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Playing Fair with the Player

It's something of a tradition in interactive fiction (if a medium that has existed for only 25 years can be said to have traditions) that the opening of a game is set in a rather narrow environment -- there may be only one location, or at most three or four -- in which the player is confronted by a single difficult puzzle. Until you solve this "intro puzzle," you can't go on with the game.

I've looked at a number of games that I'd describe this way -- I'm not going to name names, but if you've played much IF, I'm sure you can assemble your own list. Not infrequently, the intro puzzle is very difficult indeed. You're in the bomb shelter, and the items in your inventory are a wooden nickel and a pogo stick. The bomb shelter door is locked, and you don't have the key. The game will go absolutely nowhere until it occurs to you to stand on the wooden nickel while throwing the pogo stick at the door. The solution may be as absurd as this, or it may make perfect sense once it's explained to you, but knowing after the fact that it made sense is not much consolation. When you're stuck, you're stuck.

My usual reaction, after trying ten or fifteen increasingly far-fetched things none of which work, is to say, "The hell with it," and go read a book instead. I suspect I'm not alone.

Analyzing this situation from a literary perspective may be instructive. At the very least, it should be worth attempting.

If, as Graham Nelson has said, interactive fiction is "a novel at war with a crossword," it's clear that when the opening puzzle is so difficult that the player gives up, the crossword has won. The novel has lost.

In a conventional plotted novel, the protagonist (the hero or heroine) struggles against one or more antagonists (the bad guys). Interactive fiction is unique in that the player is cast in the role of the protagonist. That is, there's a player character within the fictional world -- a protagonist. The player dons the mantle of the protagonist and attempts to come to grips with whatever antagonists have been arrayed against the protagonist. Not infrequently, the setting of the story becomes the most significant antagonist, but that's a discussion for another time.

When the intro puzzle is so difficult that it gets in the way of the player's enjoyment of the game, it seems to me that the author of the game has taken on the role of antagonist. The player (not the player character) becomes the protagonist. The alleged story contained within the game becomes more or less irrelevant to this test of skill between author and player. The player character is reduced to a silicon marionette over whom player and author are vying for control.

I call this an "I'm Cleverer Than You Are" (ICTYA) game. The author is asserting that he or she (though usually it's a he, isn't it?) is cleverer than the player, and will defeat the player. Of course, the author is the one setting the rules of engagement, and can be as arbitrary or sadistic as he likes.

In conventional fiction, it's usually considered a necessity that the reader feel that the author is "playing fair." Essential information is occasionally withheld from the reader (Agatha Christie's "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" being perhaps the most famous example), but authors of conventional fiction are well advised to avoid this type of stunt. The dramatic, suspenseful intro in which the reader is sweating buckets for pages, only to read, "...and then I woke up. It had all been a dream" is both offensive and more common than you might suppose. It even shows up in published novels from time to time. The problem with the dream intro is precisely that the author isn't playing fair with the reader. The author is in possession of information that the reader doesn't have -- namely, the information that nothing dangerous or suspenseful is actually taking place in the story.

To enjoy a story, you need to be able to trust that the author is telling you what you need to know. Murder mysteries in the 1930s sometimes went so far as to include footnotes in the last chapter showing the reader where essential clues had been mentioned, in order to avoid the accusation that the author was playing fast and loose with the reader's trust.

But of course, a conventional novel doesn't have pages that are glued together until you spot the clues. It seems to me that this increases the IF author's burden. Footnotes at the end showing how the intro puzzle made perfect sense are of very little value if you can't flip forward to the end and read the footnotes.

If interactive fiction is an art form (and I would argue that it is), a good work of IF has to do what a good work in any other medium does. It has to delight the audience. Of course, you get to pick your own intended audience: Not everyone cares for obscure novels by Thomas Pynchon, and not everyone likes giant Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck figures on ice skates. If you choose to write ICTYA IF, I can't tell you it's a bad idea, but I will assert that your audience is likely to remain very small.

If you want to reach a wider audience, you may want to bear in mind that the player is not the protagonist, and you're not the antagonist. You're the storyteller, and your role is, first and foremost, to gain and keep the player's trust. Only to the extent that the player trusts you will she be willing to immerse herself in the story. And only to the extent that she is immersed in the story can she be delighted by it.

