The Thinger Project

Goodness, I haven’t posted here in two years? I’m just not very good at keeping a blog, am I? I think it’s partly my being busy with other stuff, partly not knowing what to say, and partly never really getting comfortable with blogware. WordPress is always going to be a stranger to me. Sorry about that.

There are other things I want to talk about, but this post is about my Thinger project, which is a spin-off from my Responser project.

As you might know, my Responser project began as just a webpage where I collected responses to the magic word XYZZY in interactive fiction games. Curious readers wanted to see responses to PLUGH and PLOVER as well, so I made those pages too, and then I got curious myself about other commands like SING and PRAY which tend to be used in similar ways.

I’ve also, over the years, attempted to catalog status line styles, classify room names, track which games used which extensions, compare how things are coded differently in various authoring systems, and other esoteric ways of looking at or dissecting IF. So I suppose a project where I collect object descriptions was inevitable.

So, yes, Thinger is about the responses in works of IF where you EXAMINE something. It’s utterly ridiculously time-consuming to find and extract these text segments in the first place, but it also becomes less clear as I get more data on how to organize and present the data. It’s a work-in-progress, y’know?

You can visit http://plover.net/~davidw/things/ at any time to view the current status of the project. There’s quite a few categories of objects to look at now, and I’m always adding both more categories and more examples. I also have a small handful of super-categories for organizing the categories themselves. I recently implemented a way for a category to belong to more than one super-category; for example: pianos are listed under both fixtures and musical instruments.

For the most part, Thinger is heavily biased towards sampling works of IF that I’ve also written walkthroughs for. It’s just a lot simpler for me to work with those works, and believe me, that’s already a large (and growing) corpus to keep me busy.

And what’s the point of the Thinger project? I really don’t know. I find the mix of viewpoints side-by-side fascinating. Like, you look at a ladder. What does the author feel they need to tell you about it? What the ladder’s made of? How long it is? How sturdy or safe it is? Where it leads to? Or is there something else that needs to be said? Or perhaps we don’t care and it’s just a generic ladder. Right now, Thinger is just a curious museum of oddities and mundane-ities.

I think, though, at some point, I will want to start analyzing what sorts of information is conveyed by descriptions, and which sorts of info are associated with specific objects. For example, an author might feel it’s relevant to say who owns a goblet or a bed, but not who owns a boulder. And maybe I’ll try my hand at a description generator tool someday. But when will I have the time to do that? How do I have the time to do any of this?

I’m babbling. Time to stop the post here. Thanks for reading.

Code Compare page update

Hey. I’ve finally got around to updating my page called Code Compare: a comparison of interactive fiction authoring systems, which is one of my more obscure side projects in IF territory. Uh, and by updating, I mean I’ve reformatted the entire page into something far simpler to read from the bizarre mess it was originally in. Now it looks like a series of short wiki articles. It’s much better now.

Unfortunately, the page is still woefully out of date as far as raw information goes. I started the page before Inform 7 was even invented, so there’s precious little here about it. And I’ve got nothing about ADRIFT, ALAN 3, Quest, Twine, or Javascript yet either. So much to research!

But not now. Reformatting this page took over a week to do (the original format really was an unholy mess) and I really really must get back to publishing more walkthroughs (did you know I have a Patreon?) and playing the recent Introcomp 2018 entries.

Scans! Scans! Scans!

So, remember this image from GET LAMP by Jason Scott where I’m, like, holding all these binders of IF notes? Were any of you curious what all they could possibly contain? Well, I’m going to do my best to try to let you all see ’em all, if you want to.

Now that I have a scanner (which is already complaining of all the work I’m forcing it to do), I am compiling an index of my handwritten IF notes at plover.net/~davidw/scans/. You’ll get to see my penmanship from literally decades of IF playing. Written on whatever piece of paper was closest to me at the time. It’ll be like opening a time capsule or something. Explore the weird civilization that is me.

New game: Four Days of Summer

I recently ran something called Speed-IF Potato Peeler on ifMud, and for it, I actually managed to write my first new game in ages: Four Days of Summer. It’s also my first published game in Inform 7. It’s a very silly game with 8 locations and I shamelessly put myself into the game as your sidekick NPC. So, brace yourself, dahlinks, there’s gonna be several references to other IF games in the game.

