle of creating an account just to be considered worthy of casting their votes for the entries. Some others just don't want to disclose their personal emails to a one-time competition they happened to hear about from their favourite author that is participating on it. (useless rant this one).

The downloading of the games through zip files might work on a PC or a tablet but it's hard (more like a long process) for a smartphone to unzip the files and actually download the game (it's easier if the game file inside the zip file is apk at least for my phone)

Usual participants in the judging thing seem to be so biased towards certain genres/styles of interactive fiction that they can't judge new styles of interactive fiction correctly and fairly (I'm not trying to diminish their importance in the community of interactive fiction). If this games were played by the average or new players that are being introduced to interactive fiction,I'm pretty sure they would give a much more fair review/make the judging process much more fair than the one that we saw in the IFcomp (you mentioned once that you showed it to your mother,who has never played IF games, and she quite liked TTTT).

The game wasn't mediocre in the slightest (at least in my opinion sine I tend to gravitate towards innovative games) so don't think much of the ranking in this IFcomp.If you want to improve it's fine and all but don't beat yourself up over some ranking😊

Hi Anon!

If you voted for the comp, I think there will be some sort of feedback form passing around sometime soon. I highly encourage you to send your thoughts there. Or contact the IFComp via email (please do not spam/troll them, it's pretty much a one-person organising event, I don't want it to reflect badly on the Tumblr IF community). Especially about the site functions, I am 100% sure they want to improve how it works (they do have a play online button tho).

I do think there are good arguments for the first 2 points: 5 entries is not too much for people to consider being a judge (especially if you play 5 of the long entries, that's 10h at least of playing right there) and not too little that people can't flood one/two games with a certain rating; and registering ensures you don't get floods of bots/trolls to push a game up/down the ranking (it gives some resistance to it).

I don't know how they calculate the results, so maybe I am completely missing the mark here, but I like the itch Idea of adjusted scores, where they take the mean and adjust it by the median number of ratings per game in the jam (it's probably more complicated than that). That gives the change for entries that had less votes to be considered as much as the ones who got more.

Regarding the voting pool, it actually seemed like there was a shift this year. A Choice-based game won the competition (should out to The Grown-Up Detective Agency, 100% well deserved), and so was the top 4! Actually, even in the top 10, only 3 were parsers. It was also a more light-hearted game that won too (again 100% deserved, it is a great game). There are reasons why my entry didn't vibe with people (the Post-mortem is coming today), and that's fine.

If you want to diminish the bias towards one type of game/genre/etc in the IF Comp, the best way of doing it is by voting and push other people to experience those games and vote (like I did this year).

With your last point, I felt my feelings yesterday, I finished my post-mortem for the last bit of catharsis, I've gathered my feedback to improve TTTT so I can work on it later, and I went back to finish my translation.

#ask box #personal #ifcomp

[groggydog]

ParserComp 2022 Review: The Impossible Stairs

Play here: https://mathbrush.itch.io/impossible-stairs

If you've submitted to an IF competition before, you probably know who Mathbrush is. So I approach this review with some trepidation.

I will start like this:

Some people make interactive fiction games to tell a story (I think of Houghtonbridge from my earlier review). Others do it to create a puzzle. A rare few do both exceptionally well.

Mathbrush has done what I normally cannot in creating a really great puzzle game. I speak from some experience: my first competition piece, Reclamation, was a time-based game. It approached the subject in a categorically different way than Impossible Stairs, but I at least understand the hesitance of working with an inherently difficult topic like that.

I did not play the prequel to this piece (The Impossible Bottle), and so I'm not sure how much is borrowed. But the initial discovery moment of the stairs-as-time-travel mechanic immediately roped me in. What a brilliant device.

To say the least, I think this was a really masterful puzzle game. It is polished, clues and actions alike have consequence, and there are all these little "a-ha" moments as you figure out why something is highlighted in a specific way.

This game was not made for people like me who mostly enjoy interactive stories, but it's still reasonably approachable.

Indeed, the story is mostly a non-factor in favor of the puzzle, and it occasionally struggles with something I see in most parsers: obtuse clues. While many of the puzzles are good, some of the leaps in logic are the kind you'll only enjoy if you have a penchant for bashing your head against the wall over and over. The walkthrough was very much appreciated on the Ada part in particular, but I'd also argue that the treehouse bit could have used a few more context clues.

Still, the efficient use of objects as both environmental storytelling and pieces of a puzzle (the boombox comes to mind) was really inspired, and certainly makes me rethink how I might best make another parser game in the future. And nothing feels completely unfair. At the very least, upon reading the walkthrough for one or two moments I felt that it made general sense, even if it didn't make sense to me at the time.

All in all, I would happily recommend this game in the context of ParserComp or just as a generally enjoyable game.

Well done.

