Confessions

I am not a gamer; or not a good one at least. My gaming days ended with Mario when Gameboys were the means of childhood entertainment, soooo over twelve years ago.

I have never been more frustrated during a game than when I was testing out VIOLET. When I played Mario, of course I got frustrated, but I was also competitive and kept going; I think that my attention was grabbed because of the visual images, and being able to jump on things.

This interactive fiction game, however, made me want to quit. I didn’t get frustrated because there were no images; I love books, and have a very vivid imagination when reading. In the movie, Get Lamp, playing interactive fiction was said to be like “playing a book.” However, I could not “play the book” for the life of me. I either received text like “I don’t understand” or “use a different verb,” for most of the things that I typed in. What was I doing wrong?! To lose a life or hit a dead end because you ran into another creature is reasonable to me; but having an unknown source tell me that my “move,” essentially, doesn’t work, I want to be given an explanation why.

There was also no set destination. In Mario, your goal is to save the princess; whereas, in VIOLET, my goal was to make a story, and I couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. When I was successful in my input, and got a good response back, I was overjoyed, which peaked my interest again. Until, yep. There was “use a different verb” again. So I tried a different method, of taking a word or phrase from the passage that VIOLET sent me, and using that as my command. This worked to an extent, but I was still a recipient of my new least favorite phrase.

In Get Lamp, the connection between this interactive fiction and scientific coding was brought up, meaning a way to get from one place to another. Thus, I was thinking that my transitional method of using previously used verbs/nouns would help me in developing my text. But I think I need a different method. If anyone had extremely good success and would like to help an inexperienced interactive fictioner out… it would be greatly appreciated!

I could see how one could spend hours playing these sorts of games, making stories as you go along, as I especially like the idea of creating my own images in my head. However, I have to learn how to be successful in order to do that!  I need to figure out which verbs are appropriate for the storyline, and what exactly they can go with, as it seems they have certain requirements.  I wonder if maybe I prefer being told what is going to happen (like in a novel), rather than attempting to encourage the story along myself? These are my confessions.

One thought on “Confessions”

  1. I think one of the reason why we struggle with these games sometimes is because they are all text based. Sure, we have the command to examine a room and read what’s there, I’m sure we all have different ideas in our heads of what the room actually looks like. Even though I think being able to use our imagination is one of the best parts about these games,who’s to say we will pick up on the right commands to trigger the next set of events? I felt like you sometimes, where I just wanted them to tell me what is going to happen next because I had run out of ideas.

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