Now, I’ve uploaded a SpeedIF_Potato_Peeler.zip file to the IF Archive, but I need to wait for that to get processed and moved to their games/mini-comps/speed-if folder before I can properly add the game to IFDB and IFWiki. In the meantime, feel free to grab a copy of my game from my own site: plover.net/~davidw/fourd17.zip. That will include the .gblorb storyfile and the cover art .png file.

Assuming I get feedback after I create the IFDB page, I’ll probably be motivated to update the game to be a bit more juicy, more easy, and more forgiving. Even though I don’t think it’s that difficult a game now, I can tell that I’ve failed to provide sufficient direction in a few places. And currently, you can’t ask me about anything (because conversation is hard) and I likewise shied away from adding any events in the game. So once there’s a version 2, then I’ll likely release the source code for it. Because why not. It’s fun to peek behind the curtains. And maybe someone will tell me how to code things better.

Works of Interactive Fiction

Goodness. Has it really been eight months since my last blog post? I really don’t like blogging, do I? I guess I’ve been doing it in my head instead of forcing myself to visit the WordPress site.

Anyway, something new to look at, my new Works of Interactive Fiction webpage at my Key & Compass website. This new page is a work-in-progress and another one of those will-never-really-be-finished pages I seem to be fond of making. On this page, I list several works that I’ve played and have either made walkthroughs for or plan to, and that I’ve also written up a short blurb as part of the walkthrough markups. So, what I did was, I wrote a Perl program to run through all my markups and extract the “about” blurbs and generate this new page so people could browse the works that way.

The page still needs work. The header is dull and there’s no footer yet. Tags are incomplete and I’d like to use them as filters. I’d also like to add some sort options too. Add an option to show/hide authors. And, uh, I have no idea yet how this is gonna scale as time goes on.

I’m also trying to, uh, count all the rooms/locations in all the applicable works. And, uh, y’know, there’s no standard way to count those things in IF. But I figure that’s what my next blog post can be about. 🔑️

Affordances: Diary and Status commands

This is the fourth in a series of planned posts about affordances in parser-based interactive fiction. Affordances are features that enhance the playing experience in some way, perhaps by making the work of IF less tedious, less frustrating, easier to play, more attractive, more interesting, or more fun. Affordances may be said to improve the play value of a game; reviewers will often point to these positive features as reasons why they liked a particular game.

I wish to talk today about another non-standardized affordance which I will call diary or status commands. I’m talking about commands like NOTES, DIARY, STATUS, GOALS, SPELLS, DIAGNOSE, STATS, MEMORY, WEALTH, HEALTH, MANUAL, RECORDINGS, HISTORY, etc. Some games might even have more than one such command; for example, Hadean Lands has FACTS, FORMULAE, RITUALS, and ROOMS. (There’s a lot to keep track of in that game.) Sometimes instead of a specialized command, there’s an in-game object such as a notebook, diary, journal, or to-do list which automatically updates itself and which the player can examine when they need to.

To my mind, these commands and notebooks are mostly the same sort of thing: an in-game affordance where the game is doing the note-taking so the player doesn’t have to. Which, of course, is wonderful. Now, I have to say that I’ve been playing IF since the seventies and I like making walkthroughs later on so I want my own notes regardless, but I realize that a lot of other players just don’t find note-taking all that fun. So why not have the computer do all that work?

I notice that except for DIAGNOSE, all of these specialized commands are nouns instead of verbs the way most commands are. Isn’t that interesting? All these notes are things that the player consults. If they were objects in your inventory, you’d just EXAMINE them like normal objects, I think. And a player wouldn’t have to learn these new commands by typing ABOUT; they could find out as soon as they typed “I” during normal play. So, I’m gonna ask: why aren’t these diary things in your inventory? Is it just because we think of these notes as meta, a feature of the game outside the game world, something for the player to look at but not the player character?

