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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Walkthrough comp: reviews/critiques (long)
Message-ID: <GDv88M.GI@world.std.com>
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 00:33:58 GMT
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Xref: news.duke.edu rec.games.int-fiction:63294

I wanted to jot down some short comments about these games and
transcripts, but found that for certain reasons I had a lot to
say, perhaps because constrained creativity is a topic that is
near and dear to my heart, and also because being I'm not very
good at being both brief and clear, so I try to favor clarity.
And since I wrote about all of them this came out pretty long.

=
= Jigsaw 2 (Adam Cadre)
= Lighan ses Lion (Andrew Plotkin)
=

The thread running through all the games in this competition
is "game which both would never have been written if not for
this competition and yet does its best to convince you otherwise".
This is less common in other competitions; many mini-comps have
simply restricted games to "genres" we have seen outside that comp
(one-room games, inventory-less games, CYOAs), and games written
for SpeedIFs rarely have the time to try to convince you otherwise.

These two authors (and I think it's no coincidence that it's
two of the most accomplished IF authors) made the most conscious
decision to leave out the "do its best to convince you otherwise".
Instead, the authors saw the opportunity of a new medium, the
opportunity to write games that unabashedly would never exist
outside of the competition.

Adam's game uses the competition walkthrough to humorous ends;
I can even imagine this as him taking his "instead of saying
'it would be cool if', just go write the game" advice (see 9:05)
to an extreme: noticing something amusing about the competition
walkthrough, he chose to make the joke into a game rather than say
it on ifMUD. I don't think it's worth saying more about it; suffice
it to say I enjoyed it thoroughly for its entire length.

Zarf's "game" goes to a different extreme; rather than focus on
the walkthrough, he takes the opportunity to write a transcript
for a game that could never really be. Of course, it does use the
walkthrough, but I suspect the value is in its entire construction,
not in how it cleverly builds on particular properties of the
walkthrough. More I cannot say, since delving into it in detail
did not attract me personally.

Of course, both of these authors might disagree with my analysis,
and whether they do or not, my analysis might be right or wrong;
sixteen possibilities all told, so I suppose the odds that I am
both right and that they would agree with me are low. I'll spare
you "A Dark and Flamey Posting", my choose-your-own-followup game
exploring that space, with its easter egg location "Replying
About Jigsaw 2 (as Adam Cadre)".

=
= Constraints (Stephen Granade)
= Deus Ex Machina (Gunther Schmidl)
=

I have chosen a rallying cry for my criticism of this comp.
That cry is:

   WHY A DUCK?

A better cry would be "WHY A LION", since almost all of the
games have one of those, whereas half the games choose to have
something flying at your head from out of the corner of your
eye instead of an actual duck, but I prefer the sound of
"WHY A DUCK".

The point of the cry is that few of the games met the challenge
full-on, answering the question "why is there a duck in the
game" plausibly. Constraints answers it a little, but it
quickly invites more questions.

To address the broader question implied by "Why a duck?":

Constraints answers the challenge of the comp by piling on
nearly every strategy known to mankind. Where Dreams uses
a surreal setting, Constraints uses four different settings,
three of which allow "strange" actions: a world of magical realism,
surreal dreamworld, the "real" world, and a fantasy world. The
use of multiple disparate sections is itself a strategy for
combining the multitude of actions found in the transcript.

DEM does something similar, although without all the
variations, and steering more in the direction of the absurd
than the surreal; the author seems well aware of the
implausibility of the whole thing, given his willingness to
title it as he did. In DEM and Constraints, the real world setting
is used to bring all the chunks together, and they are perfectly
realistic and plausible in this way; and yet I can't help
feeling that if one's goal is to create a game with a
plausible independent-of-the-comp existence, surrealistic actions
combined with "it was all a dream" is a cheap way out.

Then again, it worked for The Wizard of Oz.

[Perhaps I am being unfair to Constraints because I liked
the first room of the game so much I was disappointed that
the game didn't actually deliver that "promised" experience,
and am unfairly holding that against it.]

Constraints gets points for connecting the story in its
"real world" with the theme of the comp, as reflected in
the title; DEM's title also connects to its story beyond
simply reflecting the mode of its plot.

One more nice thing about Constraints...

[Gameplay spoilers for Constraints in the next paragraph.]

