Against Flavour Text

01 Thursday Aug 2024

Posted by Joey Jones in Game Design, Interactive Fiction

Tags

games, gaming, interactive fiction, ludonarrative, parsercomp, puzzle design, puzzles, review, reviews, video-games

On Game Fiction, Topic-Based Puzzles, and Meta-Puzzles

19 Once and Zugzwang are, mechanically, the same game. These two mirrored games were released in ParserComp 2024 where they took 6th and 3rd place in the Classic Class. They were written by myself (Joey Jones) and Melvin Rangasamy under a set of pseudonyms. As in our previous collaborations, Melvin did almost all of the programming and structure, and I did almost all of the puzzle design and descriptive prose.¹ In 19 Once you navigate four chat screens, convincing your friends to go on a cinema trip. The puzzles involve learning chat topics and using them on other people; in Zugzwang you fight four fantastic foes. The puzzles involve learning special attack powers and using them on other enemies. If you haven’t played, they’re really short, go check them out. But they’ll probably still be just as fun if you know the idea, so don’t worry too much about spoilers.

Under the hood, the games are the same: they use a shared extension which determines the state engine for both of the games. Almost the only difference is in the room descriptions and response texts. To justify them being parser games, forcing players to type instead of clicking links, both games have a secret command that unlocks additional story content. The conceit being that you learn each command by playing the other game. The overall point of the gimmick (beyond being a fun joke to play on the judges), was to explore the nature of descriptive text vs mechanics. If two games have the same underlying puzzles, maps, and verbs, what makes one better and why?

GENESIS

Melvin Rangasamy and I had actually started making these games (and got about 85% done) for the 2016 IFComp, but we ran out of time and the next year IFComp changed the way the competition games were displayed. Originally, entries were shown in an alphabetical list, so the idea was to have one game appear at the start of the list and the other at the end. This was initially inspired by the author of 5 Minutes To Burn Something!² remarking that he didn’t realise his little game would be the opening act of the competition. Having determined that one game should begin with the digit “1”, and the other the letter “Z”, I settled on Zugzwang first. Having determined it should be a game about fighting fantasy chess pieces, I picked a completely different genre for 19 Once: realistic low stakes interpersonal teenage drama.

Melvin quickly made the framework for the games, essentially leaving a series of tables for me to fill in with the story and reaction texts. Despite this very low hurdle to jump, it took eight years for me to get around to finishing. Part of that was that I was never particularly satisfied with the Zugzwang story. Revisiting it allowed me to focus on punchier descriptive prose, and (following Melvin’s correct judgement) fleshing out the ending.

CONNECTIONS

We tried to make the connection between the two games as obvious as possible. Someone commented that the pair of anagram names were too similar. But from experience with Jenny Roomy and Jasmine Lavages, the anagrammatic pseudonyms we used for Escape From Summerland in 2012, no matter how ridiculous and unlikely your names almost no one will jump to the conclusion of it being an anagram unless you really spell it out. Even then, people realised that the pair of names were anagrams of one another but it took a while and some collective working out for players to even guess at the authors.

In general, players are not good at guessing that there even is a metapuzzle unless you really hit them over the head with hints. Here’s what we did:

Used two sets of pseudonyms which were obviously anagrams of one another.
Mirrored the cover art design so that at a glance they were clearly related.
19 Once makes reference to a shared “Checkered Series” chess-themed book and film series
“Zugzwang” is even name-checked once in 19 Once.
Made an IFDB entry for Zugzwang that said it was the second of a series.
Enlisted the help of Jon Stall to post a cryptic review for Zugzwang that stated there was a connection (using his opaque writing style so it wasn’t outright stated).
In a forum thread about meta puzzles, I outright stated that of them that “I think they can be fun, and I’ve done it myself a few times”.

The latest review of Zugzwang shows that even with the above, the connection was missed by some players:

TOPIC PUZZLE DESIGN

We started designing the puzzle structure of the games before I’d played C.E.J. Pacian’s Weird City Interloper, but it’s essentially the same idea: you use topics on people who give you new topics which you can use on other people to get new topics. This is inherently lawnmowerable so there’s only a handful of ways you can make a puzzle out of this:

Require a sequence of topics to be used on someone (in a specific order, or before moving on) to unlock a segment.
Have some topics not be successful until some other condition has been met.
Have some unlisted topic result in success.
Have more topics than you might reasonably want to try on everyone, encouraging more judicious use

Or alternatively:

Embrace the lawnmowing and make the text as fun as possible (this is what Weird City Interloper does).

The mirrored games take all of these approaches to different extents, but interestingly, the puzzles work better in different games. I’ll now explore the surprising reasons for this.

1 – SEQUENCE

To beat the Rock or Wesley (who are both The Western Being in the code), the player has to use three attacks without leaving the location. The Rock clearly signals that each attack is doing cumulative damage and that it heals when you leave. This same mechanic was harder to translate to conversation with a person, and so players felt the 19 Once version of the puzzle was more arbitrary.

2 – CONDITION

In 19 Once, Nora and Sofia won’t agree to going to the cinema until they know other people are going (one person and three people respectively). The same idea is expressed in Zugzwang with increased level of power after defeating enemies. It’s a common RPG trope, but the 19 Once version definitely made more narrative sense to me. Whether a precondition is fair or arbitrary depends entirely on the fictional framing.

3 – LEAP

If you’re going to use the parser, then you should justify making the player type. The usual way is to have a command that is not explicitly signalled be an integral part of the game experience. The player has to take an imaginative leap.³

At the end of 19 Once, the player learns a keyword. If the player takes the imaginative leap to try the word in Zugzwang, they’ll see new story content, at the end of which, they’ll learn a second keyword which unlocks a new ending back in 19 Once. If the meta-game was any more complicated than this, no one would have seen it. As is, several players missed this metagame aspect.

4 – OVERWHELM

A lot of puzzles in games can be brute forced. Two ways to design against this include: 1. Make the possibility space of the game so huge that it’s easier to just solve the puzzle properly. 2. Encourage the player to inhabit a role such that they would rather play along than brute force.

In the penultimate room in Cragne Manor, the Observatory, the player has the power to set the astrological sign, but there 6400 combinations, and so it’s quicker and more interesting to just solve the game normally than manually churn through all the possible states. Moreover, anyone that made it that far into the game would want to complete the puzzle as intended. In Toby’s Nose, Chandler Groover took the opposite approach: you absolutely could brute force all the suspects but then you’d bypass the whole game and also the answer you arrived at would make absolutely no sense. The player is trusted to actually want to play the game as presented to them.

Despite being mechanically identical, different puzzles in the two games make more sense than their mirrored counterparts. In Zugzwang fire makes more direct sense to use against a tree than talking about time does with a friend. Some pairs managed to be about equally coherent. Screeching counters the Bishop’s words, and in its mirrored puzzle, offering free tickets counters a lack of money problem. The fictive layer made some puzzles more likely to be solved organically, while the more arbitrary ones would be more likely to appear through lawnmowing.

5 – EMBRACE

When lawnmowering is going to be an expected feature, then the best approach is to make experiencing all the text as interesting as possible. In 19 Once you get funny, characterful interactions, in Zugzwang you get short descriptive moments. A fun thing for us was that everyone disagreed which was the better game. Even the authors! I preferred 19 Once, as a relatable story that drew upon my own experience with lost friendships; Melvin preferred the high powered action of Zugzwang, which also has punchier prose (and, indeed, more punches in general). The voters, overall, preferred Zugzwang. In both games, the player is rewarded with unique text for each topic and NPC combination (the same approach was taken in Weird City Interloper), with some topics in 19 Once having multiple possible responses for repeat tries. Making a text game distinct and characterful is even easier in a limited parser framework where you have fewer commands to implement and so its more feasible to give a unique response for everything.