#parsercomp #parser #text adventures #interactive fiction

[innuendostudios]

We’re talking about adventure games again! Or, more accurately, we’re speaking in the context of adventure games about why some genres are hard to define, different ways of thinking about genre, and what genre is even for.

If you'd like to see more work like this, please back me on Patreon! Transcript below the cut.

Hi! Welcome back to Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood? Meditations on the life, death, and rebirth of the adventure game.

Adventure game.

Adventure game.

Ad. Ven. Ture. Game.

What kind of name is that, “adventure game”? It’s an atypical way of categorizing video games, I’ll say that much. We usually give game genres titles like "first-person shooter," "real time strategy," “turn-based role-playing game.” Real nuts-and-bolts kinda stuff. Meanwhile, "adventure" seemingly belongs on a turnstyle of airport paperbacks, in between "mystery" and "romance." When they slap that word on a game box, what is it supposed to communicate to us?

Other one-word genres, I can see how they get their name. A horror game is horrifying, a fighting game earns its title. But how is exploring an empty, suburban house an adventure? Why is exploring a universe not?

When I started this series, I offered up the rough-and-tumble definition of adventure game, “puzzles and plots,” and said maybe we’ll come up with a better definition later. That was… four years ago. Sorry about that. I know it’s a little late, and a lot has changed, but I did promise. So we’re gonna do it.

Today’s question is: What makes an adventure game an adventure game?

This is a tricky sort of question to ask, because, upon asking, we might stumble down the highway to “what makes an adventure novel an adventure novel?”, “what makes a rail shooter not an RPG?”, and that road inevitably terminates with “what even is genre?”, the answer to which is a bit beyond the scope of a YouTube video essay… or, it would be on anyone else’s channel, but this is Innuendo Studios. We’ll take the long road.

Welcome to Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood? A philosophical interrogation into the meaning of genre in and beyond the gaming idiom, with the adventure game as our guide.

***

The historical perspective reveals only so much, but it is a place to begin.

If you don’t know the story, in 1976, Will Crowther released Colossal Cave Adventure, a text-based story game set in an underground land loosely based on a real Kentucky cave system. The game would describe what was happening in a given location, and players would type simple commands to perform tasks and progress the narrative, usually a verb linked to a noun like a book that writes itself and responds to directives. This was the first of what we’ve come to call “interactive fiction.”

Crowther’s game - often abbreviated, simply, Adventure - inspired a number similar titles, most famously Zork, which was called an “adventure game” for the same reason Rise of the Triad was called a “Doom clone” - because they were more or less mechanically identical to the games they descended from. This is where the genre gets its title.

But the evolution from then to now has been oddly zero-sum, every addition a subtraction. As more and more adventure games came out, the text descriptions were eventually replaced with graphics, still images replaced with animations, the parser replaced with a verb list, and the keyboard itself replaced with a mouse. In the progression of Zork to Mystery House to King’s Quest to Maniac Mansion to Monkey Island, you can see how each link in the chain is a logical progression from the game preceding and into the one that follows. But you end up with a genre that began comprised entirely of words on a screen but that, by the early 90’s, typically possessed but did not, strictly speaking, require language. There is no question wordless experiences like Dropsy and Kairo are direct descendents of Monkey Island and Myst; that they are therefore in the same genre as Wishbringer, despite zero obvious mechanical overlap, is, for a medium that typically names its genres after their mechanics… weird.

(Also, for anyone confused: Nintendo used to delineate games that explored a continuous world from games that leapt across a series of discrete levels by calling the latter “platformers” and the former “adventures,” and an earlier game in that model was the Atari game Adventure, which was, itself, a graphical adaptation of the Crowther original, so what 90’s kids think of when they hear “a game in the style of Adventure” depends on whether they played on computer or console, but that lineage eventually embraced the even fuzzier “action-adventure” and is not what we’re here to discuss.)

So the connection between the genre’s beginnings and its current incarnation is less mechanical than philosophical. Spiritual, even. Something connects this to this, and we’re here to pin down what.

Now, you may be readying to say, “Ian, it’s clear the determinant of what is or isn’t an adventure game is pure association and there is no underlying logic, you don’t need to think this hard about everything,” which, ha ha, you must be new here. I would counter that, as soon as a genre has a name, people will (not entirely on purpose) start placing parameters around what they consider part of that genre. Even if it’s just association, there is some method to which associations matter and which ones don’t. So shush, we’re trying to have a conversation.

***

Another one-word genre named after a philosophical connection to a single game is the roguelike, christened after 1980’s Rogue. And, in 2008, members of the International Roguelike Development Conference in Berlin set about trying to define the genre. (I promise I’m not just going to summarize that one episode of Game Maker’s Toolkit.) Attendees began with a corpus of five games that, despite not yet having an agreed-upon definition, were, unequivocally, roguelikes, an attitude roughly analogous with the Supreme Court’s classification of pornography: “even if I can’t define it, I know it when I see it.” And, from these five games, they attempted to deduce what makes a roguelike a roguelike.