There is a level on which the author is not concerned about
plausibility that is I think one of the crowning moments of
this game (much like in Jigsaw 2). The author manages to
introduce at least one puzzle *for* players who *are* playing
from the walkthrough, and if you haven't played it and are
planning on playing it, just stop now, okay?  Anyway, when
a confronted with the sequence "TAKE NEXT TURN SMOOTH DUCK...",
a player might type "TAKE", which picks up some random object.
The player quickly discovers that "NEXT" is not a verb, so UNDOes
and tries "TAKE NEXT". Instead of taking an object, this appears
to mean "WAIT", which is a bit odd, until the player realizes that
"TAKE NEXT TURN" is a "plausible" synonym for "WAIT" (not that it
would ever appear in a real walkthrough, so plausibility founders
a little bit, but that's seemingly unavoidable in this comp).
There is, at this point, a duck, one who can be seen to smooth
his feathers, so it is with some confusion that the player finds
that "SMOOTH DUCK" is not accepted, because "SMOOTH" is not
a known verb--which means adding even more words on the
end isn't going to help, and suddenly the player (well, I did)
has a confused moment: a puzzle even though there's a walkthrough.
I was *very* impressed with how Stephen pulled this bit off,
and I don't think anybody else in the competition came close
(probably because they didn't try), although he achieves a
similar effect with "SWITCH PLOVER...".

[Also, in the process of playing Constraints, I discovered
that Tads is rather arbitrary about what effect UNDO has
after a parser failure; UNDO would step back before "I don't
recognize that sentence" properly, but after "don't know the
word" it would seemingly undo the previous command as well,
as if it didn't count.]

=
= Dreams Run Solid (Caleb Wilson)

Where Constraints is all over the map, Dreams runs straight
with a very consistent surreal tone. I think of all of the
entries that were actual games, this one seemed to me to
be the most plausible "could exist outside the comp", although
that degree of plausibility is still not very high. But I
think it works better as a game than Constraints, despite
the fact that I had 10x the number of things to talk about
with Constraints.

=
= Twilight in the Garden of Exile (Alexander Spiridonov)

This game seemingly hung WinFrotz rather early on. (I say
seemingly because maybe there was some magic keystroke I
was supposed to press--for example, for a while I thought
Walk Through Forever had crashed, until I thought to look
at the status line. I know Pytho's Mask is great and all,
but I really wish people who want to do this sort of thing
would switch to a development system that allows the
"status line" at the bottom (for Inform authors, that would
be Glulx). Input does not belong at the top of the
screen. Heck, neither do status lines, according
to the human factors literature; it was just a convenient
hack for traditional scrolling outputs, which would scroll
it off the screen and then you just redrew it. We can do so
much better today; note where the status line in most GUI
programs is.) So I can't really say much about it, hence the
huge parenthetical comment about a different game.

Well, and one more thing. Twilight offers the archtypical
example of what I'm calling a "non-puzzle." There's an
object. To open it, you need the password. True to walkthrough
form, you can just type in the password without learning it
in-game. But, just for the sake of thoroughness, what is the
puzzle? If you go off-walkthrough, how do you discover it
in-game?

By examining the object.

Throughout most of the comp games there were an awful lot of
non-puzzles like this.

=
= A Walk Through Forever (Duncan Cross)
= A Venture (Denis Hirschfeldt)
=

Why a duck?

Both of these games try to cover up their absurdity by asserting
that they are "bad" games--WTF supposedly incorporating a goofy
game the protagonist threw together quickly, and Venture supposedly
being an "old sk00l" game.

They are both kind of fun in their own way.  WTF's bad
game seems kind of pointlessly bad, though, bad to the point of
not too fun, although the author makes up for it with things like
"A voice from the audience calls out, 'OPENING SQUARE BRACKET'";
but the author seemingly ran out of steam and decide to put in
an interminably long unfun sequence which, at least, demonstrates
that Graham Nelson was wrong: a crossword can BE the narrative.
(Although the section is vaguely amusing in a sort of meta-
way, but Jigsaw 2 does it better.)

A Venture has some really beautiful touches--like its use
of "ON"--but it also doesn't go to any effort to hide some
absurdity that is beyond absurd, like the "WAKE FISH" sequence.
Well, it does, through its meta-commentary, which is basically
to point out just how hard and unforgiving these "really old
skool" games are--they're not your father's old skool games.

The walkthrough sequence "DRAW SWORD WAVE FAN DANCE ABOUT PAINT"
was apparently a very hard one for most of the games in the
competition to address plausibly; both of these games use it
as essentially a time-killer, although Venture makes it a bit
more interesting than that--but the point is that the way in
which the commands advance the game has very little to do
with what the commands actually accomplish.

