Planet Interactive Fiction

After recent RAIF discussion and the Gamasutra article on Far Cry 2, the rest of the world is also talking more on the question of how narrative can be constructed in games — out of what pieces, and in what sense it can be narrative.

A lot of the discussion comes back to traditional issues we’ve seen before: people re-discovering, for instance, the conflict between freedom, agency, and story. A lot of the techniques suggested (sandboxes where the player has to make his own story; branching narratives; narratives constructed in partial reaction to the player’s behavior, by some sort of drama manager) have already been floated a bunch of times.

For myself, I actually feel like I’ve talked out this topic for the time being, but it’s interesting seeing what everyone else is saying.

Here.

I talked a lot here about scenes and plotting, and a little in the comments here about pacing problems in games with a lot of conversation (or highly-scripted scenes in general). I noted that a conversation-heavy piece of work can get to feeling really stolid, and I’ve been thinking a lot about why that is in order to try to come up with better leavening.

I’m not looking here for the large-scale strategic pacing issues (when are new twists introduced, how fast does the plot move) but at small-scale pacing. Does the game seem to be flowing quickly or slowly at any given moment? Is it sufficiently engaging?

Text generated per move is one possible metric. Research puzzles, conversations, anything that involves the player reading a book or computer screen in game: these tend to produce lots of text for any given player action. The more text the player has to read before typing something new, the more space there is between actions.

Moves required to reach interesting outcomes is another. A fifteen-puzzle you have to manipulate for twenty-five turns before getting to an interesting or unique output may feel slow, while a puzzle that can be solved more quickly feels fast. The more moves are required to reach a new outcome, the slower the narrative moves.

Difficulty of planning the next move (or planning a sequence of moves) is a third. In conversation, especially conversation that uses menus or TADS 3-style prompts, the player never knows in advance what he is going to want to type next. Menu-based moves at least require the same type of input (a number); prompts are worse, from a play perspective, because for each move the player has to process something like

(You could ask where to find the diamond necklace of Queen Warthammer.)

into a new action

>ASK WHERE TO FIND THE DIAMOND NECKLACE

…which may not be a huge strain on the cognitive facilities of most players, but does introduce some processing time on the player’s end. It’s not creative-thinking processing, either — not “what do I do now to solve this?” — but dull read-and-repeat processing. In general, I nonetheless prefer this kind of conversation for a host of reasons — it’s more flexible than menu-based conversation and more accessible than pure ASK/TELL, and it can be heavily customized. So I need to find a way to work around the pacing issues. (Of course, prompted conversation does not mean that there has to be a prompt every turn, which can have a particularly numbing effect which makes the game feel little different from a CYOA. I think my compromise position is to prompt the player about important conversation that would be at the forefront of the protagonist’s mind, but leave optional conversation strands unprompted; also, to have a reasonable leavening of cases where, e.g., the NPC asks a yes/no question where no additional prompt is really necessary.)

In any case, in conversation scenes, we have lots of narrative development, but two slowing effects: each action produces lots of material to read, and it’s impossible to plan sequences of actions. There’s no flow. The player may not be able to get stuck (since there are no puzzles), but he may run out of energy.

People critique compass movement in games — especially when the player must repeatedly traverse a large map — as unrealistic, boring, and confusing to novices. But one thing I will say for it: it allows interludes of automatic play, where the player can essentially go on autopilot. That may not sound like much of a commendation, especially if the IF in question is trying for literary value, but I think from the perspective of pacing it is valuable for the player to be offered interludes of relatively quick, low-intensity play to cleanse the palate before another bout of conversation.

So challenge is to come up with styles of interaction that are complementary to conversation interaction — smaller amounts of text output, more opportunity for the player to anticipate future moves — but which are still interesting enough to belong in a heavily narrative game.

A good combat system might actually fit that description, which is one of several recent developments making me a little more friendly to the idea of simulated combat in IF. (Not purely randomized, though! Possibly not randomized at all.)