AGAINST FLAVOUR TEXT

In collectible card games there’s a concept called ‘flavour text’: the fictional framing for the card which has absolutely no bearing on the mechanical aspect of the game. The default use of this is dismissive, it places the fictive layer as epiphenomenal to the mechanics of the game. This way of talking about rules has seeped into war games and, even worse, tabletop roleplaying games. As if the pure mechanics were the reason players were playing, and not the imagined world that those mechanics support.

Wargames originally had adjudicators and the rules were there to simulate real world battle effects, with new rulings introduced where realism dictated. As the wargame evolved, it split into what became tabletop roleplaying games (which kept the adjudication role) and more boardgame-like experienced where the rules-as-written took primacy. Giving primacy to the mechanics over the fiction would then seep back into roleplaying games, over the decades. In Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, characters would have special powers such as “Burning Hands”, which had certain effects in the tactical combat; but the game wasn’t interested in whether such abilities could be used to start a campfire, burn some evidence, or frighten a villager. The descriptive effects of the powers are meant as flavour text, and aren’t intended to be referred to to understand what the powers might do.

The effect of this is that the powers of the players’ characters in a game like D&D 4e are abstracted into a videogame-like realm of mechanical effect. This isn’t inevitable, even for videogames. While a normal single-player digital work can’t be so responsive as having a real-life Game’s Master, it can ground the action in a coherent fictional frame. Unlike in some real-world escape rooms, a mysterious door shouldn’t just swing open because you’ve reached made an arbitrary amount of progress: effects in the game should be grounded in an imaginative reality. 19 Once and Zugzwang demonstrate that the fictional framing of a game —including the quality of the dialogue, prose and story— shape how engaging any puzzles might be. This is why traditional adventure games with hodgepodge zany settings can be so unsatisfying to the discerning player.

MEANING

Ultimately, the players have the final say on how effective a game was at being enjoyable or conveying its themes. A few players of the mirrored games reported that the metagame content didn’t extend the story, it was more like DVD commentary. If true, this would be fine, because not everyone got to see these cross-game elements, so each game should ideally stand on its own merit.

A word of advice for any authors considering including augmented reality or meta puzzles in their work: fragmenting a story makes following the narrative harder. There’s such a thing as being too subtle.

The narrative question at the heart of 19 Once is “will these people manage to remain friends?”, or more broadly, “can teenage friendships stand the test of time?”. I feel like the cinema trip at the end of the game shows one answer to this question, and the responses to the two metagame commands show two further answers: a promising reigniting of friendship; a hint towards the splitting of the group upon new lines; a definitive loss of some, but not all, of the friendships. This wasn’t perhaps obvious enough in the game: I think that split-focus of a two-layered narrative (two different games, and two different settings) made it harder for players to read finer shades of meaning in the stories.

Finally, there is another meta layer of the story which won’t be obvious to anyone else except future biographers. 19 Once is about teenagers who were friends during their A-levels (aged 16-18) but drifted apart afterwards. My co-author and frequent collaborator Melvin Rangasamy met at sixth-form college at this age, in a Computer Science class, in 2004. Like Esther and Paige (in one of the endings), we ended up going to the same university. There we played a lot of chess in the university café, and began working on our first text adventures together. We’re still friends, making games twenty years on. So our personal answer to the narrative question “can teenage friendships stand the test of time?” is a reassuring “sometimes”!

I heartily recommend collaborations of this nature. Our games made together have better implementation than ones we make apart. ↩︎
5 Minutes to Burn received 119 votes, seventy more than the 49 that To Burn in Memory received, much further down the alphabet. Moving to randomised lists was a very welcome move. ↩︎
This approach is masterfully implemented in C.E.J. Pacian’s limited parser game Superluminal Vagrant Twin, improving upon the Weird City Interloper approach). ↩︎

Urban Exploration in Narrative Games

10 Monday Jun 2024

Posted by Joey Jones in Game Design, Interactive Fiction

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Anchorhead, environmental storytelling, Game Design, games, gaming, IFDB Spelunking, interactive fiction, Moondrop Isle, Myst, mystery, photography, puzzle design, puzzles, Return of the Obra Dinn, sub rosa, text adventures, urban exploration, urbex

The newly released Moondrop Isle is many things: a mystery, a puzzle-fest, an experiment in multi-author interactive fiction… but it’s also about urban exploration. It’s about going to a place where people once lived and worked, since left to nature and the elements. This is something of which I have first-hand experience…

Exploring abandoned places is a natural fit for an adventure game. Poking around somewhere you’re not meant to be and piecing together clues from the past is perfect for a mystery game that can easily accommodate puzzles.

*Inside the Lunarcade, in Moondrop Isle.*

There are at least three elements to urban exploration (as opposed to, say, fantasy cave exploration) that make it a rich vein for games, especially narrative games with puzzles: Abandonment, Breaking & Entering, and Verticality.

Abandonment

In an abandoned place, the interloper catches a glimpse of the past, and when they do, they may be seeing one of three pasts, each layered on the other: the original function of the place, the frozen moment of abandonment, and the afterlife of abandonment. The layering of the pasts allows a story to be told of a place as it once was, and as it came to be.

Original function

An abandoned place can be frozen in good condition, and offer up something like an experience of what it would have been like to go through that place when it was in use, only with less people and no one stopping you poking around the back rooms. This is what it’s like to explore non-abandoned urban locations in real life (i.e. trespassing).

*The rose to skull projector: most memorable part of Myst for me.*

This is the fundamental design of Myst (1993): the strange machines are still mostly in good working order, the locations are mostly kept quite tidy. Its just everyone had gone. The real allure of Myst (at least for me) is not just tinkering with old mechanisms, but exploring the Ages to learn about the character of two men, finding out who they are by what evidence they have left behind. Discovering a working projector which transforms a rose into a human skull is an early dark hint at to the nature of one of the men that made that place his home.

The Frozen Moment

When you explore an abandoned place, especially if no one else has disturbed it since, you might see evidence of the final moments that marked the place’s abandonment. This layer of history is the key part of detective investigation. Return of the Obra Dinn (2018) presents a ship seemingly abandoned, the remaining evidence in the form of corpses and signs of destruction). Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (2015) lets you explore a whole village just after everyone disappeared.

*The first of many corpses in Return of the Obra Dinn.*

Artistically deployed skeletons are a common trope in RPGs. In the Fallout series, they’re ubiquitous despite the apocalypse having taken place many decades before the events of each game. It’s common in such games to come upon a corpse in the state it was in when it died, perhaps with a diary in its inventory or the cause of death obvious from the scene dressing. Environmental storytelling of frozen moments can be more subtle, but you would be forgiven for thinking it always had to include a dead body.

Afterlife of Abandonment

Life goes on. Abandoned places don’t usually stay pristine like in Myst. Wildlife overgrows, brickwork crumbles, new people move in and start repurposing the old stuff. In Moondrop Isle swimming pools have become skate bowls, bamboo has clogged up courtyards, birds nest in a monorail station, and graffiti from previous urban explorers can be found scrawled on the walls. The more post-abandonment a place becomes, if life continues there then the less the original function of the place remains, until perhaps only a few ruins remain.

