People who say “X is impossible in games/IF” when what they mean is “I do not know how to accomplish X in a game/IF”.
Extra demerits if X is in fact something that is already done in various places but the writer of the assertion has failed to do basic research.
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.
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.
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”
Another IF Comp review, following my format for this comp. There is a cut, then any spoiler-free comments I have, and then spoiler space, and then more detailed feedback that assumes the reader has tried the game.
But first, we have some obligatory filler to try to make sure that the RSS summary does not accidentally contain any review. Filler, filler, la la la…
Okay. Here we go.
Continue reading “IF Competition: The Absolute Worst IF Game in History”
People who were interested in Second Person but didn’t buy the hardcover copy may be interested to know that many of the articles are now being presented online over at electronic book review, as a continuation of the First Person thread. Since there’s a large amount of content here and it may not be immediately obvious which of these articles are IF-related, I’ve also added to the Second Person page over at ifwiki with links directly into the IF-specific stuff.
Along similar lines, Dennis Jerz has an interesting summary of Chris Crawford’s talk at Hypertext ’08.
Continue reading “More Views on Games, Narrative, and Character”
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 