If we can get past the idea that diary and status information is meta, we can add these virtual notebooks to the PC’s inventory, effectively letting INVENTORY be the command that lists all our current resources, not just our current physical possessions. This almost already happens, sorta:

• When DIAGNOSE, a standard command in early cave-crawls, went into decline, we started to see health information moved into one of three places: the response to INVENTORY, the response to EXAMINE ME, or the game’s status bar.
• Sometimes the difference between INVENTORY and EXAMINE ME gets blurred; some games even treat them as the same command whose response combines info about the PC’s appearance, self-assessment, health, and possessions together into one report.
• In the game Darkiss Chapter 1, the inventory response has three sections, “You are carrying:”, “You are wearing:”, and “You also have:”. This last section is used for intangibles: a magic formula that the male protagonist has learned, and a curse that he may also acquire. Neither of these are lists of notes, I admit, but they’re definitely status changes, and that’s pretty close to what I’m talking about.

So that’s my big idea: turn non-standard diary and status commands into standard (though intangible) inventory objects. If it bothers you to force the player to type X GOALS instead of GOALS, feel free to add another affordance: make the verb EXAMINE (X) the default optional verb for normal objects the same way that GO is the default optional verb for directions.

As always, please feel free to add your comments below.

Affordances: GO TO

This is the third in a series of planned posts about affordances in parser-based interactive fiction. Affordances are features that enhance the playing experience in some way, perhaps by making the work of IF less tedious, less frustrating, easier to play, more attractive, more interesting, or more fun. Affordances may be said to improve the play value of a game; reviewers will often point to these positive features as reasons why they liked a particular game.

Today’s affordance is the GO TO command which can come in three main flavours:

• GO TO location, to move the player character quickly to the named location.
• GO TO someone, to move the player character quickly to the named character’s location.
• GO TO something, to move the player character quickly to the named thing’s location.

There are a few syntax variations you might come across, such as FIND as a synonym for GO TO, or just typing a location’s name as a command in itself to go there. The game On The Farm used the XYZZY command to display a numbered menu of location names, which the player could then enter a number to go directly to the associated location.

I think GO TO is a wonderful command to have available in a game, especially when the game’s geography is quite large, or even in a not-so-large game geography that the player is traversing quite often. I very much enjoyed being able to zip around the marcher in Hadean Lands which had the most powerful implementation of GO TO that I’ve ever seen, whose main limitation was that only “important” locations could be targeted, so something like GO TO LAB HALL NORTHWEST wasn’t supported. I also noticed that when a character or thing is targeted, the PC would attempt to go to the target’s last known location (instead of the target’s current location) because the target might’ve moved since they last saw it. But these are quite reasonable restrictions, and I hope other authors will be inspired by Hadean Lands to try providing GO TO in their own works.

As might be obvious, all this wonderfulness doesn’t come cheap; the author has to put a lot of effort into getting this affordance to work. And Hadean Lands had the advantage that the game was essentially without time: there was almost no every-turn machinery to worry about (what’s called daemons and fuses in earlier games), so the PC could be teleported across the map once the game had determined that the player knew how to remove any barriers between the two locations. Of course, the game still needs to carry out any necessary intermediate steps like obtaining the appropriate key for a locked door in the way, for example, so yes, it’s still complicated, but at least the game doesn’t need to invisibly march the PC like a puppet through every intermediate location to get it all done.

Unfortunately, the large-geography games where GO TO would be the most useful are also likely to be the same games where lots of things are happening every turn, whether it’s NPCs wandering around, ice melting, candles burning, or birdcages floating downriver. The game Nightfall tried to implement a GO TO command, but because so many other things were going on, the game would only move the PC just one location at a time en route to the destination, and then the player would have to type CONTINUE (or C) on subsequent turns to continue the journey. And that game ran slowly. I don’t know for sure what made the game run so slow, maybe it was the pathfinding, but it serves to show that GO TO has its problems.

Still, if you’re writing a game where the player is running around the place a lot and the NPCs don’t move much and game-time isn’t that important, say something like Koustrea’s Contentment, consider adding GO TO to your game. Unless the whole idea makes you want to curl up into a little ball and hide from the world, in which case, forget I said anything.

Do you have an anecdote to share about the GO TO command? Please tell me in the comments below. Thanks.

Affordances: GO BACK

This is the second in a series of planned posts about affordances in parser-based interactive fiction. Affordances are features that enhance the playing experience in some way, perhaps by making the work of IF less tedious, less frustrating, easier to play, more attractive, more interesting, or more fun. Affordances may be said to improve the play value of a game; reviewers will often point to these positive features as reasons why they liked a particular game.