Breaking & Entering

A mystery requires secrets, and a game of exploration usually requires those secrets be physically manifested (as old letters, film reels, secret journals, keys). For a physical secret to remain secret, it must necessarily be hidden and guarded (if only by locks and walls). Breaking and entering is the means to get to such secrets. Puzzles around gaining entrance are straightforward to embed in the story and setting. This is the core dynamic in many adventure games: breaking into a place where you shouldn’t be. It’s most of the gameplay in Sub Rosa (2015), where you break and enter the house of your rival. It’s the first sequence in Anchorhead (1998), breaking and entering into the Estate Agent’s office.

*Breaking and entering is the first of several transgressive moments in Anchorhead.*

The transgressive act is the mark of the adventurer. If you’re where you should be, doing what is expected of you then you are not adventuring, no matter what ‘adventure playgrounds’ or climbing or kayak adventure package holidays would have you believe. In Broken Sword II (1997), you mostly play as George, but when you briefly play as his more normal friend, Nico, she will tell you “that’s something George would do” when you suggest stealing something from a museum.

Being blocked off from somewhere is itself a puzzle. It’s the most natural and common puzzle type for an adventure game because that’s what breaking and entering is: finding a way past walls, doors, and locks put there to keep you out. This is especially true for urban exploration: what makes it ‘urban exploration’ rather than a night time stroll is finding a way in to a place someone didn’t want you to go. Being blocked off in an abandoned building can happen at the three layers of time: a place that is always locked, a place that is closed off when it was abandoned, or a place blocked by something that happened in its abandoned state. Each of these states suggest in themselves different puzzles.

Verticality

Here’s a confession, when I write urban exploration, I write from personal experience. I have explored empty buildings in the cities I’ve lived and worked in, and even on holiday, I climb onto rooftops, vault over railings, crawl into vents. In my games, I’ve tried to translate some part of this experience, the wonder and mystery, certainly, but also the verticality.

To get into an abandoned building, most often you have to climb. These places extend upwards and are usually locked off on the ground level. An abandoned tower block in Calm (2011) was modelled directly on an experience of traversing a block of partially-constructed flats: we had to go all the way up one stair case and through a hole in the wall at the top apartment before we could go down another set of stairs back to the main entrance. My experience climbing over a wall to gain entrance to a soon-to-be-demolished mechanics garage was described during one of the vignettes in IFDB Spelunking (2012).

Last year I took a closed off footpath in Pittsburgh. It being overgrown and forbidden was fun, or course, but this was enhanced by the verticality of it, with its inherent danger, beauty of vista, and promise of a new location to visit.

When the Festival Place shopping centre was built in Basingstoke in 2002, it was built over an older outdoor shopping arcade with upper storey concrete walkways. One of these walkways was never demolished, but is preserved, along with some abandoned maisonettes, on the roof of the mall. A normal person would never see this, but someone could visit if they are prepared and able to pull themselves up onto a half-descended service ladder to a shop roof, and then shimmy up in a gap stuffed with air conditioner units, on up to the roof of the shopping centre. This experience inspired one of several ingress points to the Lunarcade in Moondrop Isle.

Lure of Abandonment

Urban Exploration (in real life, but especially in the carefully constructed world of games) allows the interloper to…

Experience mysteries of a place: what is was, what happened to it, and what it became.
Solve problems driven by their own curiosity (i.e. how to get in!), and enjoy the thrill of going where one is not meant to go.
Move through a space in unconventional ways: in windows, up drain pipes, through crawlspaces. Just traversing a place becomes a creative problem to solve.

So to adventure game designers, I say, head out in the night with sensible shoes on and don’t forget to bring a torch!

The Zany: Superhero League of Hoboken & deflating genre fiction

06 Thursday Jun 2024

Posted by Joey Jones in Game Design, Interactive Fiction

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

adventure games, games, gaming, Gamma World, Infocom, post-apocalypse, review, rpg, Steve Meretzky, Superhero League of Hoboken, superheroes, video-games, zaniness

Adventure games, especially where intended to be comedic, tend towards the zany. These kinds of games are full of eccentric characters, bizarre inventory items, and anachronistic situations. The underlying tone is zaniness: a preference for fun, creative un-seriousness over developed themes or coherent settings. Legions of pathetic heroes — dabblers and dilettantes, ensigns and apprentices — fill the ranks of adventure game protagonists. Adventure game puzzles typically rely on encountering and overcoming ad hoc situations, the sort not the domain of a serious professional, but rather a series of unusual predicaments that can be solved at a leisurely pace by an underemployed kleptomaniacal packrat.

*Monkey Island (1990) was replete with adventure game comedic anachronisms, on the solid bones of a genre-based pirate adventure story.*

Steve Meretzky’s adventure games (apart from a few standouts like A Mind Forever Voyaging) are prime examples of this zany tendency. This can be seen in his first game, Planetfall where you play a glorified janitor (the same idea was later taken up in Sierra’s Space Quest games), through the adaptation of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to the more sleazy later titles of Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and the Spellcasting 101 series. The culmination of this approach was his last game for Legend Entertainment, and his penultimate adventure game overall,¹ Superhero League of Hoboken.

For those unfamiliar: Superhero League of Hoboken (hereafter SLoH) is a hybrid RPG/adventure game. It has a grid based world-map, a party of combatants with stats and equipment that fight battles, but the game’s plot, structure, puzzles, and humour are all from the adventure game. The core premise is that in a post-apocalyptic Tri-State area, a league of costumed superpowered heroes in the ruins of Hoboken have to traipse about the wasteland, fighting mutants, enduring radiation, and solving whacky adventure game problems all ultimately caused by a sentient jack-in-the-box, Doctor Entropy.

The quests are all either resolved through finding the right object (sometimes in a short puzzle chain) and bringing it to some place, or by utilising one of the heroes unique abilities. As far as heroes and gear go, SLoH presents like the opposite roleplaying game hero fantasy to X-COM: UFO Defense which also came out in ’94. Instead of power suits and plasma pistols, they have jockstraps and broken bottles. It’s Rincewind-with-half-a-brick-in-a-sock humour.

The superhero with a weak or bizarre power is its own rich subgenre, usually but exclusively used for comedy. The Flaming Carrot comics of the 80s developed into the Mystery Men film in the 90s. In TV, Misfits in the 00s paved the way for Extraordinary, which is airing now. SLoH encompasses both ways the ‘weak hero’ approach can go. The heroes can be comedy one-notes where the power is actually weak (the Iron Tummy can “eat spicy food without distress”, which is used exactly once as indicated by the quest in the screenshot above). Or, they can be unexpected powerhouses where the power is actually quite good when you think about it, like dramatically increasing cholesterol or inducing rust.² The game can exploit the humour in both directions this way: either the powerful hero is a joke, or an apparent joke is a powerful hero.

As for the post-apocalyptic side of things: absurd situations abound in game series like Fallout, Wasteland, and the earlier novels and tabletop RPGs that inspired them such Gamma World. Woops! the reportedly terrible post-nuclear-holocaust sitcom aired in ’92: maybe in that immediate post-Soviet collapse era, it was even easier to be silly about nuclear apocalypse, or more likely, perhaps by that point it had permeated in popular culture (like superheroes) for so long that its tropes were easy pickings for comedic treatment. During the end times, anything and everything can appear, and the bizarre is easy to justify. In this way, the post-apocalypse shares much in common with the superhero genre with its proliferation of mutations and science experiments gone wrong.

