Adventure Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 562

player doesn't expect to be able to discuss arms and armor with a tavern keeper
(although the games might be more interesting and certainly less formulaic if he
could). But because adventure games are interactive stories, players expect the char-
acters in them to be more like humans and less mechanical.

A good many games try to sidestep the problem entirely by setting the game in
worlds with extremely few, if any, people. This certainly creates a mysterious
atmosphere, but it suits only a limited range of stories. Imagine how Rick's bar
in Casablanca would feel if it weren't full of people drinking and gambling. A
world with no people seems artificial and sterile.

A few early text-based games tried to implement parsers that could understand lim-
ited English sentences as typed by the player, but these seldom succeeded. NPCs
either said, “I don't understand that,” or gave absurd answers when the player asked
a perfectly reasonable question; this left the impression that the NPCs were
drugged or mentally ill.

NOTE The most
ambitious effort to
create a parser that
understands natural
language in video
games is the experi-
mental game Façade .
The player takes the
role of a friend of a
bickering couple, and
can influence their
relationship by speak-
ing to them (through
typed sentences) in
plain English. You can
download Façade free
of charge at www.
interactivestory.net.

In the end, most adventure game designers gave up on trying to create the impres-
sion that the player could talk to anyone about anything and devised the scripted
conversation , a mechanism that became the de facto standard for both adventure
games and CRPGs. Chapter 7 discussed scripted conversations in detail.

Mapping
When playing text adventures, players usually needed to make maps for themselves
as they went along, because they found it difficult to remember how the rooms in
the game world related to one another. With the arrival of graphical adventures,
mapping became less critical because the graphics provide cues about how the play-
er's current location relates to other areas in the world. However, it's still a good
idea to give the player a map. A few games deliberately deny the player a map to
make the game more difficult, but this is poor design. There's not a lot of fun in
being lost. If you force the player to make his own map, he has to constantly look
away from the screen to a sketchpad at his side; that's a tedious business that rap-
idly destroys suspension of disbelief.

The map that you give the player doesn't have to be complete at the beginning of
the game; it can start out empty and be filled in as the player moves around, a pro-
cess called automapping . It's also a good idea to give the player a compass to tell him
which direction he's facing, unless the map orients itself for him. You can also include
the map as an item to be found in the game, along the lines of a treasure map.

Automapping destroys the challenge imposed by mazes, but mazes are one of the
most overused and least-enjoyed features of adventure games. Unless you have a
strong reason for including a maze (such as re-creating the adventures of Theseus
in the Minotaur's labyrinth) and can construct one that's really clever and fun to
be in, don't do it. If you strongly feel you should have a maze, consider making it
an optional mini-game.