That doesn’t solve the problem if all your characters are peaceable or your plot doesn’t have scope for violent conflicts, though.

Hm.

After all the various discussion of whether Apple would or would not allow it: it’s there. Craig Smith has a free-download version of Frotz available, which comes preloaded with a bunch of games (9:05, An Act of Murder, All Roads, Anchorhead, Balances, Being Andrew Plotkin, Bronze, A Change in the Weather, Child’s Play, Christminster, Curses!, Dreamhold, For a Change, Heroes, Jigsaw, Lost Pig, The Meteor, the Stone, and A Long Glass of Sherbet, The Act of Misdirection, Photopia, Slouching Towards Bedlam, Spider and Web, Varicella, Vespers, The Weapon, and Zork (MIT version)).

It also has a button that taps straight into IFDB, and downloading a new game adds it and its cover art to your game collection.

Plays a little slowly with Bronze, but faster than the reports I’ve heard of the game on other PDAs (and Bronze does whacking lots of pathfinding all the time). Older I6 games are faster.

IF cover art looks really nice on the iPhone screen, too.

Victor Gijsbers recently posted about the peculiar comments “The Baron” has received: viz., that an independently designed, morally thoughtful game isn’t “feasible” in the present market conditions — even though “The Baron” exists and therefore has passed the feasibility test in the only meaningful sense.

For a long time I, like Victor, have been annoyed by the “market forces tell all” mentality that says that projects are only successful when they earn money and that artists prove their artistic credentials by selling their material widely. This tends to be contrasted with the “critical success” method of determining the value of material: something is good if it elicits the praise and admiration of a small cadre of those whose opinions matter. Bonus points if cat-fights arise between competing groups of critics.

There are pretty obvious problems with both of these approaches. Markets often value pulpy, least-common-denominator crap that gratifies some momentarily-trendy urge, which is why Dan Brown sells so many books and the commercial video game industry has such spasms about its own creativity (or lack thereof). Critics, on the other hand, can be extremely inward and academic, valuing formal innovation and meta-genre features even to the exclusion of meaningful content. Marie-Laure Ryan has written about the gap between highbrow and lowbrow interactive storytelling, suggesting that stories in videogame form are almost always targeted to one end of that scale or the other, leaving an undeveloped middle ground of thoughtful but still-accessible material.

Even if we shave away the argument about how to decide whether a piece of art is Good or Bad or worthy of canonization (an argument, by the way, that has never been satisfactorily resolved with respect to any art form), we are still left with the curious phenomenon that some players want the games they play to be commercial. Some of this has to do with perceived value — if I’ve looked forward to and forked over money for a game, I may be more excited about playing it and less likely to give up quickly. Some of it has to do with resources: a game with a sufficient budget may be up for a more thorough testing and better production values than one without. We’ve occasionally talked about these issues before.

A less-discussed part of the problem is the perceived contract between player and game designer. If I write a game and give it to you, you have no power to affect the content of the game. You can like the game or dislike it, play it or throw it out, write a positive review or give it the thrashing of a lifetime on IFDB, but there’s no force other than my possible interest in your good opinion to make me write a game that you’ll like. You have no reason to trust me.

In other words, I think some players don’t just (semi-perversely) want to fork over money for a game rather than receiving it free. I think they want to know that the game’s creators are making a living by their efforts, as a sign of good faith. The creator’s hypothetical concern for his artistic integrity or his reputation are not necessarily enough — there’s all sorts of junk on the internet, and it takes some kind of organized system of feedback to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Then the feasibility argument starts to sort of make sense again. It goes something like this: there isn’t enough of an audience for games of type X to establish a meaningful feedback loop between creator and fan base, in which the fan base supplies rewards in the form of money or reputation (the latter regulated in some way). The thing about big open source software projects is that they have gazillions of users — which means not only support, but response, and a relationship between the people who create/revise/improve and the people who use. (In some cases, a relationship known as “identity”.)