*The Gamma World ttrpg (originally 1978, this 4th edition is from 1992) iterates that its main setting is for ‘short and self contained’ adventures in a ‘wild and wahoo’ post-apocalypse.*

Silly names and deflating self importance are recurring elements in zany humour, and SLoH combines both. ‘Hoboken’ is an inherently funny sounding word. It’s a lot ‘Scranton’ used in Trixie the Giraffe Necked Girl from Scranton in Sam & Max Hit The Road. The humour here is bathetic, the bombacity of a Superhero League and the exoticism of a Giraffe Necked Girl is punctured by the paltry provincialism of Hoboken and Scranton respectively. This is the same approach taken in the comedic Great Lakes Avengers comics, which also feature Z-list heroes out in the sticks of Milwaukee.

There is perhaps a cultural and class element here too. Hoboken is on the outskirts of a great city. Compared to New York across the river, it was perhaps seen as more ugly, post-industrial, relatively deprived and charmless. This mirrors the relationship Slough (another funny word) has to London. Indeed, the original British iteration of The Office television series was set in Slough for precisely these associations. The heroes in SLoH are also coded as more working-class, or at most, middle-manager types like the Crimson Tape. They carry plungers and wear safety vests and rubber gloves. Like all classic adventure game protagonist losers (lovable or not), they can’t be too successful, professional or organised.

*Typical inventory and powers of the Hoboken superheroes*

A weakness that permeates zany adventure games, and is very much present in SLoH is that humour that relies on deflating is hard to sustain across a work, and silly names and puns becoming tiring very quickly. SLoH is at its weakest where it relies on rapidly dated cultural references (especially seen in the random enemies), and is at its strongest when its presenting short, picaresque scenes at the culmination of various quests that paint a world that is silly but has a distinct life of its own. Anachronism, 4th wall breaks, and punctured expectations can all work in moderation but if constant they can undermine the thinly suspended reality of the story, and the test the audience’s investment in the dramatic stakes necessary to sustain interest in a longer-form game or story. If any silly thing can and does happen, then a narrative is lost and all that remains is the individual entertainment of each absurd situation.

As interactive fiction has gradually left its text adventure roots behind, zaniness of heroes, puzzles and setting is longer so ubiquitous. While comedy games have continued to do very well in the annual Interactive Fiction Competition, the most successful of them like Hunger Daemon (2014), Brain Guzzlers From Beyond (2015), The Wizard Sniffer (2017), where still somewhat zany, tend to balance this with enough dramatic stakes and puzzles embedded in an internally consistent setting. As shorter games, they remain engaging and amusing for their play length.

Trademarked silly consumables and gadgets are a recurring Lucasarts joke, as seen here in *Maniac Mansion* (1987)

*Thimbleweed Park* (2017) recreates the style of *Maniac Mansion* (1987), with the same jokes.

Zaniness continues to haunt graphical adventure games, and a lot of this is due to a blanket of nostalgia that smothers creative impulses in a suffocating layer of nodding references. It’s hard to make something good if you’re self-consciously trying to recreate a past form that was only sometimes good itself. A joke can be funny in its time, but many adventure games try to recreate joke formats that were played out over thirty years ago. Nostalgic adventure games like Thimbleweed Park can have a lot of promising elements— fun situations, characterisations, puzzles and dialogue— but weigh themselves down by constantly inviting poor comparison with their predecessors. Where adventure zaniness still works is in the short concentrated form, such as with the very silly Investi-Gator which packs in a handful of absurd and amusing mystery cases with a lot of jokes for a very short episodic play time.

*Investi-Gator is only three short episodes and so can be delightful*.

Where zany works succeed, they’re either like Monkey Island which balances the very silly comedy with distinct characters, setting, and an actual plot; or they’re like Flaming Carrot where the bizarre situations are distinctly drawn and engaging on their own merits and the works are short enough to sustain interest in this. Steve Meretzky managed to explore adventure game zaniness in a dozen or so commercial games. It was the mood he was most comfortable with and at his best, the games could be creatively fecund, surprising, and fun. But his best comic work has a solid foundation of story and game design. SLoH‘s joke monsters grow tiring very quickly, the basic RPG gameplay lacks tactical depth and cannot sustain a game by itself, and so what is left is a string of amusing incidents tied together by some very transparent adventure game puzzle chains. Silly names, anachronisms, and bathos are best enjoyed as a spice to a more nutritious meal rather fare on their own.

The last of Meretzky’s adventure games was, to my knowledge, The Space Bar, set in ‘The Thirsty Tentacle’ on the planet Armpit VI. ↩︎
The non-zany web serial Worm managed to draw out 1.6 million words of story taking seriously the premise of the weak sounding but actually strong power (in this case ‘power to control bugs’). ↩︎

The Postmortem as Qualitative Research

30 Tuesday Jan 2024

Posted by Joey Jones in Interactive Fiction

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Game Design, interactive fiction, postmortem, writing

The postmortem, or retrospective, is by now a well embedded tradition in the interactive fiction community (and to some extent, in video game development more broadly). The author comes to the end of a project, reflects back on what they intended to do, the challenges of the design and implementation, and considers how their work has been received. Did you achieve your vision? Did anyone like what you were trying to do?

This form of article is invaluable for developing craft knowledge. Craft knowledge is the knowledge that we as practitioners, as designers, gain in the process of creating. It’s a knowing how to do something, of course. But it’s also a knowing what is possible with the tools at our disposal, and what effects our choices might make, and what problems we’re likely to come into by choosing one form of implementation over another. Interactive fiction authors develop this knowledge implicitly through their craft, but engaging in a period of reflection after a game is released allows some of that knowledge to be explicitly formulated.

I contend that this postmortemising is often a form of qualitative research. Academics frequently write papers and theses where they look at some social practise and try to abstract from it some general insights. On a very practical level, this is often what the IF authors are doing when they look back on their work. They’re synthesising some lessons from their experience of the whole process of creating and sharing their work. The ability to take criticism, reflect and reiterate is a hallmark of a writer who is able to build upon they’ve done and improve for next time. Often this is what’s going on with the postmortems. The postmortem isn’t just a way for authors to learn from their own work, but reading other people’s experiences can help shine light on your own work practises— showing hitherto unseen possibilities, signposting pitfalls, or seeing commonalities between what worked or didn’t work for someone else.

Not always though! It won’t take long looking through the postmortems on the IntFic forum to find some that are relatively perfunctory. You’ll see recurring themes such as “here is my response to things people complained about” or “nobody spotted this thing I did that I thought was neat”. While it might be laudable to insist that our work be the final word, when offered the chance, most writers are happy to add a few more words of clarification. Still, even the very brief retrospectives aren’t just self-indulgence. A large part of the pleasure of the community for creators is the breadth of critical engagement from players, but also the chance to take part in the conversation from your own experience. Talking about your own work isn’t an indulgence when it’s forming part of a collective sharing.

With all this in mind, I’ll be reflecting soon on my own recent release Lies Under Ice. I think the game does a lot of really interesting things for an interactive novel. It combines a base-building element with a lot of hard-forking choices that have big impacts that ripple throughout the whole story. It my second Choice of Game game, and ended up twice the size of Trials of the Thief-Taker. Thief-Taker came in about 100k of words and script, while Lies Under Ice is over 200k, and has a novella-length average play size of about 50k words. Alongside writing this big sci-fi game though, I’ve been finishing up working on my PhD. I’m in the write-up, and reflecting upon Lies Under Ice forms a part of the work. Eventually when it’s all dusted and (with any luck) cannibalised for journals, I’ll share parts here on the blog.

Until then, please share with me the most insightful postmortems you’ve read… or written?

IFComp 2022 Reviews

01 Saturday Oct 2022

Posted by Joey Jones in Interactive Fiction

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Puzzle Game Edition

It’s time for the annual Interactive Fiction Competition. I don’t know if I’ll end up reviewing many of the games, but I figured if I make a post I’ll probably play more than one.

