Wow, thanks to the OP and all of the commenters because this has definitely become one of the most thought-provoking and enjoyable threads I’ve read on this forum so far.
I spent the last two days digging into the deep history of IF, including watching “Get Lamp” (the documentary) and reading the IF Theory Reader, among other texts.
I guess what I find the most fascinating is that one could draw a Venn diagram where one circle was “Fiction/Literature elements” and the other was “Game Mechanics.” In terms of personal preferences, some players would have barely contiguous circles while others would have both circles perfectly overlapping.
In the “Old School” IF, the only real game mechanics available were
- Making it to the end without dying, and
- Solving puzzles to get a key so that you can keep moving forward to the end.
The rest was just purely navigational, such as mapping or successfully exiting out of the dreaded mazes.
Fast forward to today, and with something like CS, you’ve got the possibility of using literally thousands of variables to determine gameplay. But at the end of the day, these variables are just “keys” in disguise. Either it’s a single-use “key” that you must own to pass through a “door” or else it’s a stat of a sufficiently high level (the “key”) to activate a scene.
Therefore, while the game mechanics aspect is much more complex, it’s actually nothing new. And I think someone coming in from traditional RPGs would feel perfectly at home. What IS new to IF, however, is the level of customization available for the fiction element, and I think that’s what triggered the OP’s post.
I think that the biggest hurdle I had to overcome when getting used to CS games is the switch in narrative voice. For many CS games, the story starts by asking the player certain questions (such as gender preference, but it could be anything) and then switches to just telling the player what’s going on.
In other words, a story might ask me my name but then it tells me that I AM a pirate aboard a ship. I can choose my name, but I certainly didn’t get consulted about my preferences for job occupation, so it’s a bit disconcerting.
And with CS being limited to just two text formatting options (bold and italic), it’s pretty difficult to visually signify the switch between when I’m going to be consulted and when I’m going to be dictated to.
It’s even more confusing when I can sometimes input free text (i.e. no restrictions on choice) and then sometimes I’m limited to two or three options to click on at the bottom of the screen, none of which may correspond to what I’d ACTUALLY like to do.
In other words, in a parser game, there’s freeform input from the player throughout, so the game feels very interactive. Whereas a CYOA game could be purely “choose one of the pre-scripted answers” on every page, which feels less interactive and more like traditional “fiction.”
But if I’m being consulted sometimes and dictated to at other times, it’s really hard to get into the swing of the story and suspend my disbelief. I think that’s really what’s at the heart of my animus against customization. It’s not the user value being customized (i.e. gender, sex, hair color, etc) but that the process of customization itself disrupts the narrative flow.