=
= Bollywood Hijinx (Jamie Murray)
= A Very Strange Day in the Life of a Maid (Mel Brittingham)
=

One of the joys of fiction is that you get the opportunity to
experience a new world, something you've never seen before.
So I was interested in Bollywood's setting--especially
after reading Emily Short's comment on it--and was a bit
disappointed with what I actually got; I'm not clear that
anything in the game would change if it were rewritten as
a wacky game set in Hollywood instead.

A problem I have with these two transcripts is I can't believe
in them as transcripts. To some extent that they hew to
the form of adventures, by being present-tense second-person with
prompted imperatives that specify the actions of the protagonist;
but Bollywood lacks room descriptions and any sense of "place"
as it unfolds, and both have an awful lot of people just
walking by at random at appropriate moments in the transcript,
without trying to establish their existence previously; they
don't have a real feel of being fuses and daemons. Ok, actually,
Strange Day doesn't seem to have that many (the muffin is a
notable example), but I definitely came away from it feeling
that way.

Bollywood at least made up for it with some cute moments, like
the context in which "LION" and "PRAY" are brought together.

=
= Time Bastard (Matt Francisfordcapollasdracula)
= Persistance de la Vision (J. Robinson Wheeler)
=

Of all the games in the comp, I found these two to be the
most plausible, the most convincing. I say that about Persistance
with severe hesitation. I played Time Bastard last, so my
expectations were very low by the time I got to it, and I was
pleasantly surprised to see how successful it was. [As I go
through this fixing grammar and spelling, I note that I wrote
"played" instead of "read", and I think that reflects just
how convinced I was.]

All through my reading of Persistance, I apparently misunderstood
the tone of voice the author intended.  There's clearly some
conscious irony: TAKE ALL, or the exchange
   "You have free will, Henri," says Jean-Claude.
   "Not hardly," you sigh.
(which might have one ironic meaning in IF, where the player is in
control, not the PC, but which takes on a different meaning in a
game so obviously on rails). Because of that, and the implausible
inference from the parser at the beginning ["THINK (about Stephanie)"]
I had a grand old time reading the whole thing imagining the
author chuckling over my shoulder at the sheer implausibility
of the whole thing *as a game*; the fact that nearly every
command is effectively triggering a cutscene, the fact that
most commands are spelled out to the player in the last
paragraph before the prompt. But on reading the author's notes
it seems he was serious about the material, at least as a
story, so I suspect that I was reading this tone of voice into it.

And so I have a lot of trouble imagining that anybody would actually
put this thing into a game: except that its author is Rob
Wheeler, and I recently read his essay about his "movie player"
technology used in Centipede; this transcript seems sort of like
the culmination of that strategy, and hey, at least it (perhaps)
makes the player type in the commands instead of typing "Z".
So, if any other author had written it, I would write it off
as "Implausible. A story written in second person present tense,
passed off as a transcript." Instead, in the face of its author's
other work, I have to consider it plausible; at which point its
ranking leaps enormously, because it manages to be the sole game
of the comp to avoid surrealism, absurdity, or wacky silliness.
[Except when it gets to the dream sequence. But so close! I'll
choose to believe that the author did the dream sequence for the
fun of it, not because he was too constrained.]

Time Bastard, on the other hand, combines the rather strange
elements of time travel, Lovecraftian mythology, and a small
amount of wackiness into a whole that is vaguely plausible.
It's perhaps not hugely plausible, but it has a relatively
coherent world-logic without appealing to "surreal logic"
the way something like Dreams does. Moreover, it pulls out a
twist ending which gives it a grounding in the real world
just as much as Constraints does; so these two aspects together--a
comprehensible logic for the weird parts, and an ending that
puts it all together in a much-less strange way--combine to
create a game that I *could* imagine being written independent
of the competition.

For example, I think the game section in Time Bastard for
"STAND ON EAST SWING KNIFE LION PRAY" is the most convincing
of the comp: a multi-stage puzzle set in a single scene,
with all of the components evolving naturally; and while
there is a certain silliness to the narration, the
situation itself is quite believable. (Time Bastard also used
a single technique to work around the odd "ZRBLM" and "XYZZY"
commands, which was an example of a *good* way to use the
same strategy to get around two problematic commands.)

Time Bastard is (I think) the only transcript which chose
to include off-walkthrough commands, which is crucial to
creating this believability. It's *possible* that Persistance
wouldn't need so much leading text if Rob had done this,
but I have my doubts, since its narrative seems to need
to run continuously the way it does, without slowing down
for off-walkthrough turns.