So perhaps we can follow their example. We’ll take a corpus of five games and see what they have in common. How about The Secret of Monkey Island, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, Myst, Beneath a Steel Sky, and Trinity? All five visually and mechanically dissimilar - three third-person and two-dimensional, one first-person and three-dimensional, and one second-person and made of text (no-dimensional?) - yet no one would dispute they’re all adventure games.

Okay! We can see a lot of common features: dialogue trees, inventory, fetch quests. But here’s the rub: to define the genre by the first two would be to leave out Myst, and defining it by the third would leave out Gabriel Knight, and, honestly, any one of these would exclude LOOM, which I think anyone who’s played one would look at and say, “I know an adventure game when I see one.”

For the sake of inclusivity, we could go broad, as I did with my “puzzles and plots,” and, while this does include everything on our list, it also, unavoidably, includes games that provoke the wrong reaction, like Portal - “I know a puzzle-shooter when I see one” - and Inside - “I know a puzzle-platformer when I see one.” Trying to draw a line around everything that is an adventure game while excluding everything that is not is no easy feat.

The best adventure game definitions are written in a kind of legalese; Andrew Plotkin and Clara Fernandez-Vara have both tackled this, I would say, quite well, with a lot of qualifications and a number of additional paragraphs that specify what counts as “unique results” and “object manipulation.” It takes a lot of words! And no disrespect - I can’t have an opinion in less than twenty minutes anymore - but I can’t help thinking we could go about this a different way.

What the Berliners cooked up in 2008 was, instead of a lengthily-worded definition, a list of high- and low-value factors a game may have. The absence of any one was not disqualifying, but the more it could lay claim to the more a game was… Rogue-like. These were features that could exist in any game, in any genre, but when they clustered together the Berliners drew a circle around them and say, “the roguelike is somewhere in here.”

A central idea here is that the borders are porous. If we apply this thinking to the adventure game, we could say that Inside and Portal are not lacking in adventure-ish gameplay; they simply have too low a concentration of it to be recognized as one.

This is genre not as a binary, but as a pattern of behavior.

***

So, to unpack that a little, I’m going to use an allegory, and, before I do, I want you to know: I’m sorry.

In 2014, professor and lecturer Dr. Marianna Ritchey, as a thought experiment demonstrating the socratic method (I’m sorry), hypothesized a conversation between Socrates and Euthyphro (I’m sorry) in which Socrates posed the internet’s second-favorite argument: is a hotdog a sandwich? (I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. We’re doing sandwich discourse.)

Ritchey imagined Socrates asking Euthyphro to define “sandwich,” and sparking the dialectic in which Euthyphro offers up increasingly-specific definitions of “sandwich” and Socrates challenges each one with something non-sandwich that would necessarily fall under that definition: is a hotdog a sandwich? is a taco a sandwich? are three slices of bread a sandwich?

Now, in this scenario, Socrates is - as is his wont - being a bit of a tool. Euthyphro does all the work of coming up with these long, legalistic definitions and, with one, single exception, Socrates sends him back to square one. But Socrates is making a point, (or, rather, Ritchey is): can we really claim to know what a sandwich is, if we can’t explain why it’s a sandwich? Perhaps we should admit the limits of our common sense. Perhaps we should embrace the inherent uncertainty of knowledge.

Or perhaps we could tell Socrates to stop having flame wars and think like a Berliner.

Does “sandwich vs. not-sandwich” have to be a binary? Could we not argue that a sandwich has many qualities, few of them critical, but a plurality of which will increase a thing’s sandwichness? Are there many pathways to sandwichness, a certain Platonic ideal of “sandwich” that can be approximated in a variety of ways? What if the experience of “sandwich” can be evoked so strongly by one factor that some leeway is granted with others? What if many factors are present, but none quite so strongly that it generates the expected sensation? The question then becomes which factors contribute most to that experience, and how much slack can be granted on one axis provided another is rock solid.

A sandwich is not merely an object. It is a set of flavors, textures, sensations, and cultural signifiers. We so often try to define objects by the properties they possess and not by the experience they generate. But a sandwich does not exist solely on the plate, but also in the mouth, and in the mind.

Let us entertain that it’s fair to say a difference between a chip butty and a hotdog is that one feels like a sandwich and one does not.

***

In 2012, the internet was besotted with its fourth favorite argument: “Is Dear Esther a video game? You know, like really, is it, though?” And David Shute, designer of Small Worlds, a micro-exploration platformer (and maaaaaaaaybe adventure game?), countered this question with a blog post: “Are Videogames [sic] Games?”