Historically, the player/author contract has been more of a problem than we would like in IF. There are lots of good games that don’t get reviewed nearly as much as they should, and authors have drifted away because the amount of response their work received was not enough to keep them interested. IFDB helps a bit, because it provides a low enough barrier to entry for review writing that more people seem to be interested in writing more reviews, and that’s terrific. But there are also still quite a few works that have not gotten the reception they probably deserved.

Conversely, every year there are a handful of games in the IF competition that are plainly there to irritate the judges (see: Sisyphus, Breaking the Code, Fat Lardo and the Rubber Ducky) and a larger number where the author contributed the game on a lark even though aware that it was junk, because, hey, what did he have to lose? This accumulation of garbage is dispiriting to judges and contributes to the external perception (from people who dip into the IF community once a year to try competition games) that it’s all amateur hour over here. The player/author contract is broken.

In this respect I agree with Jimmy Maher’s recent SPAG editorial, even though I disagreed with his comments on comedy and on the relative value of formal experimentation. We do have an ambition shortage.

But I understand completely. In the absence of money, or even a guarantee of reviews — without either the market forces or the critical cadre — it can be difficult to maintain serious ambitions in creating a freeware project. Especially a large one. Doing so often requires a deliberate rejection of perspective. Crunch time at Electronic Arts sucks, I’m sure, but at least the employees are getting a paycheck whose value the rest of the world will acknowledge. Putting major time in on a project that doesn’t pay and may not even get reviewed much, well, that can be kind of rough — especially if your significant other or your boss have other ideas about how you should be spending your energy. And besides, what are we doing that matters so damned much?

Here’s my answer, but then I deliberately got rid of my perspective on this point some time ago:

Interactive story-telling is the next great art form. It may not end up looking much like text-based IF, but some medium based on player/reader feedback will become (and remain) culturally relevant and widely-valued. I say this not out of homage to the technology — the computer is widespread, but so are cars and telephones, and they haven’t engendered any great enduring art forms as yet — but because there is potential for sorts of communication and forms of audience experience in interactive storytelling that are not mirrored in any of our existing media.

What’s more, the dynamic of interactive storytelling is especially suited to our difficult and questioning age, when — especially but not uniquely in the US — there is no uniformity of culture or values, and most of us live side by side with neighbors with vastly different views on religion, politics, sex, manners, etc. Interactive stories are strongly effective at communicating constraints and boundaries, and allowing the player to explore how those constraints differ from his expectations. They’re good at providing optional exposition, where the player can choose to explore issues that interest him or that are new to him. They allow for the development of a position that (at least partly) takes the reader/player’s views into account, rather than preaching the same message to all comers.

So I do think that it’s worth being ambitious about IF.

That said, I’m not always sure what ambitions are the most productive ones to embrace next, if you see what I mean. Writing the work I want to write, as well as I can possibly write it: yes, fine. I’ve got plenty of ideas about what I want to try next. But the external metric stuff is also important, both because it provides guidance for the development of craft, and because it’s worth contributing to a larger dialogue about interactive narrative, which we can only do if works get a certain amount of attention. But what attention? From whom? Where should we be trying to go, once we look beyond our own community?

I’m not always sure of the answer.

Talking about protagonist vs. player character, and Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom.

Robb Sherwin is the author of Fallacy of Dawn, Necrotic Drift, and other works. His new game coming out soon is called Cryptozookeeper.

RS: I am a 34 year old J2EE Developer originally from Rochester, NY. I attended Syracuse University, and moved to Colorado ten years ago. I live with three cats, Frobozz, Reggie and Boggit.

JD: First off, I want to quote some reviews as a way of discussing your prior work.

Chicks Dig Jerks: Begins in seedy bar, moves swiftly to cemetary.
A Crimson Spring: Begins in seedy bar, moves swiftly to cemetary.
Fallacy of Dawn: Begins in sushi bar, moves swiftly to morgue. [Source]

RS: I think I skipped bars in Necrotic Drift? But that all comes from how I used to DM games of AD&D growing up. I honestly couldn’t think of any logical reason why five people of different class and race would get together, so I just used the excuse of them all being at a bar.