=
= Fit for a Queen (Margia McPolti)

Actually this game was written by me. I hadn't planned on
admitting to it--my oeuvre of released games now comes to
three games written under time pressure, none of which are
at all representative of my WIPs or what I *want* to be
doing on a large scale, and which play less to my strengths
as a programmer and more to my weaknesses as a writer--but
I feel it would be dishonest to make the previous comments
without admitting to it.

So I will take this as an opportunity to talk a bit about
rails. First let me say that I find it ironic in the Alanis
sense that the author of Galatea and Metamorphoses (and
perhaps A Dark and Stormy Entry?) should run a competition
in which every submitted game is on rails, often on huge,
enormous, blatant rails.

[Every game, AFAICT, except Margia's, the first two-thirds of which
(six rooms) can be done in mostly any order, and the last third of
which was on rails as a sort of parody; had I known what the other
games in the comp would look like, I wouldn't have bothered
parodying rails. Then again, I guess what I discovered, struggling
with the added constraint "not on rails", is that this was too many
constraints; I stayed off rails at the expense of "continuity", hence
my choice of genre to try to mask this.]

Admittedly, given the relative successes of "Being Andrew Plotkin",
"Shade", and "Rameses", being on rails may not be such a bad thing.

I guess the issue here is that they're not just on rails, or maybe
it depends on how you define "being on rails". There seem to be two
major additional issues in my mind: the degree to which the player
character takes actions without the player choosing them, and the
degree to which actions taken have unpredicted consequences.

The phrase "on rails" means many things, but the overriding idea
that it is normally used for seems to be a heavy linearity: at each
point in the game, you can only do the thing that the author allows
you to do; you can perhaps bash around in place trying other things,
but nothing is going to happen until you do that one action.

The thing is, games "on rails" often still try to give the player
the illusion of control--the actions taken by the player character
are the actions specified by the player; you are simply constrained
to taking the linear sequence of actions that the author has come
up with for you to follow along.

So let me define some terms. I'm going to use "on rails" to mean
what I just said above: strictly sequential sequences of allowed
commands. I also want a term that refers to the fact that the player
character takes actions without the player requesting them; this
is common in cutscenes, but I don't want to confuse this with
proper cutscenes (which need not even involve the player),
so I'll call this "uncontrolled". Finally, there's the fact that
commands entered by the player can have unexpected consequence;
I'll call this "unpredictabile". (Of course, a certain level of
unpredictability is always required in every game, or it's not
really a game.)

Let's look at the three games mentioned before. I just picked those
three off the top of my head as representative games from the last
comp, so they may not be an ideal set, but what the heck. I'm also
going to characterize them from memory, despite the fact it's been
more than half a year, so I may get this wrong.

"Being Andrew Plotkin" has some major cutscenes, but I don't
recall it as being that uncontrolled. The player still chose to
sort the files, open the file cabinet, open the door, enter
the tunnnel, etc. Similarly, sorting the files sorted the files;
opening the file cabinet didn't, since it was stuck; opening
the door did; entering the tunnel did, although it led to strange
consequences; so I'd deem BAP neither "uncontrolled" nor
"unpredictable" in the senses I've defined.

"Shade" was not at-all uncontrolled. Nor was it unpredictable,
exactly; the actions had unpredicted consequences at first,
but they quickly became predictable--and this unpredictable
consequence was really the whole point of the game in the
first place.  So I'd deem it neither.

The famously ineffective parser in "Rameses" I would tend to
deem "unpredictable"; clearly in some cases the player character's
actions are not the choices of the player, but that's not really
my point of "unpredictability"--Rameses is a special case here,
since it's not merely the consequences of the action that are
unpredictable, but the action itself. I can't remember how
uncontrolled it is; somewhat, certainly, but I think the game
tended to give you a parser prompt when it was time for something
major. You could argue that that whole parser refusal business
is more a matter of "uncontrollability" instead of "unpredictability",
I guess.

Why are these issues? Well, uncontrolledness just robs the game
of being interactive at all. Unpredictability tends to lead to
non-puzzles and anti-puzzles and unmotivated gameplay.  Here's
a fictitious example Adam Cadre invented in his comp00 reviews:

   You're in a cell.  You want to get out.  The door won't budge,
   and there's a guard posted outside.  You have a gold coin.

   GOOD DESIGN:
      Get the guard to open the door and let you go free in exchange
      for the coin.