Shute invoked the philosophical concept of qualia. A quale is a characteristic, an irreducible somethingness that a thing possesses, very hard to put into words but, once experienced, will be instantly recognizable when it is experienced again. Qualia are what allow us to, having seen a car, recognize other cars when we see them and not confuse them with motorcycles, even if we haven’t sat down to write a definition for either. And if we did try to formalize the distinction - say, “a car has four wheels and fully encloses the operator” - our Socrates might pop in to say, “Well then, friend, is this not a car? Is this not a car?” To which Shute - and, by extension, we - might comment that Socrates is, once again, being a buttface.

“If I remove the wheels from a car, then it no longer provides the basic fundamental functionality I’d expect a car to have. But it’s still a car – Its carness requires some qualification, admittedly, but it hasn’t suddenly become something else, and we don’t need to define a new category of objects for ‘things that are just like cars but can’t be driven.’”

What’s special about qualia is that they’re highly subjective and yet shockingly universal. We wouldn’t be able to function if we needed a three paragraph definition just to know what a car is. Get anywhere on Route 128?, forget about it. These arguments over the definition of “game” or “sandwich” ask us to pretend we don’t recognize what we recognize. Socrates’ whole rhetorical strategy is pretending to believe pizza is a sandwich. And anyone who doesn’t care about gatekeeping their hobby will see Dear Esther among other first-person, 3D, computer experiences and know instantly that they fall under the same umbrella. Certainly putative not-game Dear Esther has more in common with yes-game Half-Life 2 than Half-Life 2 has with, for instance, chess.

Shute goes on, “To me, it’s obvious that Dear Esther is a videogame, because it feels like one. [W]hen I play Dear Esther I’m experiencing and inhabiting that world in exactly the same way I experience and inhabit any videogame world – it has an essential videogameness that’s clearly distinct from the way I experience an architectural simulation, or a DVD menu, or a powerpoint slideshow. I might struggle to explain the distinction between them in words, or construct a diagram that neatly places everything in strict categories, but the distinction is nonetheless clear.”

This is the move from plate to mouth. If you’re trying to define the adventure game and you’re talking only about the game’s features and not what it feels like to inhabit that world, you’re not actually talking about genre.

***

So if we want to locate this adventure experience, and we agree that it can, theoretically, appear in any game, we might look for it where it stands out from the background: in an action game. Let’s see if we can find it in Uncharted. It’s a good touchstone because we know the adventure experience is about narrative gameplay, and Uncharted has always been about recreating Indiana Jones as a video game; converting narrative into gameplay.

When attempting such a conversion, a central question designers ask is, “What are my verbs?” Nathan Drake’s gotta do something in these games, so we look to the source material for inspiration. A good video game verb is something simple and repeatable, easy to map to a face button, and Indiana Jones has them in abundance: punch, shoot, run, jump, climb, swing, take cover. All simple and repeatable; you can get a lot of gameplay out of those.

But that’s not all there is to Indiana Jones, is there? There’s also… well, colonialism, but turns out that translates pretty easily! But... Indy rather famously solves ancient riddles. And he cleverly escapes certain death, and has tense conversations with estranged family members, and finds dramatic solutions to unsolvable problems. And none of these are simple and repeatable; in fact, they’re dramatic because they’re unique, and because they’re complex. And Uncharted renders all of these sequences the same way: with a button remap.

When Drake talks to his long-lost brother, or discovers the existence of Libertalia, his jumpy-shooty buttons turn into a completely different set of mechanics for just this sequence, and then go back to being jumpy-shooty. Where, typically, you have a narrative tailored around a certain set of core mechanics, here, the mechanics tailor themselves around a certain narrative experience. And each of these narrative experiences tailors the mechanics differently.

What if we made a whole genre out of that?

Adventure games are the haven for all the misfit bits of drama that don’t convert easily into traditional gameplay. In the old games, you’d never ask “what are my verbs,” because they were at the bottom of the screen. Or, if it was a parser game, your list of possible verbs was as broad as the English language; if a designer wanted to, they could, technically, have every valid action in the game involve its own, unique verb. Rather than specialized, the mechanical space of possibility is broad, the verbs open-ended, even vague, meaning different things in different contexts. The idea is that any dramatic beat can be rendered in gameplay provided you can express it with a simple sentence: push statue, talk to Henry, use sword on rope. Nathan Drake shoots upwards of 2000 people in a single game, but he’s not going to solve 2000 ancient riddles, and he shouldn’t. What makes ancient riddles interesting is you’re not going to come across very many in your life. So maybe the mechanics should be as unique as the event itself. And maybe discovering what this event’s unique mechanics are is part of the gameplay.

The best word we have for these moments is “puzzle.”

Adventure games aren’t named after their core mechanics because, by design, adventure games don’t have core mechanics. Puzzles have mechanics, learning them is the game, and they can be whatever you can imagine. Which is not to say they will be; many games over-rely on inventory and jumping peg puzzles. Even in a near-infinite space of possibility, there are paths of least resistance. But many adventure games have neither, and many are built around single mechanics that don’t appear in any other games.

