From: dmb@wam.umd.edu (David M. Baggett)
Subject: Alternatives to score in text adventures
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 16:03:21 GMT

I've been working on _The Legend Lives!_, a science fiction text
adventure set in the Unnkulian Universe, and I've come to believe that
score may not be such a great thing to have in a text adventure.  I'm
looking for some input regarding how people think having a score
affects gameplay.

Adventure (Colossal Cave) set the precedent that text adventures should
be scored games.  Its "x out y points -- this makes you a ____" format
appears in almost all its successors, and I wonder if that's just 
because we've all been following a trend somewhat blindly.

Making the game scored creates quite a few subtle problems.  One is the
question of whether or not you should be able to finish the game
without getting the maximum possible score.  Interestingly enough,
Adventure did *not* reqiure you to get all the points to win.  Did 
Zork?  Did most Infocoms?  I really don't remember.

All the Unnkulian games are written such that you can't win and not have
gotten all the points (unless you exploit a bug in the game).  This
creates tricky situations, though, particularly in "information puzzles."
Consider a puzzle that the player has to solve to get some information
needed later in the game (e.g., you must get past the troll to get into
the Wizard's Alcove containing the scroll on which the secret password is
written).  If this information is the same from game to game (i.e., not
randomly generated), then the player could conceivably play the game
once, write down the needed information, and then play again (or, e.g.,
make a walkthrough) without out ever solving any of the information
puzzles again.  Should this be allowed?  Should information puzzles
just not award points since they can be skipped?  (This would ensure
that you couldn't win the game without the maximum possible score.)

I can see several ways of dealing with this issue:

	1. Don't award points for information puzzles and allow the
	   player to skip them if they've played the game before and
	   have written down or memorized the needed information.

	PROS:  Easy to implement.
	CONS:  Somehow unsatisfying -- hacky

	2. Code in clever restrictions that force the player to solve
	   information puzzles even if they already know the information.
	   E.g., (from UU2): magic word is written in Trollish.  If you
	   don't see it written down with the "accent marks" you can't
	   quite remember the proper pronunciation.

	PROS:  If done well, hides the problem completely from the player.
	CONS:  It's a pain to come up with *good*, natural restrictions.

	       Unnatural restrictions are very obvious to the player and
	       seem like lame excuses.	

	3. Make sure that all information given at the ends of information
	   puzzles is randomly generated.

	PROS:  This is really a subset of #2, so the same PROS apply.
	CONS:  A bother to implement, particularly for words and phrases.

	       Eliminates some creativity in the game design, in that
	       you can't choose nifty magic words, etc. like "xyzzy."

	       May not be possible at all for some types of information,
	       particularly when that information depends on other,
	       necessarily fixed aspects of the game world.

	       There is still the chance that a player may get lucky and
	       guess.  (Perhaps this is realistc, though!)

	4. Eliminate scoring.

	PROS:  Solves the problem, in that it allows you to force or not
	       force solving of information puzzles on a puzzle by puzzle
	       basis.
	CONS:  Scoring may have a positive psyhological value.  It seems
	       like it may increase the addictiveness of the game in the
	       same way that knowing you've only got 10 pages left to
	       read in your novel will make you sit there until you're
	       done even if you've got a plane to catch.

	5. Make information puzzles scored, and allow them to be skipped,
	   but award points as soon as the information is *used*.  The
	   game could also tell the player that it knows he/she has 
	   skipped the puzzle.  E.g., "You utter the magic word foobarx,
	   which you seem to have discovered through ESP."

	PROS: Hides the problem fairly well from the player.

	      Alerts the player to the fact that ESP is *not* required
	      to get the information (in case he/she is following a
	      walkthrough).

	CONS: Pretty much as tedious to implement as #2 above -- the game
	      still has to keep a flag for every information puzzle and
	      give the player a witty response when he/she skips a puzzle.

I've been toying with the idea of replacing the score counter with a
percentage.  The percentage would give the player a rough idea of how
much of the whole game he/she has seen (just like current page number
in a novel).  This could be based on number of locations visited vs.
the total number of locations, number of items seen versus total number
of items, etc.

Thoughts?

Dave Baggett
dmb@wam.umd.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction,rec.games.programmer