Cheat, Beg, Wheedle, Cajole

...and other strategies for how we finish IF games

Help, please!

The IF audience, as a whole, is ashamed, critical, and frustrated. Not by the lack of commercial success of IF or by the fall of Infocom; but rather by the games themselves -- specifically, by our frequent need for assistance in getting through them. A quick look at the IF newsgroups shows that a great many people are stuck in different games and are using help of some sort. But how many people need help to get through a game? And how many hints does the average person take? And, if we need all this help getting through a game, does that mean that the average interactive fiction game is too hard? And if we all use hints, why does everyone feel so guilty about the whole thing?

To find out what the IF community thinks about getting help for the games, what kind of help is appreciated, and when do clues get in the way, I recently posted a poll on the newsgroups and received about 50 responses. I also e-mailed several IF authors to see how they feel. I've compiled the results and offer some analysis.

The average IF player

First, the obvious: an interactive fiction game relies on puzzles to make the Interactive part of the game come alive. And the nature of puzzles is to be challenged, and occasionally stuck. That's the point, isn't it? So it's only logical that we would need a nudge now and then.

In fact, 96 percent of players say they resort to help at some point during a game, with the average IF player needing three hints to solve the average length game. Some 38 percent use an average of three or fewer hints, 37 percent need three to five, 8 percent need more than five, and 15 percent couldn't answer with a number, but gave varying versions of "it depends."

Does this mean the games are too hard? Well, 96 percent of players answer with a resounding no, the games are not too hard. On the contrary, most respondents were quick to beat themselves up, taking the blame and feeling inadequate for failing to solve puzzles: only 25 percent gave a straight "no," while 10 percent said they were "too lazy", 15 percent said they were "too stupid", and 17 percent said they were "too impatient." Putting some blame on the authors were the 8 percent who said "guess the verb" caused looking at a cheat, 6 percent admitted that their minds just were out of sync with the author, and 6 percent contended that while the games were not unfairly difficult, some puzzles were.

So what causes this high "cheat" rate among players? One factor may be that most IF players (95 percent) play interactive fiction games alone. Those of you who have played a game with a friend will know that two minds are much better than one. Maybe someone in the community can figure out a way to play networked IF games, since over 35 percent of the respondents made a point of saying (without being asked) that they wished they could play with a friend.

Good help vs. bad help

It was difficult to pin down the type of help most people prefer. In- game hints seem to have the slight advantage (41 percent), even though some feel they are too tempting. As one person put it, "[in- game hints] are like putting a bowl of cocaine next to a junkie and telling him to only take a little when he really needs it." One method praised by several people was the hint-giving demon in "Curses". There were a lot of people who liked making the hints a part of the game itself rather than part of the program that's running it.

Newsgroup postings were the next most popular (25 percent), although there were almost an equal number of people who liked having to wait for a response as those who hated it.

The Universal Help System and Invisiclues both had respectable showings, but walkthroughs and e-mailing the author received little praise.

It was easier to determine the least favored help method: walkthroughs. 62 percent hated walkthroughs, most of them vehemently. The type of walkthroughs that were hated most were those that were a list of commands with no annotation or explanation. Those that had comments fared slightly better. The next two least-favorite methods were in-game hints (18 percent) and newsgroup postings (15 percent). Complaints for these were that they were "too accessible" or "take too long to hear back."

Let's hear from the authors

But how do the authors feel about all of this? After all, hints and help can give away puzzles that they spent months perfecting. Surprisingly enough (or maybe not at this point), most IF authors are very pro-hints. They spent months -- if not years -- working on their games and don't want people to give up halfway because of one particularly tough puzzle. Actually, all the authors contacted for this article said they used hints when playing games and one, Gareth Rees, the author of Christminster, has written a few walkthroughs himself, most notably for Jigsaw.

"Not all players can solve all puzzles, perhaps because the puzzle requires some piece of cultural knowledge, or is too hard, or just strikes the player the wrong way," Rees said. "Without hints and walkthroughs many games wouldn't be appreciated to the extent they should be." C.E. Forman, co-author of Path To Fortune, added, "What's obvious to the author may be thoroughly incomprehensible to a player. There's a very fine line between challenging and frustrating. The best games toe that line with the greatest of care. Though they may be hard, they're fair."

Authors see hints as a bridge between their minds and the audiences. Some players can make it all the way over, some need a push in different places. And the same feeling of being "stupid" seems to exist on the authors' side as well. Andrew Plotkin, who wrote So Far, said "Not everybody can solve everything, either because [they're] stupid or I'm stupid (i.e., designed a puzzle badly. :-)"

Neil deMause, who wrote Lost New York, agrees. "[Lately] I've seen a slew of puzzles that are way too hard, requiring not just a flash of insight but practically the ability to mind-read the author's intentions," he said. "I'm deeply concerned that we're falling out of the habit of providing in-game clues. The prevailing attitude seems to be 'I'll think up a really tough puzzle, and if they get stuck they can just use the hints.'"

Why we need to get over it

So where does that leave us? Well, getting help for IF games is a fact of life and we all need to stop feeling guilty about it. After all, it's the rare occasion where author and player click at the right level for an entire game. Walkthroughs, although almost universally reviled, do help people get through the games when they have no other recourse. And most of the rec.games.int-fiction newsgroup stays alive because of hint asking and giving. What we (authors, players, walkthrough authors, all of us) need to do is focus on making hints work the best they can for everyone. That will be the focus of the second part of this article, which will appear in the next issue. If you have any suggestions to toss in, please e-mail me at robrachel@aol.com.

This is part one of a two-part article.

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