   BAD DESIGN:
      Swallow the coin.  This randomly causes the door to fall off
      its hinges onto the guard, allowing you to make a break for it.

Unpredictability can lead to bad design. Fortunately, most of the
walkthrough comp games avoided this flavor of unpredictability;
instead, the action had its intended consequence, solving the puzzle,
but would lead to a further unexpected consequence; let me expand
Adam's example with

   SURREAL DESIGN:
      Get the guard to open the door and let you go free in
      exchange for the coin, but when he opens the door,
      the door turns into a duck which eats the guard...
      and now you have to get past the duck.

Is this good or bad design? The unpredictability doesn't make puzzles
unsolveable, but it tends to mess with the sense of overall motivation
and progress toward a goal; you're constantly overcoming obstacles
that you'd never seen until the previous turn. This is clearly
connected to being "on rails", yet not strictly the same thing.

[And none of this even addresses the "leading" I discussed previously,
where the puzzles are non-puzzles because their answers are explicitly
spelled out in the output from the previous command.]

So how, IMO, do the games stack up in forcing the player forward,
in terms of the three jargon terms I'm using here, "on rails",
"uncontrolled", and "unpredictable"?

Time Bastard:             on rails, unpredictable at times
Persistance de la Vision: on rails, uncontrolled
Dreams Run Solid:         on rails, unpredictable
Constraints:              on rails, unpredictable
Walk Through Forever:     on rails, unpredictable
Bollywood Hijinx:         on rails, unpredictable
Deus Ex Machina:          on rails, unpredictable
Very Strange Day:         on rails, unpredictable
A Venture:                on rails, unpredictable
Jigsaw 2:                 on rails

So, ok, there wasn't that much use to that exercise, except that
if you go along with my analysis you can see that these games are
a lot more unpredictable than the comp "on-rails" games.  I think
"Time Bastard" and "Being Andrew Plotkin" are actually probably
similar, but I'd need to replay BAP to be sure.

For comparison, in the main section of Fit for a Queen, there are
only a few unpredictable moments, if you stop to examine things
first--for example, the consequences of "SEAT ZRBLM" and "WAVE FAN"
are clued--but there are exceptions; TURN SMOOTH DUCK and the final
outcome of BOWL (although the latter was for tone, not constraint).
The only uncontrolled actions are stepping through the door when
you unlock it and falling off a platform, which are very minor.
To me, all of this makes the game a more plausible actual *game*:
you have a goal, you can try to achieve the goal, and you can
see how most of the actions you're taking are getting you closer
to your goal (if you don't stay strictly on the walkthrough). And
achieving all that was the goal I set myself for writing this game.

===

A few comments about common threads to the games:

Almost all of the games avoided the "obvious" interpretation
of DRAW SWORD and as a result picked roughly the same
interpretation as each other... leading me to question
what it means to be "obvious". The game Constraints rather
cleverly combined both meanings.

Sleeping fish form another theme; some games avoided it
by reading the walkthrough differently, but Time Bastard
addressed it head-on in a very clever way--one that I
kicked myself for not seeing coming.

Despite the lack of motivation for it in the walkthrough,
two games make reference to tentacle porn, and that's not
counting Time Bastard.

A few games made use of parser followup questions, despite
the way this is unnatural in a walkthrough; SWING KNIFE (at) LION,
SWITCH PLOVER (with) EGG, LOOK UP DRESS (in) BOOK [it was
interesting to see the more clever ways of avoiding the
"obvious" interpretation of "LOOK UP DRESS"]; admittedly,
my game seems to have done this more than any other.

Nearly every game ended up with some unused commands, although
I think nearly every author was working under the aesthetic
that including unused commands was inappropriate (Dreams Run
Solid has so many that I don't think it was intended to, and
there *is* a school of walkthrough that includes extras). From
my notes, it appears that (ignoring the alpha and omega of
the comp, Adam and Zarf's games) none of the actual games used
every command; of the walkthroughs, Time Bastard is the obvious
exception, although I don't didn't take notes about several
of them, so A Venture may also have succeeded on this front.
(If someone wants to debate this, I'll post the specifics.)
There is an overall pattern here which is, I guess, not very
surprising: the transcripts manage to meet both the "use
every command" and "plausible comp-independent existence" more
effectively than the actual games; not very surprising because
I imagine that the transcripts would require a lot more effort
to actually turn into games than any of the actual games took
(although, actually, I'm not sure Time Bastard would be that
much bigger than Fit for a Queen).

SeanB