Have you ever used the command “GO BACK” in a work of interactive fiction? Here’s what it can mean:

• GO BACK can mean go back to your previous location, assuming the travel route you took from there to your current location isn’t one-way. This is the usage I wish to discuss.
• GO BACK can also mean go back towards the beginning of the story, as opposed to GO FORWARD meaning to go towards the story’s conclusion. This is the usage in Gun Mute, for example, whose geography is topologically linear and whose story is strongly goal oriented.
• GO BACK can also mean to go back relative to the way the player character is facing, so if the player is facing north, “GO BACK” means to turn around and go south. This usage is very very rare in IF; I can’t remember any works that use the relative directions FORWARD, LEFT, RIGHT, and BACK this way.

GO BACK in the first usage is an affordance because it gives the player an extra way to help them navigate through the game’s geography. But although it was used in the very earliest text adventures, the command has all but faded away into obscurity today. So I’m curious, what happened to this lost affordance? Why was it added in the first place, and why did it disappear? I have some guesses on the last question:

• It was too much effort for the author for too little gain for the player. Although I don’t think it’s a difficult affordance to add, really. The game just has to remember whenever the player changes locations what the last location was and whether or not the mode of travel is reversible or not.
• Players just didn’t use it. Once you start navigating with compass directions, you don’t suddenly start thinking of relative directions. “BACK” just isn’t part of the compass.
• It was eclipsed by UNDO, a far more powerful tool for retracing one’s steps in a game.

I’m inclined to think it was a combination of all these factors, especially UNDO, that contributed to the demise of GO BACK as an affordance. And I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not. Are we missing something by not having GO BACK? One early game, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, used GO BACK in a puzzle. A sign quoting MGM’s The Wizard of Oz told players: “I’D GO BACK IF I WERE YOU”, and if you typed GO BACK at that location, you’d end up somewhere you couldn’t reach any other way. Which was kinda cool to figure out, but probably isn’t enough to ask other authors to add GO BACK as an affordance in their games.

Hm. What about games where UNDO is disabled? Would GO BACK be a welcome addition then? Ummm… I don’t know. Maybe? You’d have to tell players that the command was there, and even if they knew, would they use it?

I have more questions than answers about this one. Players, would you use GO BACK in a game? (Assume you can abbreviate the command to BACK or B.) Or should the command remain in the dustbin of history? Please let me know what you think in the comments below.

Affordances: Doors and Keys

This is the first in a series of planned posts about affordances in parser-based interactive fiction. Affordances are features that enhance the playing experience in some way, perhaps by making the work of IF less tedious, less frustrating, easier to play, more attractive, more interesting, or more fun. Affordances may be said to improve the play value of a game; reviewers will often point to these positive features as reasons why they liked a particular game.

For my first article on affordances, I’m going to start with the obvious topic: doors and keys. Long-time players of IF are quite familiar with the tedium of “UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY. OPEN DOOR. E.” in older games, and now expect “E.” to do all that busywork with the key automatically. It may be helpful to list how we want the game to behave in various circumstances when attempting to go through a door:

1. If the door is closed and locked: Try using any and all available keys in a reasonable way to automatically unlock the door.
2. If the door is still locked: Report that there’s a locked door in the way.
3. If the door is unlocked but closed: Automatically try opening it.
4. If the door is still closed: Report that there’s a closed door in the way. Perhaps it’s jammed or guarded.
5. If the door is (now) open: Go right through.

