From: blasius@gmd.de (Volker Blasius)
Subject: Re: Alternatives to score in text adventures
Organization: GMD, Sankt Augustin, Germany
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 20:10:40 GMT

In article <1992Aug12.160321.24522@wam.umd.edu> dmb@wam.umd.edu (David M. Baggett) writes:

>I've been working on _The Legend Lives!_, a science fiction text
>adventure set in the Unnkulian Universe, 

Hurra!

>                                         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. 

Yes, and this plagued us for months, until someone got hold of the source
code and analyzed it until he found that you had to leave the magazine 
(Spelunker Today) at Witt's End to get this final point that made you
Adventurer Grandmaster. I always want to have seen all of a game I play,
all the nooks and crannies, and a score is a big help in this direction.
This implies that you should be able to finish without having got all the
points, this fact telling you that you missed something or/and that you 
cheated (see below). And if you cheated, it serves you right not to know
whether you missed something.

A game that (in my opinion) overdid this, was Sierra's The Colonel's Bequest.
There were loads of redundant clues you didn't get points for if you didn't
examine each and every item with a magnifying glass and stuff like that, so
I finished the game with many, many points missing. I always read the hint
book afterwards (if there is one, and for my peace of mind there better is),
so I found out what I had overlooked, but it was a bit much for my taste.

>Did Zork?  Did most Infocoms?  I really don't remember.

As far as I remember, you had to have all the points to finish. This is OK
if this is also an indication that you didn't miss anything, i.e. the game
is layed out this way. In fact, I prefer games that are layed out this way,
but if I really missed something, I want to know. (I admit that Witt's End
was just a big teaser, but it served this purpose very well.)

>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:

> -- argument deleted to save bandwidth --

Yeah, this is difficult. My first thought was:
  If the game contains puzzles of this kind, I think it should
  - give points for obtaining the information the correct way,
  - allow the player to cheat by skipping over the information puzzle and
    finish without all the points, and
  - maybe tell the player, "You finished with x out of y because you
    cheated".
But then I remembered that e.g. I cheated in Spellcasting 201 in exactly
this way by saving, going to the lessons and writing the information down
(or rather let SCRIPT write it down for me), restoring, and using the 
information without the tight schedule I'd otherwise have had. The game
didn't punish me for that, and this I liked, because I hate arcade games.

I really don't know. Maybe it depends on the game (attending to the lessons
wasn't actually solving a puzzle to gain some information).

>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.

Somehow this idea doesn't appeal to me very much. I like points that tell me
that the thing I just did or got is essential for getting onwards; it sure
increases my motivation to continue. And the number of points you got should
be enough indication as to the percentage of the way that's still ahead -
though in most games the number of points you get for doing things of
equivalent value rises exponentially the farther you get, especially in
games with large scores.

>Thoughts?

Yes, these are my momentary thoughts about that, nothing more.

Volker

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