An adventure game puzzle isn’t simply a thing you do to be rewarded with more plot, it is an answer to the game’s repeated question: what happens next? It was literally the prompt in many versions of Colossal Cave. How did The Stranger find the linking book that took them to Channelwood? How did Robert Cath defuse the bomb on the Orient Express? How did Manny Calavera find the florist in the sewers of El Marrow? It is story told through gameplay, and gameplay built for telling stories.

So I would amend my prior definition, “adventure games are about puzzles and plots,” to “adventure games are about puzzles as plots.”

Beyond that, if you want to know what understand the adventure game experience, you may just have to play one (I suggest Full Throttle).

***

Rick Altman argues we too often define genres by their building blocks, and not what gets built out of them. If you want to write science fiction, you have many components to work with: spaceships, time travel, nanomachines. You can make sci-fi out of that. But what if you take the component parts of science fiction and build… a breakup story? Or a tragicomic war novel? Is it still sci-fi? Let me put it to you this way: if somebody asks you to recommend some science fiction to them, and you say "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," how likely are they to say, "yes, this is exactly what I was asking for"?

Blade Runner is what happens when you use science fiction to build film noir. Dark City is what happens when you use film noir to build science fiction. So what defines a genre, the bricks, or the blueprint? Any meaningful discussion should account for both.

Adventure games are mechanically agnostic, all blueprint. You can build one out of almost anything. We took the long road because the ways we’re used to thinking about genre were insufficient.

***

So: from a few steps back, the adventure game isn’t even that weird. Game genres are usually named after their mechanics, and a small handful are left in the cold by that convention. This would have been a much shorter conversation if not for the fact that video games run on a completely different set of rules from every other medium that has genres.

...but do they, though?

What actually is genre for?

Well, Samuel R. Delany - yes! yes, I’m still talking about this guy - describes genre not as a list of ingredients but a recipe. Imagine for me that you’ve just read the following four words: “the horizon does flips.” If this is just a, for lack of a better word, “normal” story - not genre fiction - that’s gotta be some kind of metaphor, maybe for the protagonist feeling dizzy, or when the drugs start to hit. Whatever it is, it can’t be literal; the earth and sky do not change places in naturalistic fiction.

But they can in fantasy. Certainly stranger things have happened. And they can in science fiction, but by a different set of rules: now there’s a “why.” It’s gotta be something to do with gravity or the warping of space; even if the story doesn’t explain it, it has to convince you, within a certain suspension of disbelief, that such a thing is happening in our universe. Whatever it is, it’s not magic.

These four words can mean many things. Genre informs you which of the many possible interpretations is the correct one. (For what it’s worth, they’re Barenaked Ladies lyrics about being in a car crash.) The label “science fiction” isn’t there to tell you whether a story has rayguns, it’s there so you know which mechanism of interpretation you should employ.

Genre not what’s in the book. It’s how you read the book.

The opening chapters of a mystery novel may be, by the standards of any other genre, excruciatingly dull. A lot of descriptions of scenery and a dozen characters introducing themselves. But, because you know it’s a mystery, these first pages are suffused with portent, even dread, because you know someone’s probably gonna die. And some of these mundane details are just that, but some of them are clues as to who committed a crime that hasn’t even happened yet. You are alert where you would otherwise be bored. And you know to watch for clues, because you know you’re reading a mystery. Those are the genre’s mechanics.

Genre dictates the attention to be paid.

Words, sounds, and images don’t mean things on their own. They have to be interpreted. If part of genre is the audience’s experience, it’s an experience that audience co-creates, and it needs clues as to how. I’ve said before that all communication is collaborative. Here’s what results from that: all art is interactive.

Video games are not unique in this regard, they are simply at the far end of a spectrum. But if the purpose of genre is to calibrate the audience into creating the correct experience, perhaps it makes sense that the most interactive medium would name its genres after what the player is doing.

So the label “adventure game” is, to the best of its ability, doing the same thing as “adventure novel,” and as “first-person shooter,” if, perhaps, a bit inelegantly. There may be better ways to straddle all these lines, but the shorthand reference to an old text game gets the job done.

So that’s the end of our journey. I really hope we can do this again, and preferably not in another four years, but we’ll see how thing shake out. Regardless, I’m glad you were with me, and I’ll see you in the next one. It’s been an adventure.

#video essay #adventure games #who shot guybrush threepwood

[moralanxietystudio]

“An RPG / Visual Novel / text adventure hybrid” is a mouthful - Roadwarden Devlog

In her Rock, Paper, Shotgun article, Jay Castello has mentioned:

The game’s genre is purposefully fluid. On (...) Studio’s website, the top frequently asked question says “I can’t figure out what is this game’s genre,” to which they’ve cheerfully replied “Me neither.”