I’ll try to avoid outright spoilers, but these will be critical reviews. The main point of entering the comp is for critical attention, to get an audience for your work and improve your craft. Well, that’s how I see it. I’ll try and only bring up substantive points (stuff like typos are better sent directly to authors). I don’t like giving a numerical rating, as it’s necessarily reductive, but I’ll do it anyway as I always liked getting one for my own work. The numbers are something like 1-3: bad; 4-6: either fundamentally flawed with promise or well made but under-ambitious; 7-9: good; 10: amazing, possibly ground breaking. I use the ~wiggly line~ if I anticipate shunting a score up or down based on other entries.

I like puzzles, I write puzzle games myself, and so thought I’d start with some of the games that said they had puzzles.

Lazy Wizard’s Guide

Learning spells to solve puzzles and unlock new areas is, as a conceit, as old as interactive fiction itself. It’s as hoary as cave exploration (which this game also manages to check off). Magic is good puzzle-fodder as they allow the player to make extraordinary changes. They give a tool-set which must be learned fresh. There are some standouts of the genre, such as The Wand (2017) and Suveh Nux (2007) and the reason these work so well is that the magic has a sort of logic to it: the player can be exploratory or fill in the gaps.

The magical student learning to pass a test, exploring a mostly empty castle, is a subgenre that has it’s origins back in Enchanter (1983), and has been seen regularly since. Lazy Wizard’s Guide has almost the exact same plot and structure as The Apprentice (1993). A magical school gives an environment which can be easily gated, and can present a natural setting for puzzle set pieces. The player can learn the spells at the same pace as the character: usually cast as a student who is a bad enough student not to know these spells already, but a good enough student to master them when needed.

Unfortunately, Lazy Wizard’s Guide fails at being an exemplar of this genre. The construction of the game is mostly well put together: persistent disambiguation problems aside, it was well implemented and there were several quality of life elements. Some elements of the puzzles were undermotivated, and looking under, behind and searching were all treated differently. But the main problem was that the puzzles themselves (despite the magical trappings) were too pedestrian.

The magic spells themselves were all used to do exactly what they said on the spell description (unlocking, transfiguring cat-to-troll, sending to sleep, entering a painting etc.). There was no creativity required in the application of the spells. Furthermore, the spells were gated by use of components, so the game didn’t even make use of one of the main benefits of a spell-based text adventure: not lugging around a vast inventory. Moreover, the components were mostly obtained through basic non-puzzly routes. The items needed were just hidden about, or worse, were obtained from NPCs who mostly functioned as object delivery systems.

The basic ideas behind the spells were serviceable, but there are ways they could have been made more sparkling: components that required other spells to create, or puzzles that require you to change the conditions under which the spells take place (such as altering or commissioning a painting to get to a new location with the enter-painting spell).

The setting itself was very cardboard cutout wizard school. The plot was just about doing an arbitrary list of tasks. The NPCs were mostly stock stand-ins, complete with pun names. The simple puzzles might have been saved if there was a greater sense of characterisation, a rich sense of place, evocative prose, or a plot. But the PC was just and unknown and unknowable player stand-in, the place was just a by-the-numbers Harry Potter knockoff, and the writing was completely in service to the puzzles.

~6/10 Solid implementation, but unambitious thin fare

Tower of Plagh

Series of wholly arbitrary non-puzzles in a lazily implemented space. I got a few floors down and gave up at the monkey puzzle (which was a pure example of read-the-author’s-mind). I would guess a child made this game. There’s not much to say, other than it’s a comp tradition for there to be a few entries which shouldn’t have been entered.

2/10 Someone’s first test game.

You Feel Like You’ve Read This In A Book

This game starts with a genuine sense of emergency, and gives you a very text-adventurey set of environs (forest, cave, church, pawn shop etc.) to puzzle through. The big idea is that the writing includes a lot of references to other works. For a twine game, the puzzles are serviceable as puzzles (you find a problem and can form a likely plan to solve it). The game is short and you’re likely to die the first time round, so there’s a pretty tight gameplay loop of retrying and trying to find your way to some of the endings. The sandbox + multiple endings works quite well for the length, the twine text-effects are well picked but not excessive and the writing is charming enough.

Still, I’m indifferent to the main conceit of the game. The setting, plot, and characterisation is all explicitly a set of pastiches of ideas drawn from a series of novels. I’ve read many of the novels, but it wasn’t really necessary. The work doesn’t have anything to say about these stories, they’re just the substance from which the pastiche is made. But the substance isn’t substantive enough to serve as an introduction to these works. They’re just references for the sake of referentiality. Because of this artificiality, it undermines the sense of personal horror or emergency of the neurotoxin plot. It’s not often that a work goes out of its way to be explicitly derivative to this extent, and it’s a shame in a way as the writer clearly has the chops to make something original.

Of course, a game that is a loose patchwork with a thin sense of reality can absolutely work. A Beauty Cold and Austere (2017) is one such. The Chinese Room (2007) which I co-authored was a nonsensical patchwork of philosophical thought experiments, but it was educational, funny and at least some of the puzzles were good. So I believe this model of game can work, but ideally it has to say something about the works from which its drawing.

~5/10 Promising structure and imaginative execution, but derivative building blocks

Zero Chance of Recovery

This is a chess puzzle based on a famous end-game scenario. It’s well implemented, with all the quality of life elements you’d expect from a Schultz game. It does exactly what it sets out to do. The narrative framing is very thin, but just enough to clue the required win state. As this is isn’t intended as a full narrative experience or a rich puzzle game, but rather as a single set piece, it’s hard to judge against the other entries. Games can be good at doing what they intend to do, but intend to do much much less than other games.

~5/10 A single chess puzzle: a well-made tiny morsel.

Monkey Island and the Ascent of Point-and-Single-Click

19 Tuesday Apr 2022

Posted by Joey Jones in Game Design, Interactive Fiction

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

monkey island, puzzle design, puzzles

There’s another Monkey Island game in the works, Return to Monkey Island and we can expect it to be a single-clicker: that is, to resolve all action through clicking on a hotspot, with no ‘look’ action or other verbs. There has been a tendency over the decades for graphic adventure games to involve increasingly streamlined verb selection. This isn’t just a matter of user-friendliness, rather it has an interesting impact on the design space for the game’s puzzles, opening up some possibilities while closing down others.

We can see this by taking a sojourn through the history of verbs in Monkey Island.

Pre-Monkey Island

The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) used the SCUMM engine, which was first developed for Maniac Mansion (1987). Maniac Mansion had the classic wall of verbs at the bottom of the screen, with fifteen verbs. This way of interacting by constructing commands was modelled clearly on existing text adventure game conventions which they might have expected some of the players to already be familiar with.

The game was novel, even by today’s standards, in that it could be completed in different ways by using various combinations of characters who had their own skills or unique interactions with some NPCS. The key verb here is New Kid which switches character: an idea returned to with the more streamlined Day of the Tentacle (1993).

The Secret of Monkey Island

The profusion of verbs in Maniac Mansion is streamlined in Secret of Monkey Island, from 15 down to 12 on the Amiga release, and later 9 for the PC edition.

They were able to strip out Turn on/Turn off and make Walk To the default action for clicking when no other verb was selected. In this way, the Walking verb isn’t removed, but its place in the interface is. Turning On and Off in this game was probably wholly extraneous or could be replaced with Push.

Push and Pull remain and are used a handful of times throughout the game. As the Use verb is always use-something-with-something-else, and object interaction is limited to either using something on the object, or pushing/pulling the object, the puzzles tend towards the use of items in the inventory on elements in the environment.

