Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: gdr11@cl.cam.ac.uk (Gareth Rees)
Subject: Re: Red herrings
Message-ID: <1993May9.004550.11444@infodev.cam.ac.uk>
Sender: gdr11@cl.cam.ac.uk (G.D. Rees)
Nntp-Posting-Host: duke.cl.cam.ac.uk
Reply-To: gdr11@phx.cam.ac.uk
Organization: U of Cambridge Computer Lab, UK
References: <H0Z93B1w165w@tfsquad.mn.org>
Date: Sun, 9 May 1993 00:45:50 GMT
Lines: 90

In article <H0Z93B1w165w@tfsquad.mn.org>, gtr@tfsquad.mn.org (Guy Thomas Rice) writes:
|> The problem with many, if not most, IF games, is that EVERY SINGLE OBJECT 
|> in the game is used for something, somewhere.  This is INCREDIBLY 
|> unrealistic.  In real life, you would NOT walk thru a building picking up 
|> everything that isn't nailed down.  Aside from the fact that you would be 
|> arrested, there's really no point to it, since 90% of the items you come 
|> across in your average room (in your home, let's say) are things you 
|> aren't going to use at all today.  They're obviously there for some 
|> reason, but the reason usually has nothing to do with whatever problem 
|> you're working on at the moment.  If my current problem is that I desire 
|> something to eat, I don't pick up every moveable object in my bedroom, 
|> the hallway, the living, and the kitchen so I can make a sandwich.
|> 
|> No, the problem with most IF games is a LACK of "red herrings."  To be 
|> realistic, there ought to be many items that simply aren't used.  Call 
|> them props, window dressing, whatever.  The lack of them makes is too 
|> obvious what IS needed (everything you can pick up).

I agree with you entirely, but stand by what I said about Planetfall, for the
following reasons:

Adventure games *teach* you to take everything that's not nailed down (in fact
in the hints for my copy of Planetfall there's some hint marked 'Should I take
the towel?' and the answer is 'in adventure games you should take everything
that's not nailed down.').  They do this in the following ways:

1. By putting the player in a desperate situation where survival is imperative
and in which when you are attacked by a dragon you don't have time to go back to
the armoury and get the sword.

2. By including bottlenecks, one-way passages and so on.  It's embarrasing to fly
away in the escape capsule and later on discover that you should have been
carrying a circuit board that you could have torn out of the computer.

3. By making you use objects in unfamiliar ways.  You might have thought the junk
mail was useless, but in the right circumstances...

4. By scattering lots of potentially useful objects in odd places.  It's annoying
to discover that you need a chisel and then have to wonder, 'I've seen a chisel
somewhere, now where was it?'  Of course, good map-making could prevent this but
its often simpler just to take everything so that you know where it is.

In order to be able to have lots of red herrings (and indeed interesting red
herrings) you need to foster an attitude of 'leave the objects alone until I need
them' and counteract the behaviour that has been taught by the devices above.

How to do this?

One way is for the game to take an active part in 'object management'. 
Hitch-hikers has a series of mini-games into which you cannot take objects from
the rest of the game, and from which objects generally can't be extracted.  The
player has to make do with what's available.  Gateway does something similar,
having mini-adventures from which you are expressly forbidden to extract objects,
and in the manual it explains that this is to help the player and prevent there
being hundreds of objects lying around. (It should be noted that this kind
of practice helps the writer of the game because it reduces the number of silly
combinations that have to be coded (for example, if the player can take the
lawnmower from the garden section into the house section and try to mow the
carpet)).

This can be taken to extremes - imagine a game in which the following could
happen:

    >look
    Kitchen.
    There is a kettle here on the table.

    >take kettle
    Taken.

    >out
    [You put the kettle back on the table before leaving]

    Living Room.

I myself would rather like this as it would absolve me of having to consider the
kettle except in puzzles that could happen in the kitchen (such as bringing a
letter to the kitchen and steaming off a stamp), but I imagine that many more
players would howl in frustration because they wanted to try throwing the kettle
at the guard or whatever.

The fourth point I mentioned can be counteracted by having some command, OBJECTS
say, that tells you what objects you have seen and where they were when you last
saw them.  [quick plug here for Graham Nelson's excellent game CURSES which has
this very feature - CURSES is a game in Infocom's data format and which can be
used with any Level 3 or higher Infocom interpreter.  It can be found at
ftp.gmd.de in if-archive/games/infocom.]

-- 
Gareth Rees <gdr11@phx.cam.ac.uk>