When I mention Roadwarden in my Facebook posts or on Twitter, I usually struggle describing it. I keep saying things like “RPG / Visual Novel / text adventure hybrid”, but it’s not very... marketable. I like to use “interactive fiction”, which is arguably correct and sounds fine, but it doesn’t explain well what the player does in the game.

The main goal of this post is to sink deeper into this topic: how could we label Roadwarden? And what it actually is?

By the way, during the next couple of days I want to update the game’s demo. It’s going to be awesome.

Why am I looking for a label?

Why is the label important? Is it just because it’s convenient for social media ads?

When we categorize a game, we also set up the player’s expectations. If we call a game an endless runner, we make a promise. We claim that it’ll be easy to learn and hard to master, with a very stable pacing, without pointless plot and accessible from your phone. Sure, some endless runners can diverse from this premise or even completely fail at executing it, but making this label is an act of communication. Here is what I have to offer. Are yo interested?

And while Roadwarden fits into various definitions of specific genres, it makes promises that are not as commonly associated with its labels. It has an experimental approach to role-playing. Violence, that’s always plot-related and significant, not grindy. Exploration of a grim, detailed and consistent setting, but not a very heroic one. Dialogues used as the core of the experience, not just a tool. Humble adventures of a regular person in a world that overwhelms it. And I try to avoid common tropes in my story.

And I never ask myself “is it OK to add this new feature? after all, it’s not popular in this genre!”. I add everything that helps me make a better game. I put the experience above the marketing convenience.

A term “video game RPG” is famous for being a very vague label, pretty much impossible to define. It’s one of the most diverse branches of gaming. Every person plays RPGs for different reasons, thou we could probably make a list like 1) a complex story with possible side quests, 2) some character progression (both story-wise and through XP-like mechanics), 3) combat and exploration. If you prefer western games, you’ll probably enjoy 4) having important decisions. And you probably like 5) fantasy, eventually science-fiction with fantasy elements.

Sure, there’s a lot of variety - we have action RPGs, text-based RPGs, tactical RPGs, dungeon crawlers, rouge-likes... It’s really weird that the same label somehow covers The Witcher 3, Undertale, Final Fantasy VI and Wizardry from 1981, yet not Far Cry Primal, but that’s because these games are classified by an objective definition of a genre. We just try to say: “if you like X, you may also like Y. they’re kind of similar”.

Roadwarden as an RPG

When I develop Roadwarden I’m interested in things that most RPGs consider unimportant. And I don’t mean something like “I care about story, and These Other Games are all about combat”! That would be a silly statement. But I put an emphasis on aspects of the story which are often marginalized.

For example, in most RPGs you simply kill things (in self-defense!) and grind XP to get stronger. You can kill 10 packs of wolves and 25 boars and it means absolutely nothing. You’re just overcoming a barrier while trying to get a new level or reach the other side of the forest. Killing these enemies won’t be considered animal cruelty. Won’t destroy the balance of the nearby forests. Won’t starve the villagers. These animals are not Really a part of the story.

In Roadwarden, bandits don’t randomly spawn and die without influencing the plot. They are not some random loot waiting to drop on the floor for the player’s convenience. They have families, friends, goals, story behind them. They don’t want to kill you - they want your stuff. And they’ll try to rob you only if they know you can’t beat them. Without an unfair advantage they wouldn’t put themselves at risk.

In my game, violence means something. Nobody here dreams about it, aside of the most terrible, wicked people. Every death leaves a void, and void should be haunting.

In most RPGs you find a tavern, buy a potion and leave. In Roadwarden you spend 15 minutes talking to the innkeeper, and he’s not there just to give you a quest. He wants to know more about you. He wants to know what news you’re bringing. And if you can be trusted.

Also, potions in this game are rare and have taste. And aroma.

Your character isn’t going to have one hundred thousand coins at the end of the game, nor murder two thousand creatures to save a village inhabited by 30 NPCs. They characters are not waiting for The Chosen One or a master of martial marts that can save them. You’re just someone who tries to change your own life by doing something risky, in a realm that’s filled with people who don’t even know if they want you here.

Your character is a part of the world they live in. And I think most RPGs don’t do a good work reflecting this idea. Immersion should be something more than the constant pursue of better graphics, cinematics and more “freedom”.

So while Roadwarden is still a game that includes combat, trade, exploration, unlocking new abilities and building your character, it’s all put in a new context. And there’s a good chance that a portion of RPG fans wouldn’t be satisfied with something this different. I try to encourage them to take a look... But I don’t want anyone to feel cheated.