JD: The mysterious stranger in a tavern fixation?

RS: Right, exactly.

JD: Sounds plausible. Since you embraced your inner psyche with Necrotic Drift you sort of got past that.

RS: Yeah, and at the same time, I have tried to ask myself if it’s really necessary for everyone in the game to be friends.

JD: Could you expand on that?

RS: A lot of fiction benefits from people arguing, and there is a little more of that in ND [Necrotic Drift], but I try to take it to an extreme in CZK [Cryptozookeeper], where there is more or less open hostility between everyone. Also, with the earlier games, I very much wanted there to be a side kick character. But it started to get ridiculous, because for a lot of the game, I didn’t have them react too much.

JD: Do you think the “cooperative party” mentality of AD&D has influenced game plots in general?

RS: I would say, yes, I think there is a common reference from D&D that game developers just naturally get, growing up. And in text, I think you get it even if you didn’t play D&D, because Adventure and Zork and such have D&D elements. So there is, like, no escaping it.

JD: Let me give you another quote

The oddness won’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows Sherwin’s previous work. His games often incorporate eccentric characters, difficult or dysfunctional romantic relationships, crude material handled so deftly that it comes out not being offensive after all, and many, many references to modern pop culture. [Source]

RS: It does sort of bug me that the great majority of games live in this vacuum when it comes to pop culture.

JD: You would prefer more pop culture references in general?

RS: I would assume that there is legal trouble if someone tries to quote a “Lost” reference, so I guess I understand why. But at the same time, I know I spend a lot of time talking about various forms of media with people, and to completely close that out from the kinds of things that your character can talk about seems to restrict things.

JD: You’re saying IF authors in general don’t capture “real” conversation very well?

RS: No, I think that their conversations are great, and in fact, being able to stay on target and stay focused is something I could probably do more of.

Also, it is tough - for instance: I was looking at a bug in FoD recently, and I saw a reference to something being more restrictive than “a Greek cafe”. I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about at first. I did some searches, and apparently like 7 years ago, Greek cafes were cracking down on MMORPGs games, or something. Which was fine at the time, but man, did that get dated. So I am definitely not doing things perfectly or anything.

I remember one review about ND where the reviewer was wondering why the first edition of D&D was referenced. And my reaction was just, well, I am in my 30s still talking about games from 20 years ago, so it was OK that in the future they might do that.

JD: Let me go on to my last quote.

I’m totally fascinated with Robb Sherwin’s evolution as an IF author. The standard progression seems to be to start out with some lousy puzzles and a weak story and so-so writing and cardboard characters, and gradually the author improves to producing pretty good puzzles and slightly less cardboard characters and an occasional nifty one-liner in the writing. Robb Sherwin, on the other hand, has basically had lousy puzzles and gameplay for all his previous games, but they’ve still been great to play because of the high-quality writing and characters. I’m pleased to say that Necrotic Drift, while not actually having good puzzles, has definitely reached the “not annoying” stage, puzzle- and gameplay-wise, and the overall package is really quite nice. [Source]

RS: Puzzles are very tough for me! I actually don’t put them into the initial design doc at all. But I go and add them afterwards, to try to help out the pacing. Sometimes, one might develop while writing a scene, but that is rare.

JD: Does that make it easier or harder to make them organic to the plot?

RS: I think a little easier, only in that, since I am never in a situation where I have this great puzzle I need to insert, they can all spring from the games themselves. But I am in awe of the puzzles other IF authors make.

JD: Have you thought of writing something without puzzles at all, given your initial design docs don’t have them?

RS: Yeah, that wouldn’t be so bad. There are very few puzzles in Pantomime, for instance, until the end. There was not a place where I think it necessarily suffered for it. But, the problem for me, in doing completely puzzless IF, is that I am asking myself, “Should this be a straight fiction story?” And that intimidates me, so.