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge

The second Monkey Island game (1991) has the same user interface as the first, but it increasingly makes use of a specific kind of puzzle that is afforded by the wall of verbs: the use of a surprising verb to solve a problem.

The first time this puzzle element appears is on the first island, where Guybrush must close an already open door. This action is motivated in the context of a plan the player might form, but nevertheless involves interacting with an object that in a way that wouldn’t normally appear productive. Given that opening a closed door and closing an open door are both the only useful things you can do with it, and the hint about the door’s additional useful property happens when performing the action, this is a puzzle that could be implemented straightforwardly in a single-click game, but it would lack the surprise element as in a single-clicker the player is bound to click on every hotspot.

This approach is later used to humorous effect when the player can use the surprising verb to pick up a guard dog. Dognapping also features in the non-Lucas Arts point and click game Simon the Sorcerer 2 (1995), which has a similar verb table, but streamlines pushing and pulling, closing and opening into a single icon, and introduces a wear verb. Both games recognise that there is something funny about making the active choice to stick a dog in your jacket or hat.

This kind of unlikely taking is a puzzle-element, albeit minor, that can’t be replicated in a single click. Surprise taking can still occur, where the protagonist picks up an item you wouldn’t have thought was takeable, but there the decision is out of the player’s hands.

The Curse of Monkey Island

The Curse of Monkey (1997) followed LucasArt’s Full Throttle (1995) in ditching the wall of verbs and instead having a verb coin instead. The verb coin streamlined the 9 verbs into three verbs: ‘hand’, ‘eye’ and ‘mouth’. Hand is a general use action, and hovering over it on an object says the verb that the hand will perform: opening, pushing, taking, and so forth. Eye is just the Look At command. Mouth usually performs Talk To, but in some cases may be Eat, Drink or even Blow.

The wheel opens up new affordances, as many more verbs can appear in the game. This allows for more varied interaction with the objects in the inventory or environment than the earlier Monkey Islands. To achieve this, it sacrifices some surprise, as the nonstandard actions with the wheel are telegraphed. The surprise ability to take the dog in the previous game would no longer be a surprise here, as it would be indistinguishable from trying to pet the dog.

The Use and Give actions from previous games are still present: when items are selected from the inventory, they may be carried and used directly on things or given to people in the environment. Like the Walk To verb before it, these actions remain but no longer require their own buttons.

Escape From Monkey Island

Escape From Monkey Island (2000) followed Grim Fandango in having 3D rendered environment, a more cumbersome inventory process, and awkward movement keyboard. It ditched the verb coin and went for a simple three commands: look, use/talk, and pick up/put away.

Despite these changes, the hover text remained, even as the mouse was ditched altogether (perhaps to better facilitate play on the PS2 console port of the game). This hover text appeared now as a series of selectable actions on the bottom of the screen.

The player could cycle through different objects in their immediate vicinity to use items they were carrying with. Surprise as a puzzle feature was by this point mostly eliminated, as the possible affordances of everything in the environment pop up as soon as you get close. Still, like in Curse of Monkey Island, the use of the hover text allowed for more unusual verbs than the first two games. Both games were able to use this to have amusing one-off actions appear.

Tales of Monkey Island

Tales of Monkey Island (2009) was made by Telltale Games under license from LucasArts and is different in many ways to its predecessors. It has a similar 3D rendered environment as in Escape, but returns to using a mouse and a regular inventory screen once again.

In an age of tablets without a right mouse button, and with a desire to remove user experience frustrations, Tales removed the ability to look and ditched the hover text. The all purpose “use” had finally arrived.

The all-purpose use was long a feature of other point and click games such as the Broken Sword series which had double clicking to perform some action, and right clicking to examine. In these games you don’t know what the object’s affordances are until you start double clicking on it.

The Tales chapters aren’t alone in being a single-clicker: The Journey Down (2010), Broken Age (2014) and others would later take the same approach. One major difference in puzzle affordance is that hints have to appear either dynamically or in the descriptions of non-actionable environmental items, rather than in object descriptions. All actions are unknown to the player before performing them. This often leads to a sort of puzzle-box approach to several of the puzzles.

In Chapter 1, there is the seizing of the Screaming Narwhal and the strapped-in-the-seat scene, and in Chapter 2, there is a fight with a pirate hunter, Morgan LeFlay. In all these scenarios, there are a number of repeatable events that are triggered by clicking on specific objects in the environment. These puzzles are solved by working out what those events do (e.g. hot coals are poured on the deck; a monkey is given a banana; a seagull is roused from its perch) and then clicking on objects in the environment in the correct order to gain the desired effects.

These puzzles can be quite satisfying, in that they give the player a series of repeatable elements to experiment with until they figure out the sequence that will get them what they want. The player can never take an ingenious action, because they will perform all actions possible with a single click, but they may still exercise their ingenuity in devising the correct order.

Single Clicking

From Maniac Mansion’s fifteen verbs, Tales of Monkey Island has three: Walk (by using the keyboard), Use (inventory object) and Do Literally Anything Else. From Curses onwards, the Monkey Island games have introduced various situational verbs, allowing for a wider range of potential action, but in paring down interaction with the world to a single button, the game puzzles become less about choosing the right action and more about choosing the right order of action or dialogue options. Interacting directly with the environment is longer done through deliberate verb selection, but rather speculative selection of hotspots. That said, the core item + environment puzzle dynamic remains and is still one of the main ways the player can enact plans and potential solutions.

Tablets aren’t going anywhere so single clicking is probably here to stay. And that may be no bad thing. It is worth remembering that the most memorable puzzle in The Secret of Monkey Island was Insult Sword Fighting: a purely dialogue driven puzzle the likes of which have appeared in all subsequent games. But it does give a very different ludic feel than when we were going about putting dogs in our pockets.

Nothing Is True, Everything is Permitted?

05 Friday Nov 2021

Posted by Joey Jones in Game Design, Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Making sense of the assassins’ creed

Some years ago I met with an old friend from sixth-form college who I hadn’t seen in a while and I noticed that he had a new tattoo. It was a tattoo of the maxim of the assassins in the videogame series Assassin’s Creed:

Nothing is True; Everything is Permitted

I remarked at the time that if nothing were true then that very maxim couldn’t be true, it was self-contradicting. I think he thought I was deliberately missing the point to make a joke, but I was quite serious at the time. On the face of it, what is really meant by this maxim is something like:

Moral codes have no content; therefore all acts are morally permissible

Or perhaps, given the nature of the game-world as an illusory projection into the past that makes up the frame story of the videogame series, perhaps it means:

Nothing is true about the world; therefore everything is permitted

We might question whether the conclusion follows the premises in this formula but regardless, something like that seems like sense in which the motto is intended. The order of assassins must kill and to allow themselves to kill, they tell themselves that killing is permissible and it’s permissible because either moral order or the reality of existence has no truth to it.

More cynically, we might say the game writers weren’t intending to create a coherent philosophy justifying assassination, but rather they used an existing formula that sounded deep enough for their setting, whether or not it held up to scrutiny. Indeed the phrase doesn’t come out of nowhere. In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness he (apparently falsely) attributes the following phrase to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:

If there is no God then everything is permitted

I.e. if there is no God to create a moral order, then any act is permissible (or more accurately, no human action can be either permissible or impermissible if there is no ultimate authority to do the permitting). It’s not hard to see how this now well known phrase was modified (perhaps unwittingly) into the Assassin’s maxim.

