LAST CHANGE
2000-12-16
TOPIC
NAME
bill -
DESCRIPTION
Bill of Player's Rights
=======================
In an early version of Zork, it was possible to be killed by
the collapse of an unstable room. Due to carelessness with
scheduling such a collapse, 50,000 pounds of rock might fall on
your head during a stroll down a forest path. Meteors, no doubt.
-- P. David Lebling
W. H. Auden once observed that poetry makes nothing happen. Adventure games
are far more futile: it must never be forgotten that they intentionally
annoy the player most of the time. There's a fine line between a challenge
and a nuisance: the designer has to think, first and foremost, like a
player (not an author, and certainly not a programmer). With that in mind,
I hold the following rights to be self-evident:
1. Not to be killed without warning
At its most basic level, this means that a room with three exits, two of
which lead to instant death and the third to treasure, is unreasonable
without some hint. On the subject of which:
2. Not to be given horribly unclear hints
Many years ago, I played a game in which going north from a cave led to a
lethal pit. The hint was: there was a pride of lions carved above the
doorway. Good hints can be skilfully hidden, or very brief, but should
not need explaining after the event. (The game was Level 9's `Dungeon',
in which pride comes before a fall. Conversely, the hint in the
moving-rocks plain problem in `Spellbreaker' is a masterpiece.)
3. To be able to win without experience of past lives
This rule is very hard to abide by. Here are three examples:
(i) There is a nuclear bomb buried under some anonymous
floor somewhere, which must be disarmed. The player knows
where to dig because, last time around, it blew up there.
(ii) There is a rocket-launcher with a panel of buttons, which looks
as if it needs to be correctly programmed. But the player
can misfire the rocket easily by tampering with the controls
before finding the manual.
(iii) (This from `The Lurking Horror'.) Something needs to be cooked
for the right length of time. The only way to find the right
time is by trial and error, but each game allows only one trial.
On the other hand, common sense suggests a reasonable answer.
Of these (i) is clearly unfair, most players would agree (ii) is fair enough
and (iii), as tends to happen with real cases, is border-line. In principle,
then, a good player should be able to play the entire game out without doing
anything illogical, and deserves likewise:
4. To be able to win without knowledge of future events
For example, the game opens near a shop. You have one coin and can buy a
lamp, a magic carpet or a periscope. Five minutes later you are transported
away without warning to a submarine, whereupon you need a periscope. If you
bought the carpet, bad luck.
5. Not to have the game closed off without warning
`Closed off' meaning that it would become impossible to proceed at some
later date. If there is a Japanese paper wall which you can walk through at
the very beginning of the game, it is extremely annoying to find that a
puzzle at the very end requires it to still be intact, because every one of
your saved games will be useless. Similarly it is quite common to have a
room which can only be visited once per game. If there are two different
things to be accomplished there, this should be hinted at.
In other words, an irrevocable act is only fair if the player is given due
warning that it would be irrevocable.
6. Not to need to do unlikely things
For example, a game which depends on asking a policeman about something he
could not reasonably know about. (Less extremely, the problem of the
hacker's keys in `The Lurking Horror'.) Another unlikely thing is waiting
in dull places. If you have a junction at which after five turns an elf
turns up bearing a magic ring, a player may well never spend five
consecutive turns there and will miss what you intended to be easy. (`Zork
III' is very much a case in point.) If you intend the player to stay
somewhere for a while, put something intriguing there.
7. Not to need to do boring things for the sake of it
In the bad old days many games would make life difficult by putting
objects needed to solve a problem miles away from where the problem was,
despite all logic - say, a boat in the middle of a desert. Or, for example,
a four-discs tower of Hanoi puzzle might entertain. But not an eight-discs
one. And the two most hackneyed puzzles - only being able to carry four
items, and fumbling with a rucksack, or having to keep finding new light
sources - can wear a player's patience down very quickly.
8. Not to have to type exactly the right verb
For instance, "looking inside" a box finds nothing, but "searching" it
does. Or consider the following dialogue (amazingly, from `Sorcerer'):
>unlock journal
(with the small key)
No spell would help with that!
>open journal
(with the small key)
The journal springs open.
This is so misleading as to constitute a bug, but it's an easy design fault
to fall into. (Similarly, the wording needed to use the brick in `Zork II'
strikes me as quite unfair, unless I missed something obvious.) Consider
how many ways a player can, for instance, ask to take a coat off:
remove coat / take coat off / take off coat / disrobe coat
doff coat / shed coat
(I was sceptical when play-testers asked me to add "don" and "doff" to my
game `Curses', but enjoyed a certain moment of triumph when my mother tried
it during her first game.) Nouns also need...