JD: So you need some justification for nonlinearity, and exploration.

RS: Yeah. That is a good way to put it! I mentally think of the transcript in a puzzleless game, and I’m like, “All this guy did was go west a lot.”

JD: There’s also conversation that does “do something” and conversation which is just sitting chatting.

RS: Exactly - I try to make up for the bad or non-existing puzzles with requiring conversation between everyone.

JD: Is there some magical technical solution that might help? I mean help with the ‘go west’ transcript idea. If there’s some threshold of AI or something that would break it open.

RS: Yeah, having better AI (I guess what I mean by that is, AI that I can pull from libraries and plug-ins, so I don’t have to do it, badly, myself) does allow the author to mix things up, as well. Instead of having the antagonist take various steps that get everyone to the end game, he might better be reacting to the player, which would make for a more interesting run-through of the game. Of course, I am completely unqualified to make that stuff, so it’s not like I am issuing a demand or anything.

JD: What’s a puzzle you wished you had written?

RS: I am going to have to go with the wings puzzle in Photopia. It is the only one I can remember that actually had me grinning as I typed it in. I just *knew* what I typed was going to work. That is the ideal, as far as puzzles go, in my opinion. There have been many where I looked at it in the walkthrough and said, “Brilliant!” put that one was easy enough for me to figure out, but easy enough for me to actually, er, do.

JD: So your ideal would be something where the reader/player takes some action beyond the normal enough to be called a “puzzle”, yet is so intuitive they’ll know it will work?

RS: Yeah, I think that is right.

JD: What’s something in IF that you’d like to see — a trend or just a particular type of game? Something you yourself might not feel able to write but have been hoping someone else will.

RS: I would love to see one of the imps make a sequel to one of the games that could really benefit from it, like Spellcasting 401, or something.

But at the same time, along the same lines, games that do a lot with NPCs are really intriguing to me. I do have The Elysium Enigma by Eric Eve ready to play once I finish CZK.

JD: Ok, let’s get into your new work.

RS: Cryptzookeeper is basically a cross between Monster Rancher, Zork, and a good call on Coast-to-Coast AM.

Basically, I am hoping to put together a game that lets the player assemble various DNA snippets that they pulled out in a Zork-style treasure hunt, into the various monsters of legend and cryptozoology. At the same time, I am hoping to have character interaction in the game that makes it familiar to people that have played some of my other wares.

JD: Snarky, irreverent, pop culture, etc.?

RS: Yes! I am also going to try to experiment with selling it. I have no idea how that will sort out, but still. There were a few indie game sites that seemed to close people off if their games were not for sale, so that got me thinking.

I will try to make the direct download very cheap, definitely less than $10 and probably closer to five. I am not sure about the physical copy, as that will depend on the manufacturers and such.

JD: But you’re planning feelies? I remember the “pills” with Fallacy of Dawn and the really curiously colored d20 in Necrotic Drift.

RS: Yeah, I am definitely going to make a version that has a CD and a DVD style container. I am hoping to do some kind of instruction manual as well.

There should definitely be one more thing. I had considered chocolate animals, after getting some molds, but that might be difficult if someone chokes on the creme-filled hydra?

JD: Is there anything else significantly different from your prior work?

RS: CZK is a little different in that I am changing the conversation system.

I have been using the Photopia-style menus for a long time. And while I don’t like strict “ask about x” and “tell about x” I am trying to use a system that I first saw in Ultima 6, where keywords come up in a different color, and those relate to activated conversational topics. Also, the think verb gets used for a list of topics you can ask an NPC about.

JD: So the TADS 3 underlining essentially?

RS: Right.

JD: What about the puzzles in Cryptozookeeper? Do you consider them better than your previous ones? Why?

RS: I think that CZK gets around it, because you are always looking for more animal DNA. So, let’s say you see a moth - your goal, even if you are working on something else, might also be to get that moth.