Looking into the game further, it seems that in the fiction there are characters that ascribe a meaning to the maxim like so:

“To say that nothing is true, is to realize that the foundations of society are fragile, and that we must be the shepherds of our own civilization. To say that everything is permitted, is to understand that we are the architects of our actions, and that we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic”

But none of this strictly follows from the maxim. Perhaps in some contexts, “nothing” can mean “no society” and “true” can mean “is stable”, but only insofar as we can use language metaphorically and employ synecdoches. We might be tempted to say that this kind of exegesis of the maxim is the only kind that can make sense of the phrase.

We could end the discussion there, and in fact those were the extents of my thoughts on the matter for the last decade or so. However, after reading Frege’s Logical Investigations, I have some new insight into how we might make sense of the maxim.

Frege makes the argument that truth is a property of thoughts, and not of things. The table before me is a table, it is neither true nor false; but the thought that “there is a table before me” is either true or false. Truth doesn’t belong in the world, or our sense impressions of the world, but in the realm of thoughts or claims.

Now you might ask, what about illusions? Are they not false rather than true sense perceptions? Indeed, on certain readings, the entire world of Assassin’s Creed is an illusion. It’s illusory in the fiction, insofar as the past is presented as a very rich VR simulation; it’s also illusory insofar as it’s a work of fiction, a non-factual videogame.

But the falsity of an illusion is in false claims we make of that illusion. Let me unpack that. If Altaïr sees a building in the distance, but it’s not actually a building but rather a VR simulation of a building, then it can be said to be an illusion only if he takes it to be real. An illusion once pierced is no longer illusory. (Actually we might want to say something a lot more couched than that, as certain visual illusions still work on the senses even if we know them to be false.) A building or a fabrication of a building are both like my table, they are just things that may be potentially experienced. The falsity that arises from an illusory building is the false thought “there is a building”.

We can return then to the first part of the maxim: what is the “nothing” that is true. Most trivially it’s “no thing”, i.e. no part of the world:

No thing is true

This then is trivially true, as things belong to the world while thoughts are claims about the world (at least if we’re agreeing with Frege’s on truth).

This interpretation has the benefit of being neither self-contradicting, nor requiring us to take it in a purely metaphorical sense or extrapolate some further meaning not contained but perhaps hinted at in the maxim.

What then of the second part of the maxim?

Everything is permitted

We can give ‘everything’ the same treatment as ‘nothing’:

Every thing is permitted

I.e. every part of the world is allowed. Allowed by whom? The assassins aren’t a specifically religious order it seems, and so “allowed by God” is probably not the natural interpretation; rather we should perhaps take it to mean “permitted by the Order of Assassins”. This is a more charitable interpretation than taking it to mean:

All acts are morally permissible

This proposition is either obviously false (clearly some acts are not permitted by some people), or it is meaningless, as if everything is permissible and nothing is impermissible then permissibility just isn’t a feature of facts about the world.

Let us take a step back and consider what it means for something to be permitted. Frege argues that judgement is the acknowledgement of the truth of a thought. We might say that moral judgement is the acknowledgement (or denial) of the permissibility of an act. Permissibility is like truth then, it doesn’t exist in things, but rather as a property of our claims about the world.

If Altaïr fatally stabs someone with his wrist-blades, most ordinary onlookers would consider the act of murder wrong, or impermissible. “It’s impermissible for Altair to murder that man” is a moral claim that is either true or false, but the permissibility isn’t found in the act itself. No atoms of permissibility or molecules of impermissibility can be found in the point of his dagger or the intent in his mind. Permit is not a feature of the world of things but a feature of judgements about human actions. It is either true or false that an act is permitted, and for any permission there must be someone who permits.

All of this to say, while assassination is clearly not permissible by the standards of ordinary onlookers, or any given religious or political authority, it is permissible by the standards of an organisation whose primary method and core identity is assassination. More broadly anything an assassin does in the course of their business furthering the aims of the organisation might be ultimately justifiable. There is no specific means that cannot be justified in pursuit of their ends. This is born out in the gameplay, insofar as the main moral tenet of the assassins (concerning not killing the ‘innocent’ is apparently often breached in the furtherance of their aims). So on the final analysis, we might make sense of the phrase as:

No thing is true; everything is permitted (by the Assassins)

This doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and there’s no evidence of the game writers or the in-fiction characters taking the first part in this Fregean sense. Rather, on reflection I want to return to my initial assessment of the maxim but with a new appreciation of its role in the fiction. The maxim is really best understood as a fake-deep thought-terminator, but one that makes sense in the context of the ideological aims of the assassins.

By “fake-deep” I mean, something which sounds like it has a deeper sense, but is either trivially true or requires so much additional exegesis that it could mean any number of contradictory things. A common hallmark of a fake-deep saying is that it rests upon a repetition of a some words, often used in two different senses. For example:

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.

Here “dream” in the first sense is meant as the experience we have when we sleep that is only ever owned by one person; “dreamer” here is meant in the second sense of dream, as someone who has an aspiration that goes beyond their current circumstance. Clearly, dreams-as-aspirations can be shared. It’s literally false but use of the phrase can act as a justification for a certain state of affairs (in this case, feeling justified in being alone with one’s aspirations).

The assassin’s maxim fits this pattern with the pairing of “nothing is” and “everything is”. The one statement doesn’t follow from the other and the only interpretations are clearly false, or trivially true but unintended, or only metaphorically true after some tortured exegesis. But the purpose of such a maxim isn’t really to guide thought but to end it. We might reframe the maxim more accurately as:

Don’t worry about the truth or falsity of moral claims; our organisation allows anything

And what better maxim for indoctrinating new assassins into not reflecting too deeply on what they are doing! It’s not something I would recommend getting as a tattoo… but as a fake-deep ideological mission statement, it makes sense in the context of the fiction of the Assassin’s Creed series.

Interactive Fiction Resources

12 Friday Feb 2021

Posted by Joey Jones in Interactive Fiction

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Tags

interactive fiction

Can Red Herrings Be Elegant?

20 Thursday Aug 2020

Posted by Joey Jones in Game Design, Interactive Fiction

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

elegance, Game Design, golf peaks, monkey island, puzzle design, puzzles, red herrings

This includes minor spoilers for Monkey Island and Golf Peaks but they’re worth it.

In 2018 Tom Hermans wrote up an excellent primer on elegant puzzle design, with the following principles:

A good puzzle should explain itself
A good puzzle shows all puzzle pieces
Use the smallest amount of space and puzzle pieces for the puzzle to work
Understand possibility space
A good puzzle wants to teach the player
A good puzzle (game) should be ambitious

I’d like to talk briefly about the third criteria and what it means for a puzzle to be elegant. Tom writes:

A red herring is a puzzle element that seems relevant, but isn’t required to use to solve the puzzle. It’s clutter, and thus unnecessary. A better idea would be to place objects that seem useless initially, but are actually used in completely new and unexpected ways, making them relevant.

There are adventure games (including graphic and parser) that obey this restriction with regard to inventory items: everything that the player can pick up is eventually necessary, even if it isn’t necessarily obvious at the time. Part of the puzzle with these objects is overcoming the belief that they are useless and finding where they fit.

The Red Herring item in the first Monkey Island game does this admirably. At first the player may pick it up thinking it a joke item but later they realise that it is exactly its status as a red herring that makes it not an actual red herring.

But sometimes genuine red herrings can be elegant. A red herring can be more than just clutter. A red herring can be an almost fully realisable alternative solution. Overcoming false paths can be part of the puzzle itself.