9. To be allowed reasonable synonyms
In the same room in `Sorcerer' is a "woven wall hanging" which can instead
be called "tapestry" (though not "curtain"). This is not a luxury, it's an
essential. For instance, in `Trinity' there is a charming statue of a
carefree little boy playing a set of pan pipes. This can be called the
"charming" or "peter" "statue" "sculpture" "pan" "boy" "pipe" or
"pipes". Objects often have more than 10 nouns attached.
Perhaps a remark on a sad subject might be intruded here. The Japanese
woman near the start of `Trinity' can be called "yellow" and "Jap", for
instance, terms with a grisly resonance. In the play-testing of `Curses',
it was pointed out to me that the line "Let's just call a spade a spade"
(an innocent joke about a garden spade) meant something quite different to
extreme right-wing politicians in southern America; in the end, I kept
the line, but it's never seemed quite as funny since.
10. To have a decent parser
(If only this went without saying.) At the very least the parser should
provide for taking and dropping multiple objects.
Since only the Bible stops at ten commandments, here are seven more, though
these seem to me to be matters of opinion:
11. To have reasonable freedom of action
Being locked up in a long sequence of prisons, with only brief escapes
between them, is not all that entertaining. After a while the player begins
to feel that the designer has tied him to a chair in order to shout the plot
at him. This is particularly dangerous for adventure game adaptations of
books (and most players would agree that the Melbourne House adventures
based on `The Lord of the Rings' suffered from this).
12. Not to depend much on luck
Small chance variations add to the fun, but only small ones. The thief in
`Zork I' seems to me to be just about right in this respect, and similarly
the spinning room in `Zork II'. But a ten-ton weight which fell down and
killed you at a certain point in half of all games is just annoying.
(Also, you're only making work for yourself, in that games with random
elements are much harder to test and debug, though that shouldn't in an ideal
world be an issue.)
A particular danger occurs with low-probability events, one or a
combination of which might destroy the player's chances. For instance, in
the earliest edition of `Adventureland', the bees have an 8% chance of
suffocation each turn carried in the bottle: one needs to carry them for 10
or 11 turns, which gives the bees only a 40% chance of surviving to their
destination.
There is much to be said for varying messages which occur very often (such
as, "You consult your spell book.") in a fairly random way, for variety's
own sake.
13. To be able to understand a problem once it is solved
This may sound odd, but many problems are solved by accident or trial and
error. A guard-post which can be passed if and only if you are carrying a
spear, for instance, ought to indicate somehow that this is why you're
allowed past. (The most extreme example must be the notorious Bank of
Zork, of which I've never even understood other people's explanations.)
14. Not to be given too many red herrings
A few red herrings make a game more interesting. A very nice feature of
`Zork I', `II' and `III' is that they each contain red herrings explained in
the others (in one case, explained in `Sorcerer'). But difficult puzzles
tend to be solved last, and the main technique players use is to look at
their maps and see what's left that they don't understand. This is
frustrating when there are many insoluble puzzles and useless objects. So
you can expect players to lose interest if you aren't careful. My personal
view is that red herrings ought to be clued: for instance, if there is a
useless coconut near the beginning, then perhaps much later an absent-minded
botanist could be found who wandered about dropping them. The coconut
should at least have some rationale.
An object is not a red herring merely because it has no game function: a
useless newspaper could quite fairly be found in a library. But not a
kaleidoscope.
The very worst game I've played for red herrings is `Sorcerer', which by
my reckoning has 10.
15. To have a good reason why something is impossible
Unless it's also funny, a very contrived reason why something is
impossible just irritates. (The reason one can't walk on the grass in
Kensington Gardens in `Trinity' is only just funny enough, I think.)
Moral objections, though, are fair. For instance, if you are staying in
your best friend's house, where there is a diamond in a display case,
smashing the case and taking the diamond would be physically easy but quite
out of character. Mr Spock can certainly be disallowed from shooting
Captain Kirk in the back.
16. Not to need to be American
The diamond maze in `Zork II' being a case in point. Similarly, it's
polite to allow the player to type English or American spellings or idiom.
For instance `Trinity' endears itself to English players in that the soccer
ball can be called "football" - soccer is a word almost never used in
England. (Since these words were first written, several people have
politely pointed out to me that my own `Curses' is, shall we say, slightly
English. But then, like any good dictator, I prefer drafting constitutions
to abiding by them.)
17. To know how the game is getting on
In other words, when the end is approaching, or how the plot is
developing. Once upon a time, score was the only measure of this, but
hopefully not any more.