Category: interactive fiction

Interactive Dioramas

A couple of months ago this possible IF exchange popped into my head:

> EXAMINE CLOTHES
They’re… well, I suppose that depends. Are you male or female? >> F

You’re wearing …

The original context was that I was imagining a piece of historical IF with a meticulously-rendered environment; and part of the point would be to call the player’s attention to the ways in which, in that environment and culture, a person’s surroundings would be affected by gender, social status, and other features. So it would be better to collect protagonist data during the game (to highlight where and how it matters) rather than all at once at the beginning (leaving the effects obscure afterward).

It wouldn’t be too hard to code, I don’t think: you’d probably want to start with placeholder objects, like “generic clothing”, and then swap in the specific objects as soon as the player tried to interact with the placeholder.

I doubt I’ll have time or occasion to use this idea in the near future, so I just thought I’d throw it out there, along with a question: are there other interactive styles or approaches that would be especially useful for educational interactive non-fiction (as distinct from conventional IF)? (Another possibility that comes to mind would be footnoted IN-F, with source references appearing in a separate pane whenever the player encountered something.)

Types of Action and Types of Agency

I’ve been thinking again about actions and how they’re expressed, and how the communication of an action relates to player agency.

Let’s say, for now, that agency is the player’s ability to affect the world and story, and it depends, in turn, on whether the player can form a reasonable guess about the results of an action before taking that action. If the player cannot guess or does not care where the action will lead, there is no agency; the player is providing the energy for forward motion but is not meaningfully steering the work.

The thing is, different kinds of actions are themselves susceptible to different degrees of agency. We’ve been moving slowly (and with varying degrees of success) away from having all IF commands be of the sort appropriate to physical action.

Hypothesis

If we consider the types of agency involved in different kinds of action in the real world, we will be able to come up with better ways for the player to command non-physical actions.

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Alabaster 31 (Invisible Progress)

Have now:

  • had more human beta-testing and incorporated the feedback (of which there was not a huge amount)
  • removed the Conversation Builder extension and commented out a lot of the support code from the main game file, so that what remains now in the game is only the material that is intended for the final release
  • done a little more streamlining, getting rid of the remaining procedural rules in the hope that that would bump the speed a little. (It doesn’t seem to have done a huge amount, but it was worth a try.)
  • sent off the source code for further profiling: there is a particular slowdown when disambiguating the names of quips that I still have not been able to optimize away

Meanwhile, David Kinder has been working on Git and Glulx, using Alabaster as a benchmark project, and it looks like it will be able to speed things up a lot at the interpreter level as well.

Still outstanding before release:

  • find out results of profiling; tweak to improve if possible
  • add artwork, if same comes through

Information Flow and Gradual Characterization

Ran across an interesting post from Krystian Majewski on design problems with multiple choice dialogue, which, among other things, draws on some play-testing reports on Emerald City Confidential:

[Playfirst] did a user test of the indie point-and-click adventure Emerald City Confidential and they described how casual gamers reacted when they first encountered a multiple choice dialogue. You might think that point-and-click adventures are a good match for “casual players”. Well, when faced with their first multiple choice dialogue, most players simply froze in panic. They assumed that one of the answer as “correct” while others would lead to failure. From the kind if information they received, they couldn’t really anticipate what would happen. Even worse, after they decided, they didn’t receive a clear feedback on what effect their choice had. They were used to the transparent feedback schemes of most casual games and weren’t able to cope with the uncertainty.

I found this really interesting, because I would have assumed, in general, that a simple multiple-choice presentation would be more accessible to casual players than some other mode of interaction.

Majewski goes on to argue in favor of consistent verbs representing standard strategies usable at every dialogue point. At any given time (for instance) the player might have the option to respond intellectually, sensually, or in a religious way — a strategy that reminded me a little of the dialogue system in Forever Always.

I’m not sure how much application this has from an IF perspective. Certainly the core IF audience tends to have different expectations about how dialogue will work, so is probably not completely frozen by a menu. Moreover, it’s possible to write menu dialogue in such a way that it gives more of a hint about the likely effects; the writing and cluing of the player determines, to a large degree, how much agency it feels like one has. At the same time, I generally agree that menu dialogue feels more distancing (to me) than parser-based dialogue, even if the latter is heavily clued with hints about what the player can say.

One of Majewski’s commenters adds:

Real dialogue flow should be such that no specific choice matters too much, but the sum of the choices does. But as you’ve mentioned this is just a nightmare from a design perspective.

I’m not sure it has to be so bad a nightmare as all that, and it’s been done. To pick the obvious example, in Blue Lacuna… (very mild spoilers, and discussion of a WIP of my own, follow the cut)

Continue reading “Information Flow and Gradual Characterization”