The command-line is a (useful) lie
Here’s a big, meaty post by Emily Short on the role of parsers in interactive fiction.
But at the end of the day … the trick isn’t to make the parser understand whatever a novice might type, and that the average novice user would actually be happier with a smaller vocabulary that has been spelled out in full.
It’s a matter of making the game better at communicating to the player what kinds of things are valid actions in the first place — indicating the affordances of the system, in other words.
That will also help with the other problem that novices often report: a kind of paralysis of choice. If you can do anything at the command prompt, where do you start?
Yeah. That command prompt is a problem.
I agree, sort of. This is a carefully framed argument that discusses the role of the parser in terms of the novice, but I wonder if that’s beside the point.
Take, for example, the ‘problem’ of the paralysis of choice. I think IF works because of the paralysis of choice, but only in players who know their choices aren’t unlimited, i.e., they’re experienced enough to know that there’s actually a fairly small vocabulary and range of actions available. To experienced players, the parser becomes a canvas of hopeful experimentation, but for the novice, the parser represents hopeless trial and error.
To bring novices up to speed, some IF incorporates cues to help them understand which actions are available and, subsequently, how to translate their actions into the parser’s vocabulary and grammar. If you’re unsure how to use a parser, then graphics, maps, Choose Your Own Adventure-style ‘jumps’, underlined ‘actionable’ nouns and contextual menus are enormously helpful, and it’s easy to just take the next step and dispense with the parser all together, which is typically where these discussions end up (and if you’re not careful, they lose the IF altogether and end up as a graphical point-and-click, and we all know how that story ends…)
But to ditch, or even diminish, the parser creates a fundamentally different game — a game where the player plucks his or her actions from the scene in front of them, rather than issuing commands in their natural language (however illusory that might be). It’s not a worse game, it just has a narrower command space, as Short puts it.
Ultimately, I don’t think parsers are the problem here. I think the problem relates to player experience. But rather than remove the parser, or artificially embed aids, cues and other affordances into the interface, I suggest we concentrate on building IF worlds that are consistent, tighter and predictable. Even the best IF still consists of world models that are a mile wide, but an inch deep: they are generally inconsistent and lack operational depth, which is complicated by a broad and loose vocabulary. Let’s invert that process and make the text indicate the affordances — why should IF require anything else? — and then build the world accordingly.
