Re: Why so little Puzzleless IF?

["Mike Berlyn" <mberlyn@cascadepublishing.com>]

Stark,

Chameleon, long overdue because of the complexity of the project, is
puzzleless IF (as Muffy and I see it). Writing it has proven to be
infinitely more complex than writing puzzle-based IF for myself and for my
partner. We started the design over 15 years ago and had sold it to Infocom.
Thankfully, they were taken over by Activision, and Activision reverted the
rights back to us. I say thankfully because it has proven to be a bear to
write, and we would have missed every milestone by a margin too large to
calculate. Just talking to each other about the stories requires a few
minutes of explanation as to what story we are talking about.

I have been actively coding and scripting the product for over a year, now,
and am still not finished. I have, through experimentation and earlier
prototypes, learned that "press any key to read the next section" is an
unrewarding experience for text adventure players, and that readers, unlike
players, do not necessarily enjoy the wide-open environments supplied in
puzzle-based IF. These adjustments to the presentation have made for a
strange hybrid product which requires more thought and work than I had
originally thought.

Some overarching structures needed inventing, like a Scene, and some
messaging systems needed implementation and debugging. A reliable method of
getting characters to move independently using a generalized system similar
to that in Deadline, was a tremendous effort in itself. (When the product
ships, I will post the movement system, written in Inform, to the gmd site.)
A generalized method of tracking characters, their attitudes, and their
pasts had to be designed and implemented. None of this was trivial.

However, no matter how hard the code was/is to write, the design proved
harder. One of the major design problems is as follows:
When writing puzzle-based IF, you are writing (i.e.: you have to think up)
only one story and one environment. When writing non-puzzle-based IF, you
have to write several stories which interact with each other based on what
the player-reader does. Each story line must be equally compelling. Each
plot within the story line must make sense based on the characters in the
story. In essence, I have found the experience an order of magnitude more
difficult than, say, writing Suspended was.

I hope this explains somewhat why there is so little puzzleless IF. It sure
does for me. :)

-- Mike Berlyn
mberlyn@cascadepublishing.com
http://www.cascadepublishing.com


Stark wrote in message <01be637a$2021d280$69d408d0@Stark.foxinternet.net>...
>I don't like puzzles.
>
>I find them to be irritating, pointless, tedious, and a waste of my time.
>Because of this, I have little interest in text adventure games.
>
>However, I am intrigued by the idea of interactive fiction.  I like the
>idea of being able to play a part in a story, being able to experience a
>story interactively in a way which has never before been possible.
>
>Unfortunately for me, most of what has been written falls under the
>category of text adventure games.  Lots of rooms full of objects which must
>be manipulated in the proper fashion to solve puzzles, and perhaps some
>interesting text woven through it all or a story wrapped around it, or
>perhaps not.
>
>There have also been attempts made at writing quality interactive fiction,
>in which the story and the characters are of primary importance.  However,
>as far as I've seen, most of these are heavily influenced by text adventure
>games.  They are as much games as stories, forcing the reader/player to
>solve puzzles in order to allow the story to progress.  [By "puzzle", I'm
>referring to those actions a player has to take in order to continue the
>plot, and which are obscure enough that they might not occur to the player,
>thus resulting in the player being stuck]
>
>Having read through some of the threads on the topic of puzzles and
>puzzle-less IF that have been posted over the years, it seems that many
>people have believed that text based IF >has< to have puzzles in order for
>it to hold people's attention and be enjoyable.  Without puzzles it would
>be boring, without puzzles there'd be no point to the interactivity and one
>might as well just go read a book.
>
>But I would think that a few of the recent IF stories that have come out
>should disprove the above.  In the End and Tapestry contain no puzzles(ok,
>so Tapestry contains a couple).  Mercy is completely without puzzles, and
>seemed to have been well-liked.  And of course, there is Photopia.
>
>Photopia was almost completely puzzleless, and yet it was quite successful.
> People loved it, it won awards, and so on.  Photopia proves that
>interactive fiction does not need puzzles.
>
>So why are the above works of IF the only puzzleless ones in existance?
>There must be 1000 games in the IF archive, and yet 99.5 % of them are full
>of puzzles and of no interest to me.  And I've already finished the 5 or so
>which are puzzle free.
>
>Stark