Roadwarden as a Visual Novel

Roadwarden may also not be a perfect fit for many Visual Novel fans, even though it involves a lot of narration, descriptions and dialogues supported by limited visuals. Roadwarden has fewer gameplay elements than most RPGs, but way more than most VNs - it even introduces simple survival mechanics.

Also, the story is non-linear - it’s very complex (what doesn’t mean “long”) and modified by how the player moves around the map. Many VNs introduce story branching, but I’m pushing it unusually far. And, of course, Roadwarden has way more choices than most VNs, even though some of these choices are focused on role-playing alone and don’t impact the game’s mechanics.

Not only that, but the visual style and the lack of common tropes that are appealing for the core VN-fanbase can be a big problem. I was even asked a couple of times if my game will involve any romantic relationships. Sure, there are successful VNs that don’t involve porn (VA-11 Hall-A), romance (Ace Attorney), manga-style drawings (Cinders), nor Best Girls, so I’m not saying it’s impossible to make one and prosper. But it’s playing against the odds.

All these things push me into being very careful here, and I usually feel that I should say something like “it’s a Visual Novel, BUT...”

Roadwarden as an adventure game

So let’s make a step back. There’s an argument to be made that Visual Novels are a sub-genre of (or rather, an evolution of) a more interactive label. Here’s how Wikipedia defines the adventure games:

(...) a video game in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving.

That works, doesn’t it? It’s also fair to say that such a definition is very vague and doesn’t even exclude RPGs or games like Half-Life. Quest for Glory series, for example, is usually considered to have “RPG elements” or gets classified as a hybrid of both an adventure game and an RPG.

This vagueness opens adventure games for many subgenres, and Roadwarden graciously falls into a couple of them at once. It has scenes with text parsers, typical for interactive fiction, but its advanced dialogue choices could even categorize it as digital gamebook (CYOA-like). Probably a better option for us is a “graphic adventure game”, since there are Some graphics and few ways to interact with the game - parsers, in-game “buttons”, dialogue choices.

I have a pleasure to be a part of few adventure game communities and there’s usually a small range of titles that are constantly mentioned as the “classic” adventure games. Point & clicks (Monkey Island, Grim Fandango), graphic games with parsers commands (King’s Quest), sometimes games like Myst...

Text adventure games, while accepted, are not really discussed often. And it’s difficult to make silly memes about them, so they are a bit obsolete. However, a group focused specifically on text adventure games really doesn’t care about graphics.

It feels to me like there Should be a spectrum of graphics vs. text, and of visible interface vs. text parsers. But it’s not the case. Text adventures and graphic adventures are almost in different worlds - not because of what they are, but rather because of what communities surround them. And, once again, Roadwarden is in between. It’s not just a hybrid of an RPG and an adventure game, it’s also a hybrid of a text adventure game and a graphic adventure game.

Roadwarden is a hybrid, and that’s not sexy

In conclusion, here are some of the genres that I think are strongly present in Roadwarden:

· RPG;

· Visual Novel;

· text adventure game;

· graphic adventure game;

· digital gamebook.

Also, I heard opinions that “it feels a lot like a tabletop RPG”. What makes me happy, since it’s intentional.

Some of my game’s features are not exclusive to any specific genre. All of the labels I’ve listed tend to be story-heavy and support their plot with dialogues (or even narration), often include inventory management, allow you to role-play a protagonist and tend to use fantasy settings. Others, however, are genre specific: parsers, open world exploration, mechanically progressing protagonist, simplified visuals, resource management...

Roadwarden is a hybrid, what means it’s going to have a problem appealing to fans of a specific genre. Yet, at the same time, it’s a game that’s not restricted by its labels - and I don’t think genres should limit our designs. My game can include all the things it needs. It can be unusual, experiment and creatively look for new ways to explore.

I just hope I can earn your trust.

#indiedev #indie game #devlog #rpg #visual novel #pixelart #text adventure #adventure game #video games

[rastagong-tearoom]

Serving of Tea #4: The last stretch

Excerpt from Devilman Crybaby, courtesy of reddit user Tomaiua.

Hello everyone!

I know it's been forever, apologies for this utter lack of updates. I am not dead yet, and I have been working on Sylvan Disappearance all the while.

It has been pretty challenging, though. It's also not over yet. I've had a pretty busy semester school-wise with a certain research project, and working on both a visual novel and my research consistently has been……… pretty difficult. I think I fared well enough, overall? Well, I still have some amount of work ahead of me.

At the same time, part of why this whole VN development thing took so long is because I didn't want to cut too much on sleep, social time, down time. For the most part, I have succeeded in this regard! Yeah for healthy habits!

Besides, I can announce that the scripting process of Sylvan Disappearance is now complete! This is the last stretch, finally.

Here is a brief description of what remains to be done:

Going through a last editing pass

I still haven't read the VN from back to back myself, and I absolutely need to do so! For the sake of editing the text itself to a satisfying level of course, but also to ensure the internal coherence of the story and to polish the general presentation.