JD: So the puzzle mechanic is well built into the plot this time?

RS: Right, exactly. So, the goal is to make the game not too ridiculous in getting that moth. Because, honestly, four of them fly into my home every time I go into the garage.

I also want to get away from something that David Welbourn said in the Get Lamp interview. He said something to the effect of, “If you see a bone in a text game, you know you’ll eventually have to give it to a dog. I am trying to avoid that sort of thing.”

JD: Simply objects that imply their utility, or is there a larger issue?

RS: Right - it seems very cliche to see objects that just get filed into the mental category of, like PUMA PACIFIER or whatnot. Plus, there is like a 40 year range in placating animals.

JD: What do you mean by that?

RS: A 4 year old knows that the cat likes catnip, and someone that has studies zebras their whole life might know that they like a certain kind of grass (which I co-opt by hopping onto the wiki) so to avoid all that would be the ideal for a text game.

JD: What’s the multimedia like on this one?

RS: I have character and NPC face pics up, when you are talking to people. There is also a location graphic. And then, to the right of the screen, is inventory. The screen gets modified when animals are fighting each other, but for most of the game, it’s very PC-centric.

I am going to try to make the graphics matter more, but at the same time a good friend of mine (who also tests) is blind, so I need to secretly add text to the game that will describe the necessary photos, through the screen reader.

There is music, but only during chapter title breaks. I found that music during the game itself was kind of awkward.

JD: There was some in Necrotic Drift, wasn’t there?

RS: Yeah, in ND, a song would start, and then just end. So if you took a while to solve a particular scene, there would be silence.

I think people also like listening to their own music for text games.

JD: What would be the suggested playlist for Cryptozookeeper?

RS: I develop it listening to “pop punk,” but I don’t recommend that genre of music to anyone. I know it is wildly unpopular.

But I guess, the mood I am trying for, are just those songs you play in the middle of the night. If a song would have worked for All Alone, by Ian Finley, I think it would work here.

More about Robb Sherwin’s past work can be found at the Jolt County website.

Rise of the Videogame Zinesters written by Anna Anthropy

The only thing that bothers me about this article is that the notion of using interactive fiction for an independent view is somehow new.

Maybe the title of the article should be Discovery of the Videogame Zinesters?

I’m sure anyone reading the blog and interested in the progress of Textfyre is wondering when we’re going to publish our first game. As I have said from the beginning, “We’ll get there when we get there.” and that statement still holds true today. We make progress in spots and we’re learning a lot about the business and artistic needs of the company as we go. Here are some of the things that have happened recently…

I did indeed hire an assistant, Sara Lieberum, to help with the internal business processes. Sara is an expert at helping start-up companies get organized and she’s a welcome addition to our team.

In the search for an assistant, I also found Justin Greene. He didn’t fit the assistant position, but he has a a great understanding of school systems and so we’ve hired him as our educational consultant. Justin is busy learning about Interactive Fiction, our products, and will be developing the lecture and lesson plans for middle school language arts classes. This coincides with our plans to develop an institutional version of each game.

In the process of looking for a UI developer, two people approached me that may well solve many problems going forward. The first, Will Capellaro, is a brand design developer. He’s taking on the role as part-time Art Director for Textfyre and has already proven to be an excellent partner in helping me understand the business side of managing artwork development.

The second was Thomas Lynge from Tenteo in Denmark. Thomas is a big fan of Interactive Fiction and has already started to help with the UI programming. They’re experts with WPF and Silverlight and have suggested that they would be very interested in developing a Silverlight version of the UI. Since having an online playable version of our games is important, this is a fantastic development.

On the game side of things, Secret Letter is nearing completion with its testing, Klockwerk is in the final writing stages and I7 programming is in-progress, and Giant Leaps has just begun its writing phase.

I’m hoping to have teaser online playable version of Secret Letter ready the next time I post. Stay tuned.

Here.