Thoughts on Victor Gijsbers’ combat-and-conversation IF game ‘Mid the Sagebrush and the Cactus are over at Play This Thing. Short version: it does some really interesting things with the ATTACK system; though I didn’t mention this in the PTT review, I think Gijsbers achieved some of what Urban Conflict was trying for, in terms of creating a tense situation in which you have to judge carefully when to talk because the other person is an enemy. The writing itself didn’t always work as well for me. Full review (with spoilers past the midpoint) over here.
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Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
Personally, I dislike that the system is transparent to the user, because the status bar. Simply, I don’t want it. I want that the narrative and literature show me that the tension is high, not a explicit stat in the status bar. I have same feeling for the mechanic of action turn and reaction turn, the plot should be organic and flood free of any constrains. But yes, it is very interesting, as all Victor’s works.
I see your point, but I think I would have found the game very difficult to play without those reminders about which verbs were available at any given time (and even whether I was armed). More frustration would have meant a first-play experience focused on trying to figure out the verbs, rather than one about trying to judge the other character’s motives and feelings — and that would have been much less compelling.
I guess that in a certain sense, we here have a narrative at war with (not a crossword but) a tactical game. The more you hide the tactical variables by casting them in prose, the harder it will be for the player to understand the system and to make tactically informed decisions. The more you put them out in the open, the farther you move away from the ideal of a narrative told in smooth flowing prose.
There may seem to be a perfect solution available where you give the player the tactical information through the prose: when the tension is high, you have the game show prose than conveys tension, and so on. But even apart from (1) the complexity of such prose generation and (2) the danger that you’ll be making oblique statements about how tense the situation is ad nauseam, this will never work perfectly because (3) no implicit statement of the state of the world will ever be as clear and transparent to the player as an explicit statement.
Of course, some tactical information can and should be given through the prose: thus, if you drop a weapon, Sagebrush shows prose that suggests that dropping your weapons might make David less likely to attack; David’s reactions to getting shot indicate the deterioration of his morale; and so on. But this works better for specific effects than for continuously changing variables.
Personally, I do not much mind if a piece of IF is also overtly a game. I also don’t mind if a pen & paper RPG uses a lot of explicit mechanics to steer my narration. But I know that other people do mind, because for them it breaks the mood of storytelling, and prefer RPGs where no dice are ever rolled.
I guess that in a certain sense, we here have a narrative at war with (not a crossword but) a tactical game. The more you hide the tactical variables by casting them in prose, the harder it will be for the player to understand the system and to make tactically informed decisions. The more you put them out in the open, the farther you move away from the ideal of a narrative told in smooth flowing prose.
This is very nice and I think crystallizes some of the reasons for the difficulty I had with the game when I was beta-testing it. (Victor, I owe you an e-mail, which will come sometime this year.) My inclination on seeing a conversation game like this is to try to take it narratively, and in the beta versions this was reinforced by the help text, which at the time steered you away from Easy mode and turning on the numbers; but if you don’t see the underlying mechanisms… well, I’m pretty sure my feedback inspired the help section “I died! In easy mode!” (Which is still happening, lots. I think I need to turn the numbers on.)
BTW the game seems to run pretty well on Quixe, here; maybe that would be worth adding to the review?