But of course there do have to be puzzles. If there are no puzzles, the player can simply proceed from the beginning of the story to the end. The story will not be interactive, not in any significant way. So there's always a delicate balance. The author is walking a tightrope. What would be too difficult for the player, or too easy? Might a given puzzle be difficult but fair? What do we mean by "fair" and "unfair"?

Other people -- people who are smarter and more experienced than I -- have written about the design of puzzles. I don't want to rehash that whole discussion here. Briefly, it seems to me that a good puzzle has at least two qualities: Its existence in the world of the story makes some sort of sense in that world, and the solution is suggested in some way (subtly or more clearly) by the descriptions of the objects involved. An ICTYA game generally violates one or both of those precepts. Things are thrown in arbitrarily, and then you have to make an intuitive leap that is not supported by any information that the author actually provides.

In my first two games, I provided built-in hint systems that supplied the solutions to all of the puzzles. Figuring that this made the games a bit too easy, I also included disincentives. In "Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina," the points awarded for solving a puzzle are progressively reduced as the hints are accessed. In "Last Resort," the hints are password-protected. I supply the password on request, but having to send an email and then wait a day for a response encourages players to keep going and trust their ingenuity.

I no longer think built-in hints are enough. They're necessary, but not sufficient. They're necessary because not all players will have the same native intelligence or experience with IF. But they're not sufficient, because in the moment when the player accesses the hints, she's no longer immersed in the story. We're back in a situation in which the player is the protagonist and the author is the antagonist. And that's a bad thing. The author has failed in his balancing act, but that's a given: The author will always fail, because the balance needs to be different for different players. So the question is, how do we make the balance of puzzle obviousness or subtlety different for different players, without forcing them to resort to the hints (except as a last resort)?

Right now I'm toying with an idea for how to do this. It means a lot of extra programming work, but the results, in terms of the player's immersion in the story, may make it worth the effort.

Reflect, if you will, on the nature of examining something. In IF, the 'examine' command typically prints out the description of the object in question. The text that forms the description will vary depending on the state of the object within the model world, if the object can be gotten into more than one state: for instance, if the object is an inflatable raft, the description will tell the player whether it's inflated or not. But that's usually the only type of variation you'll see.

In the real world, the process of examination is more nuanced. Typically, the first couple of times we examine something, we're doing a cursory examination of its general features -- color, size, condition, position in the room, etc. If we examine it more than twice, it's almost certainly because we're interested in performing a closer scrutiny in order to glean extra details.

This is a point (there are many) at which IF's attempt to model the real world breaks down. In almost any text game ever written, examining something for the tenth or twentieth time will print out exactly the same text as examining it for the first time.

Creating a more sophisticated paradigm for the action of examining would reduce the need for hints and walkthroughs, while increasing the player's immersion in the story.

Let's try out an example. Let's suppose there's an old trunk in the basement. It's locked, of course, and of course you don't have the key. Indeed, the key may have been lost years ago. The first time you examine the trunk's lock, you might learn only that it's somewhat rusted. But the action of trying to unlock the trunk (using something that doesn't work) might kick the lock's description into a new state. Now, the same command ('x lock') might -- and arguably should -- provide additional detail: "The keyhole is rather large, as if it was meant for an old-fashioned key." (This is much more informative than the default response, which is typically, "That doesn't seem to fit the lock.") After a couple more tries, the description might change further, adding a new sentence at the end: "Almost any small, straight piece of metal might be inserted into the lock."

With those simple changes, the puzzle of the locked trunk is brought within reach of the less experienced player, and without pulling the player out of the story.

Ideally, of course, the more experienced or masochistic player should be able to use a global "shut off the in-game clues" command. Compared to the rather convoluted process of setting up variable text descriptions, which may need to respond to context in a different way for each puzzle, setting up a skip-the-clues command would be absurdly easy. Add the code "&& useClues" to every line where the description shifts, and you're home free.

As a player, I'm absolutely not interested in having the author prove he's cleverer than I am. I want to admire his cleverness, but I don't want to be insulted by it. Even more than admiring the author's cleverness, though, I want to be immersed in the story he's telling. If the cleverness gets in the way of the story, let's just ditch the cleverness, shall we?