That first step glosses over a lot of fussy details. We want to try keys known to open the door first, which means the game has to remember if the player-character has successfully used a key before. We will also want to consider keys in our inventory before considering visible keys in the PC’s location. We probably want to automatically try taking a key if it’s not in our inventory, even if the key’s in a piranha tank. If we do pick up a key, we probably want to automatically put it into any keyring we already have. And once the key is in our inventory, there’s the question of availability; a key in a keyring is available for our use, but a key held by an evil gremlin in the birdcage we’re carrying probably isn’t available. So, let’s try to itemize all that:

1. If this door doesn’t even use keys, skip all this. Don’t bother trying keys.
2. Select a key:
   1. If there’s a key in our inventory known to open the door, select that key.
   2. If there’s a visible key elsewhere in our location known to open the door, select that key.
   3. If there’s a key in our inventory that will open the door, select that key.
   4. If there’s a visible key elsewhere in our location, select that key.
   5. Otherwise, no key is selected: Report that you don’t have a key for this door.
3. If the selected key isn’t in your inventory, try taking the key. If the taking was successful and if you have a keyring, put the key into the keyring.
4. If the selected key isn’t available: Report that you can’t use that key because of reasons (e.g.: evil gremlin).
5. Otherwise: Unlock the door with selected key.

Note that (IMHO) we should only generate an automatic take-action when the key is outside our inventory. We shouldn’t have to bother taking the key out of our
keyrings, picnic baskets, and Soft-N-Fresh bathrobe pockets in order to use a key. Test for availablilty/touchability instead of testing it being directly in our hot little kleptomaniac hands.

Further things to consider:

• Understand keycards as a separate class of keys. Only automatically try keycards in doors with the appropriate slots, and only try cut keys in doors with keyholes, eh?
• You can automate entering an elevator car too. Don’t force a player to type “PUSH CALL BUTTON. WAIT. E.” when “E.” could accomplish the same thing.
• Car doors, too, can be friendly. Don’t force a player to type “UNLOCK CAR DOOR WITH CAR KEY. OPEN CAR DOOR. ENTER CAR.” when “ENTER CAR” is good enough.
• Don’t forget about automatic closing and locking of doors. When the PC is leaving their own home or exiting their own car, it’s perfectly reasonable to have the game automatically close and lock the door behind them, as long as they have the key.
• Report what door(s) a key is for when the PC examines the key, assuming they know that info. Likewise, report what door(s) a key is for when the PC takes inventory.

If you’re writing in Inform 7, you’ll want to lookup the Locksmith extension by Emily Short. I haven’t looked at it, since I’m more of a player than an author, but I expect that it handles most, perhaps all, of the above.

So how’d I do? Are there any other affordances regarding doors and keys you’d like to see that I missed? Please comment below.

Intro to my JSON datafile

This post will be about my IF datafile, now in glorious JSON format. The top level of my datafile looks like this:

{
  "languages":[ ... ],
  "urlabbrs":[ ... ],
  "lists":[ ... ],
  "tags-info":{ ... },
  "authsystems":{ ... },
  "extensions":{ ... },
  "events":{ ... },
  "people":{ ... },
  "games":{ ... }
}

And here’s a brief description of each of these top-level sections:

• The languages section is very simple and is mostly there to remind me what each 2-letter language code means, e.g. "en" means English, "fr" means French, and so on. Sometimes I forget what the code for Swedish is, y’know?
• The urlabbrs section is for my list of URL abbreviations, for example, I’ll use [A] at the beginning of an URL to mean "mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/". I was still worried about file size when I creating my datafile, and I thought the use of these abbreviations might reduce bloat. I’m now thinking that this is an added complexity I ought to do away with someday, if I ever want to make my datafile public in any way.
• The lists section is for describing lists of works of IF, such as Holiday-themed works (where I want to subdivide into particular holidays), or works that take place in the United States (where I want to subdivide into individual States).
• The tags-info section is more comments to myself, reminding me what tags I use in my data, in what contexts I use them, and what do they mean.
• The authsystems section is for recording info about authoring systems. But it’s a very new section and doesn’t have much info in it yet.
• The extensions section is for recording info about library extensions, particularly used by Inform 6 or Inform 7 authors. It’s also a new section.
• The events section is for recording info about events, mostly competitions. It’s… okay, but it could be better.
• The people section is for recording info about people, mostly authors of IF. This is a mostly threadbare section where I can record a link that I want to associate with someone, like their blog.
• The games section is for recording info about works of IF, and it’s easily the largest and most complex section of all of them. When I have time to update my datafile, I’m mostly adding to this section, and sometimes the events section, and not much else. I want to rename this section to works; I just haven’t done that yet since I’d have to update all my programs that read the datafile as well.

