From: dmb@wam.umd.edu (David M. Baggett)
Subject: More on scoring in text adventures
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 15:59:32 GMT

General comments about the thread:

You guys are killing me here!  There have been so many good arguments
on all sides of the scoring issue that I'm now even more undecided
than before!

Most text adventures still seem very much limited to linear
exploration.  Though I hadn't realized the connection between parallel
puzzles and scoring problems, one of my goals with Legend has been to
"delinearize" at least the first half of the game.  If you go far with
this you can have several distinct paths that lead to the same
information being gleaned (or object being gained), as a previous
poster pointed out.  So what happens if you do both paths just for the
heck of it?  Or how about if the two paths are mutually exclusive
but one is significantly harder than the other?

The theory that having multiple solutions to a single problem makes the
game more realistic is interesting.  I don't think it's been really
tested to date.  Can anyone think of a text adventure where many
puzzles can be solved in several ways?

An interesting and related note (spoiler ahead for UU2 - skip this
paragraph to avoid reading it): I originally had two solutions to
the outhouse puzzle in UU2 -- you were able to burn it down until
the final beta-test version.  (You can still burn it down in the
release version, but you can't win the game if you do. :)

I changed that bit at the last minute to specifically *avoid* having
two solutions to the same puzzle, because I thought one of the
solutions was too easy and hence didn't warrant the standard score for
solving the puzzle.  So there's another aspect to all of this: having
multiple solutions to puzzles is *much* harder, because you (the
designer) then have much less control over the difficulty of the game
overall.  Though this may not seem all bad, the genre is already
extremely limiting (compared to noninteractive fiction) and I'd hate to
give up even more control over things.

In article <BsxDH9.Mvn@rice.edu> amitp@owlnet.rice.edu writes:
>In a game, though, it's nice to explore everything --- if you were trying to
>encourage people _not_ to explore everything, then why spend time writing
>those "side dishes"?

Actually it's more a matter of implementation than anything else.  When
you're actually coding the game (and beta-testing) you come up with all
sorts of bizarre scenarios that "should work."  For the ones that are
easy to code (e.g., things that just produce a snappy response), it
takes so little time to add that you figure, "Ah, what the heck."

Things like making the game understand "xyzzy" are so trivial to do
that you begin to get in this mindset where you find it hard to argue
against putting them in.  The same goes for "decorations" -- game
objects that you can't take but are included in locations for
completeness so the game doesn't say "I don't see any chair here" when
you say "examine chair" in a room with a chair in it.

From the comments so far it seems like keeping some kind of progress
indicator is important, but it's not clear that "points" are the best
manifestation of the concept.  I really liked Greg's "Acme Prahgress-O-Metur"
idea; i.e., an object you carry around that tells you how you're doing.
But what the meter should tell you is still a little unclear.

Taken to an extreme, I suppose you should really be able to solve a
game with two completely different walkthroughs; i.e, with no puzzles
solved the same way in each game.  With this kind of freedom it's clear
that score is totally useless, even for completists who feel that they
MUST see the whole game in one walkthrough -- it may not be *possible*
to see every part of the game in one walkthrough, since some puzzle
solutions might be mutually exclusive with some locations.

Maybe the best gauge is the number of words of game text you've read
vs. the total number of words in the game.  (Wouldn't *that* be
fun to implement!)

But here's a more realistic thought:  How about having a score but
never telling the player what the maximum is?  Then die-hard gamers
would have the added challenge of actually determining what the maximum
possible score *is*.  (Even the game author might not know unless s/he
bothered to check all the score increments for mutual exclusivity!) The
more I think about this, the more I like it.  You could still have the
"You have earned XXX points -- this makes you a _____" schtick, though
you'd just stick in a clause that said if (score > some_high_value)
then say "veteran gamer," or perhaps have categories that might even be
impossible to attain (i.e., without worrying about the fact that
they're unattainable).

How about it, folks?

Dave Baggett
-- 
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