To look at these false paths, I’ll use Golf Peaks as an example. Golf Peaks is an excellent game of logical experiment where you play a series of cards in order to move a ball to its hole. There are no superfluous cards: every single card must be played in a specific order to complete any given puzzle. This is an early puzzle which demonstrates this principle:

You can move the ball one space, two spaces, and three spaces in any ordinal direction. There is only one order in which you can successfully move the ball. This takes you down the left-hand path. The right-hand path is the red herring here, as at a very first glance you might think it possible to take the ball down that side. If there were nothing on the right-hand of the puzzle-board, there would scarcely be a puzzle: just a single clear route for the ball and a number of cards to navigate that route.

Thus, in Golf Peaks, the challenge isn’t just in discerning what cards to use to overcome each obstacle, but in discerning the one true path through the puzzle-board. Long after playing, one particular puzzle from Golf Peaks stayed with me, and it immediately came to mind on reading Tom’s writing about red herrings, as the puzzle is almost entirely comprised of the scarlet fish.

This is late in the game where the player has mastered overcoming many different terrain types:

Ice, which slides a ball which rolls onto it
Jump pads, which launch a ball with sufficient momentum across a gap.
Corners, which send a ball with momentum at a right angle
Holes, which relocate a ball to their corresponding holes, coming out the other end in the same direction of movement
Water, which causes the ball to be reset at the position it was last in before it went into the water
Sand, which can be rolled over but not stopped on.
Mud, which halts all momentum of anything rolling onto or off of it (necessitating the chipping movement cards.

All these element appear in a dizzying assemblage in 9-9. The player by this point can clearly see that there’s no possible playthrough that will use all of the jump pads but their existence leads the player to look for solutions using some of them. The obvious solution seems to be to take the path down to the hole, appear at the top, take the jump pad onto the mud, then chip onto the ice. Like so:

This is only the ‘obvious’ solution because the player anticipates a unity of elements. They think the correct solution will use the most unique aspects of the puzzle-space. It turns out that the cards will almost allow this solution, but the player comes up one card short. They fall off the ice right by the final straight to the hole, with no more cards to play.

Aha! They think, perhaps the shorter route is correct, and that the teleporting holes are a diversion. So they try taking the first bridge, doing a loop and trying the whole thing like so:

But again, they will find themselves exactly one card short! So then they think, perhaps the bouncing corners are a diversion and they think they can do that route again but bypass the quicksand in the middle instead of going up to the jump. Like so:

But, again, the player will find that they get to the ice exactly one card’s play away from the final hole but with no more cards to play. Eventually it turns out that all the jumps, holes and corners are red herrings and the only possible solution is to cut through the middle like so:

Indeed, the main game concepts the player needed were:

How does a ball move on ice?
How does a ball interact with water?

The first concept is the theme for all of the 9th Stage puzzles. The second concept is an idea that was introduced several stages back, but here occurring for the first time combined with the ice. I wouldn’t be surprised if each of the puzzles were designed to showcase a unique combination of the game’s various board elements and cards.

The 9-9 puzzle could very well have been built without the extraneous elements, but it wouldn’t have been as good. Or indeed as elegant: the elegance lies in the perfection of its three false paths. Each false path leads the player exactly one card from the finish, enticing and frustrating them, taunting them with how close and how far they are. Here the red herring is brought to a fine art of multiple misdirection.

We could say that elegance is not the only virtue worth heeding in puzzle design. This is true but also we can see that elegance in a puzzle isn’t the same as having the maximum minimalism of elements. If a puzzle has red herrings, these misleading elements can be developed to their fullness as part of the puzzle rather than as mere superfluities.

Again, I recommend you read Tom Hermans original article, as he explores more puzzle design principles there. I also invite you to read my Embedded Puzzle Manifesto which explore how puzzles in narrative games can be embedded in their stories .

Collaboration & Cragne Manor

15 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by Joey Jones in Interactive Fiction

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Here’s some thoughts about Cragne Manor in the context of earlier experiments. Cragne Manor is a game written by 84 people as a tribute to Mike Gentry’s Anchorhead. Each person wrote a different room without seeing any of the other rooms (except for the two organisers, Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna). (I wrote the penultimate room and designed some aspects of the game’s meta-puzzle. I’ve also played the game to completion.)

cragne

In group projects, structure is key. Ryan Veeder gave Cragne Manor constructed a matrix of rooms and puzzle sequences in which all the content could slot into, as each part hadto meet a small set of specific requirements (room exits, input or output items, only one room). Within these constraints, writers could expand as much as they fancied. Jenni Poldna and Ryan did a great job at wrangling people to conform to this structure so everything would work together.

With some (notable!) exceptions, the game is remarkable consistent in tone: with each player being give the names of the rooms, and most having a feel for what Anchorhead is like, the locations believably fit together.

In Cragne Manor there are a number of separate puzzle tracks (object trading, information trading, book collection, room unlocking etc.) which leads up to a final combination of all the end items and information. Participants could choose whether they wanted a room with a puzzle or somewhere purely atmospheric. This helped tie everything together, but did add to an extraordinary profusion of junk objects and arbitrary constrictions. While it’s a rich experience to play, and the meta-structure is solid, there arises a lot of questionable design. For instance, there are at least four separate and non-interchangeable cutting objects. For this to have been avoided the game would have required more interventionist organising (unfeasible given the already heroic effort involved in wrangling so many contributors), or a property-based puzzle structure (which may have been too prescriptive for the authors and a lot more work to design).

Despite the wild inconsistency of plot, back-story and character, Cragne Manor was a more coherent game than the most equivalent project, that of IF Whispers. In IF Whispers, authors receive the last written room and the game emerges out this Chinese-whispers-like process. In all but the last IF Whispers game, the participants had no access to earlier rooms beyond the one immediately preceding their own. This means that there is no over-arching continuity in the end result. The enjoyment then is mostly for the participants.

The exception was 2012’s IF Whispers 5. There were only 5 participants: Chris Conley, who organised the project and wrote the start & finish; Marius Müller, who along with Chris and myself also contributed to Cragne Manor; Tom Blawgus; myself, Joey Jones; and Porpentine. Chris wrote the end and the beginning and knew what was happening, so he could guide things towards making sense. Each of the rest of us wrote two rooms each, written in a circular, with each player only having access to the previous room. Each person could also add extra constraints or rules to the project as they went (like, “The cat will not die.”, “Yourself has a need called silence.”) The result was one in which there could be bizarre sequences, but everything tied together in the end. Like Cragne Manor, sticking within the horror genre allowed the bizarre or incongruous to gel better together.

Other structures have worked well for these kinds of loose mass collaborations. Alabaster is a conversation game in which ten different people contributed conversation threads without seeing each other’s work. The start was written by Emily Short who also edited it for consistency afterwards. As such it hangs together well.

Where authors continue to be interested in taking part in these kind of projects, there remains much space left for further experimentation.

Far Far Futures

~ Joey Jones on Interactive Fiction

Against Flavour Text

GENESIS

CONNECTIONS

TOPIC PUZZLE DESIGN

1 – SEQUENCE

2 – CONDITION

3 – LEAP

4 – OVERWHELM

5 – EMBRACE

AGAINST FLAVOUR TEXT

MEANING

Urban Exploration in Narrative Games

Abandonment

Original function

The Frozen Moment

Afterlife of Abandonment

Breaking & Entering

Verticality

Lure of Abandonment

The Zany: Superhero League of Hoboken & deflating genre fiction

The Postmortem as Qualitative Research

IFComp 2022 Reviews

Monkey Island and the Ascent of Point-and-Single-Click

Nothing Is True, Everything is Permitted?

Interactive Fiction Resources

Can Red Herrings Be Elegant?

Collaboration & Cragne Manor