I’ll assume if you’ve read this far, you’re mostly interested in the games section, so here’s the structure of a game entry:

"game-id":{
  "titles":[ ... ], "ifwiki":"",
  "authors":[ ... ], "publishers":[ ... ],
  "contribs":[ ... ], "testers":[ ... ],
  "genres":[ ... ], "license":"",
  "color":"", "graphics":"", "sound":"", "cruelty":"",
  "versions":[ ... ],
  "sline":{ ... }, "exts":[ ... ], "lists":[ ... ],
  "seealso":[ ... ], "reviews":[ ... ], "spoilers":[ ... ],
  "notes":[ ... ],
  "year":"", "xayear":"",
  "series":"", "seriesplace":integer,
  "baf":"", "tuid":"", "ifratings":"", "ifro":"", "tags":[ ... ]
}

Fortunately, few of these fields are required; at minimum, I want the game-id, the title, and the year. Here’s what these fields are for:

• The game-id is a unique short ID that I make up for each game. The full rules are complicated, but it’s usually the first five letters of the game’s title (not counting words like “the”, “a”, “an”) put into lowercase followed by the last two digits of the game’s original publication year.
• The titles field is a list of the game’s titles, where the main title is first. What counts as the “main” title can be a bit of a judgment call.
• The ifwiki field simply tells me what the game’s article name is on IFWiki, if different than the main title.
• The authors field is a list of the game’s authors (including writers and programmers). These are not simple strings of the authors’ names, but name-records.
• The publishers field is a list of the game’s publishers (including distributors). Again, more name-records.
• The contribs field is a list of the game’s contributors (including illustrators, musicians, voice actors, etc.)
• The testers field is a list of the game’s testers, usually beta-testers.
• The genres field is a list of the game’s genres, which I try to standardize even though the genre info is coming from Baf’s Guide, IFWiki, and IFDB, each of which handles genres different ways.
• The license field is a simple string naming the game’s license.
• The color field attempts to answer the question, “Is text-colour usage in the game significant?”
• The graphics field attempts to answer the question, “Are there graphics in this game, and does a player need to be able to see them?”
• The sound field attempts to answer the question, “Is there music or sound effects in this game, and does a player need to be able to hear them?”
• The cruelty field records where the game is rated under the Cruelty Scale.
• The versions field is complicated; there’s a version-record for each version of the game. That’s where authoring system, platform, language, IFID, etc. is recorded.
• The sline field describes the status line layout.
• The exts field lists any library extensions that the game is known to use.
• The lists field lists which game lists the game belongs to and how.
• The seealso field lists links to webpages about the game, not including reviews or spoilers. I don’t know if I can justify why it isn’t called links.
• The reviews field lists links to reviews of the game.
• The spoilers field lists links to spoilers about the game (e.g.: walkthroughs, hints, maps, transcripts).
• The notes field lists other things I want to note about the game that aren’t covered in other fields. There’s a wide variety of note types.
• The year field states for the game’s original publication year.
• The xayear field states for which year this game is eligible for an XYZZY Award.
• The series field states which game series this game belongs to. I’m badly assuming a game can only belong to one series, so this needs to change.
• The seriesplace field is an integer stating where in the series this game is; for example: 2 means it’s the second game in the series.
• The baf field is the Baf’s Guide number that the game had on that site.
• The tuid field is the TUID of the game that IFDB uses. Er, for the main version of the game.
• The ifratings field is old IF Ratings number that the game had on that site.
• The ifro field is the IF Review Organization number that the game has on that site.
• The tags field is a list of tags like "cover" (meaning that the game has cover art) or "no-testers" (meaning that the game doesn’t credit any testers).

That’s probably enough to chew on for one post. Someday, I really need to make a webpage documenting the whole thing.

Oh, and why am I collecting all this info in the first place? Originally, it was to showcase my walkthroughs, but as I helping out with the XYZZY Awards and administrating IFWiki, I really did need at least some of this info collected somewhere. And I sensed that no one else was recording quite everything that I felt needed to be recorded. And I felt a more detailed approach would be more helpful down the line.

Unfortunately, I can’t claim my datafile is in any way superior; my records are quite spotty in places because I’ve been doing this mostly manually to date. Automating the process is something I  <em>really</em> want to do — if I can find the time for it.