So as I said yesterday, I was psyched to get the whole package of game entries for this year's Interactive Fiction competitions (get it yourself if you haven't yet, it comes with all the interpreters!) and was thinking about doing some regular writeups here on SVGL about some of the titles I've been playing, kinda informal reviews. I've been thinking a lot about the game review process as we know it in general lately -- you know, score hysteria, and how a point or star rating based on allocation of performance across various factors seems to be becoming just a touch irrelevant, since gaming these days is so much more about the "whole package" experience, and not the sum total of its parts.
How would this apply to IF? As a side note, I still call them "text adventures," because depending on the game, the term "interactive fiction" is a little misleading. I tend to be dissatisfied with those text adventures that sort of provide a linear experience -- I like it still to feel like a game, you know, wherein while there may be a fixed objective or several, the outcome is still in my hands. I recently played a game that would definitely qualify as "interactive fiction," in that there was, to my eyes, no way to divert or affect the course of the outcome as the author envisioned it. It was a fascinating exercise in frustration, and very thought-provoking. I highly recommend checking out The Illuminated Lantern's Commonplace Book Project, which envisions the stories of H.P. Lovecraft as interactive stories.
Text adventures are famous, or perhaps infamous, for their obtuseness -- an action you attempt that fails might have been successful if you had only phrased it another way. "Light lamp," for example, and you might be told "that doesn't work," but "Strike match" followed by "put flame on wick" might be the way to do it. And you might have arrived at that conclusion yourself if "light lamp" had been met with "how do you want to do that?" Rather than "You can't." That's part of the fun, I think (and maybe I'm in the minority here), as frustrating as it can be. Still, the sophistication of the parser must definitely be evaluated when reviewing text adventures -- too much head-banging against the wall will ruin the game. Best to account for a wide variety of possibilities when designing a text adventure -- so that even if it doesn't understand what you're trying to do, it will recognize how to instruct you to make it understandable (e.g "I could only understand so far as you're trying to do something with the matchbook"). There's a fine line between challenging and needlessly frustrating.
Long story short, I think there are several key areas that have to be examined when reviewing text adventures: The story, the puzzles, the quality of the writing, the overall difficulty level, and the intelligence of the parser. Anything else?
Even if I can segment out the key areas of focus in text adventures, that doesn't mean I'd quantify them numerically. The sum of the parts, again, doesn't always equate to the whole in an overall experience -- hence my feeling on, for example, Final Fantasy XII. Nothing wrong with it; pretty perfect, in so much as a game can be without obvious flaws, and yet, it makes no mark on my heart or my memory. To paraphrase ActionButton, "perfect in form and function; otherwise, bad"; an empty experience. But anyway, even if I'll be judging text adventures by their segments, they sure as hell won't be assigned any numbers that must comprise a whole. I'm angry at numbers, in fact; there's, like, too many of 'em.
Can anyone think of any other areas of note that need to be evaluated in a text adventure review? What would you need to know to determine whether or not you'd enjoy one -- regardless of whether you've tried a text adventure before?
P.S: For those of you who love me for the pr0nz, there are sex text adventures, and I have covered one of my favorites at Aberrant Gamer.