I ended up changing a number of core scenes during scripting, and if I do not ensure that the whole narrative is consistent, some parts might feel somewhat strange in the final result.

I might also cut down on the length of certain scenes! The story currently sits at a little over 45 000 words, which is actually quite a lot. I promised myself that I would not hesitate in cutting down where possible, if appropriate. We'll see.

Soo, yeah, the whole thing definitely goes a bit further than a mere editing pass.

Some amount of external testing

It's tempting to skip this step, but I know I shouldn't!

In the field of game developement, it's usually recommended to test early and frequently. This generally holds true for parser- or choice-based interactive fiction.

I am not sure of the applicability of this idea to visual novels, though. Since they tend to be longer, and more linear —in short, more alike to regular novels— iterative testing doesn't seem as helpful. It usually doesn't make much sense to have someone read an incomplete draft, unless the projected length is very high, or specific feedback on a precise aspect is needed. (I'd be curious to hear the thoughts of other writers on the matter!)

At any rate, I'll be kindly asking a few friends for help regarding playtesting, I hope it will work out!

Correctly attributing every free-to-use asset in the story

This one is going to take more time than it appears.

As I explained in the past, I rely extensively on photographic backgrounds with permissive licenses for the story, and it will probably remains so for the foreseeable future. As you can imagine, this practice of reuse extends beyond backgrounds: all sound effects and music in the story are somehow free to use.

Whether or not they use a Creative Commons license (which explicitly requires attribution), the authors of all these resources ask to be credited for their work, as they rightly should be.

I always strive to be precise and exhaustive when attributing specific assets! It's basically the least I can do, and it's even very little in comparison with the real, hard work which went into the production of original music, sounds, photographs.

However, explicit and correct attribution is not that common. It might be because in the mind of creators and final users alike, there's something shameful or cheap in the act of relying in pre-existing work, which all ties into our expectations of high production values regarding digital works. This is of course very understandable, because commercial pressure requires market value. And there is obviously tremendous value in original art.

However, I genuinely believe that assets in the public domain or with permissive reuse licenses should be valued as sources of common wealth too. And this starts with rightly attributing these assets to the creators who kindly offered them to everyone. The Creative Commons non-profit offers us both a succint summary of good attribution and an in-depth look at the best practices for attribution. I highly recommend checking out the latter if you're interested in the topic!

The baseline is that good attribution does take a little time, but not too much. Ideally, the title, the author, the license and a link to the source should be included. There are no hard rules though, it is more of an general ethical recommendation. As stated in the page: “there is no one right way; just make sure your attribution is reasonable and suited to the medium you're working with. That being said, you still have to include attribution requirements somehow, even if it's just a link to an About page that has that info.”

The best practices page also acknowledges that attribution is harder in non-textual media, like games and videos, and suggests different methods of attribution.

I've personally settled with:

A succint summary of all the contributors on the itch.io page that will host the VN. It merely lists names by category.

This summary is also reported in the rolling credits at the end of the game.

An in-depth credits menu inside the game, accessible from the main menu at any time. Each track, sound and background is visible either with a thumbnail, or with an audio player. In all cases, the credits menu explicitly lists the author, the license, background information on the asset and a link to the source.

I won't lie, coding a credits menu takes a little time! I still think it's worth it, and I hope some players enjoy having a look at the assets that went into making the whole VN, and learn a few things about the numerous real-life locations and talents behind it all!

The credits menu itself is mostly coded now, though I still have to add the audio player for sounds and music, and to fill it with all the assets. I've also coded the rolling credits at the very end, and I similarly only need to fill them with the names of all the involved authors.

Attributing each asset with all the required information will take some time, though. It's relatively easy to get lost in the task, to spend hours tracking the source of each asset if it was not cleanly compiled somewhere prior to beginning. I learnt this lesson the hard way in the past.

For Sylvan Disappearance, I prepared myself correctly. I've been using a giant spreadsheet to keep track of each and every asset used in the course of the story, with all the required information easily accessible by column. I even added bookmarked assets that I did not intend to use at first, for easier reference in case they became useful. Here's a sneak peek:

Now all I have to do is reporting each and every line in the credits menu. It will take time, but it is doable!

A potential release date?

When will this VN finally come out? ...I... still can not say for sure.

This month, this much is certain! I am almost done with schoolwork, but I will most likely be busy again in the second half of April anyway. But overall, Sylvan Disappearance should be released by April 26 at the latest!

(Most likely, it will be released right before April 26.)

That is all for today! This should be the very last long-form serving of tea before the release.

I will endeavour to write very short promotional posts. And since I still cannot show anything else from the game itself, I will find something else. I already have a small idea, I think it can prove interesting!

Until then, take care everyone!

#Sylvan Disappearance #visual novels #vn dev #vn development