Re: [BookClub] Some _Firewitch_ Impressions

[buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)]

Knight37 <knight37@gamespotmail.com> wrote:
>sgwrong@xtra.co.nz (sg) wrote:
>>It was interesting to read Stephen Granade's impressions. He played
>>the game when it was released five years ago. Does anyone else
>>remember playing the game then? Do they think their reaction to the
>>game would be the same if they'd played it this year?
>
>I remember thinking "this would be a very good text adventure for a 
>beginner."

I find this assertion interesting. I also downloaded it because
of the bookclub, and got stuck after perhaps half an hour.  It
gets added onto the big list of "highly regarded IF that I've
gotten stuck on". I made it through all of comp99, with some
reliance on hints, but I'm not sure I've finished a single other
game since then.

Partly this is due to my unwillingness to spend huge amounts of
time; I have no doubt I would never complete Zork or such a game
with my current attitude.

But some of it I can attribute to a game-design problem--which is
not to fault any of the authors for not choosing to make the game
design this way, but rather to simply say that the game design is
incompatible with my likes.

A fundamental flaw with many adventure games--especially commercial
adventure games--is that they open up many avenues of exploration at
once, but only some of them are solveable, but there's no way to
discern which ones those are. In some cases, the games are truely
non-linear and most can be solved at the same time (Enlightenment?),
but in many cases, only a few are solveable. But even then there's
generally no way to tell which kind of game a given one is until
you've solved a few puzzles and determined the lack of dependency.
In the case of JFW, after earning one point in something like 150 moves,
I found I had: a "puzzle" doorway which killed me, a disk which I got
past revealing an area I couldn't figure out, but couldn't get back
from, and a pit which I couldn't get back across. I have no clue
which of those were solveable from my current point in time and current
set of objects, and since they had the "couldn't get back from"
problems, I couldn't even oscillate between trying out various ones
without restoring, so I gave up pretty quickly.

A related problem which underlies almost all of my negative experiences
is the lack of motivation. Many games throw you in a situation in
which you don't have any clue what you're trying to accomplish in
the short term or the long term. JFW had this feeling for me, as
did LYG--as did the initial section of Curses, which I also didn't
get past. The constant references to Varicella's master plan
which I wasn't let in on made that game's lack of short-term
motivation more disturbing than it would have been otherwise,
making the fact that I was totally stuck excessively frustrating.
Quit telling me that I don't need to do that to accomplish the
master plan and just tell me the darn plan! (After reading the
solutions to it, I'm amazed at how any one could have solved it
*without* a time constraint, much less with one, unless I just
missed something totally fundamental somewhere.)

My deeper problem with most adventure games is the lack of what
one of my coworkers calls "intentionality": the ability of the player
to successfully make and carry out plans to complete goals. Some
examples of experiences which had intentionality: the disk in JFW,
or, especially, the flood puzzle in For a Change. The latter is
especially relevent because it plays on the player's previous
experience with the important object: a player can't successfully
make and carry out plans unless the player can predict the outcome
of actions. Unfortunately, since actions are so "emulationy" instead
of "simulationy" in adventure games, predictability is rare. The
simplest example of lack-of-intentionality that pops into my head is
getting the key at the beginning of Christminster; you have to
interact with a window having no clue that this interaction is
relevent to getting the key. Thus, confronted with the problem of
getting the key, you can't reasonably come up with a solution to
the problem *until* you've interacted with the window, which is itself
entirely unmotivated except because-it's-there. I believe some
people use "read the author's mind" to refer to puzzles where
the outcomes of interactions are unrealistically unpredictable;
I'm not sure this is a case where they'd use that phrase, since
it's not unrealistic.

Not everyone cares about intentionality, of course, and there are
kinds of games where intentionality isn't important at all. I happen
to like it, though, so I get miffed by that sort of thing as well.
Which is not to say that JFW lacks it; I'm not sure, since, having
solved no puzzles, I can't actually tell how predictable the outcome
of those puzzles are. So this whole thing was really just a
parenthetical rant I've been meaning to squeeze out for a while.
Mainly I'm just glad to see I'm not the only one being stumped by
highly-regarded "easy" IF.

SeanB