The Carnegie Rule of Game Design: How to Make Things Interesting

Dale Carnegie wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People back in 1936, and I've heard jokes about it for my entire life. The book gets thrown around as a cliché because it serves as a useful way to communicate. (If it wasn’t useful, people wouldn’t be citing it almost a century later.)

One of Carnegie’s rules says that if you want to be interesting, you should be interested in others. That’s helpful advice for game design.

Being interested in your audience can help you find ideas that resonate with them. An interest in psychology can find better ways to keep that audience engaged. Being interested in topics, methods, and concepts from other disciplines will improve your final product.

Here are 6 ways that being interested has led to more interesting games:

• Be interested in travel. Xalavier Nelson Jr., an award-winning narrative director, created An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs after spending a lot of time in airports. In an interview, he explained that “when you spend that much time in airports, they break your brain.” (He also worked on Hypnospace Outlaw, which has been described as a flawless piece of historical fiction — much of its impact comes from an interest in 1990’s internet culture.)
   
• Be interested in medicine. Jane McGonigal has designed alternate reality games and written two New York Times bestsellers. After she suffered a serious concussion in 2009, she faced lasting complications that meant a long and difficult road to recovery. McGonigal saw it as an opportunity to apply design theories in a new context, and the result was SuperBetter. It's a healthcare game that has been used by more than a million people fighting depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury.
  
  
• Be interested in mythology. Emily Short created Counterfeit Monkey and Galatea, and she also helped build interactive fiction tools and procedural storytelling projects. Short used her knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman mythology to discuss how an in-game pantheon can create more interesting mechanics and enrich stories. More game design topics and techniques are discussed on Short’s blog.
  
  
• Be interested in pioneers. Aaron Reed has received recognition for innovative narrative and story design, and he created Blue Lacuna, which is considered to be one of the top 10 interactive fiction titles of all time. In his 50 years of Text Games project, Reed has tracked the evolution of a genre and discussed how dynamic stories have connected with audiences across generations.
  
  
• Be interested in dinosaurs. At a young age, Kim Belair’s interest in dinosaurs led her to Castle Infinity and formative experiences with one of the internet’s earliest multiplayer communities. She went on to write for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and contributed to Goodbye Volcano High, founding her own narrative development company. Belair’s limited history of Castle Infinity explains how her early online adventures have stuck with her.
  
  
• Be interested in communities. You might have seen Victoria Tran playing Among Us on Jimmy Fallon’s Twitch stream. Tran is community director at Innersloth, and she has built healthy, engaged communities around video games by being interested in the players. Her work focuses on nurturing practical, more sustainable, and kinder online communities. 

Ultimately, your own work can be improved by studying the work of other designers. Game jams, competitions, and online events are a good way to see how people have solved common problems and taken new perspectives on familiar issues. One example is the Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction, which happens every April. 

The 2021 Spring Thing event has thirty-eight entries made by designers who are interested in 1970’s sci-fi shows, arcane mysteries, and other surprises. One entry even mentions Dale Carnegie’s book.

 

Image credit: Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Paris, Eiffelturm -- 2014 -- 1272” / CC BY-SA 4.0

Should Games Have Meaningful Choices?

Jon Ingold, co-founder of Inkle Studios, talked for almost 50 minutes before addressing the main question posed by the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain: How do you make choices matter in video games? When he finally considered it, his answer was brief.

“You don’t,” Ingold quipped. “Choices are a tool for getting the player to do two things: Firstly, to buy into the game and be hooked by it, and secondly, to take some responsibility for it.”

Honestly, it was how good professional education events play out — the real value came from hearing Ingold exploring the ideas behind the question and discussing the challenges of telling interesting stories. 

When Ingold writes complicated story plots for interactive fiction, they branch less frequently than it appears. “I tend to work in scenes,” he said, and his scenes have a single entry point and a single exit point. The space between those points is where players explore how characters to relate to each other. 

Ingold explained that the emotional interplay happening between entry and exit distracts the audience from more conventional work that steers them towards the next part of the story. “It’s all there to make you feel like you’ve been moved through an experience, and that’s the game,” he said. 

When this approach works well, it produces a game like Heaven’s Vault — game designers have praised it for tracing a single broad arc while providing completely different experiences each time it is played. Andrew Plotkin described Heaven’s Vault as “a game with multiple middles.” 

From a design perspective, Ingold opposes the idea of players having complete control over a story. “If a player can just walk into a room and do whatever they want, then what’s the point of playing this game?” He added, “You might as well play with Lego, because Lego does what you tell it to.” 

Ingold prefers stories that respond to player decisions in ways that offer surprise and entertainment. He repeated a point made by Meg Jyanth during her 2016 discussion of the design decisions behind 80 Days: “Who ever heard of that story where a protagonist gets exactly what they want?”

Ingold also dislikes updates and notifications that clearly indicate what has been altered by player choices. “I might as well be the game designer, I might as well just control the numbers under the hood.”

This contrasts with game designers who clearly indicate how the player’s choices change variables within the game. Josh Labelle’s game, Tavern Crawler, successfully used such an approach to tie for first place in the 2020 Interactive Fiction Competition. (Like Ingold, Labelle included tradeoffs in his story where players lost access to some plots by choosing to explore others in more detail.)

One attendee seemed to think it was clever to demand a direct answer to the event’s question about making choices matter in video games, which seems like it misses the point. If there was One Right Way to tackle this challenge, then we could just distribute a .PDF and be done with it. 

Well-written games make conscious design choices to support a specific philosophy. Ingold spent an hour describing the philosophy that guided his choices, and the event’s moderator, Samantha Webb, did an excellent job of keeping the conversation moving to explore adjacent ideas about game design and the craft of writing.

The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain organized the event as part of their Write On series, and watching the presentation was time well spent. 

Immorality, or Impatience?

Game designer Peter Molyneux famously stated that Americans were unlikely to play games as evil characters. He claimed that only 10% of them were willing to make the unseemly moral choices entertained by their more “free and liberated” counterparts in Europe and Japan. Other detailed studies have also examined how often players make “evil” choices.

I can’t tell whether these studies have accounted for impatience. 

The Outer Worlds comes to mind: it's a game where players regularly make decisions that have serious consequences for the inhabitants of Halcyon System. I’ve seen what happens when an altruist unites different factions to ensure their collective survival, and I often wonder what would happen if a greedy sociopath set out to claim the system’s resources for himself. 

…and then I remember that I’d have to endure all those loading screens again. 

It’s not moral revulsion that prevents me from exploring these choices, it’s an aversion to tedium. I know that fully implemented storylines offer entirely new narratives, but I was tired of fighting the same four enemies during my first trip through the story. The possibility of a new story is interesting, but it's not interesting enough to make me grind through the same challenges a second time. 

People have used Molyneux’s claim to gripe about the work involved in offering a meaningful choice — why waste effort creating an “evil” story arc if nobody will choose to experience it? Those complaints ignore the fact that sometimes the gameplay is a bigger problem than the narrative. 

Being “liberated” might not have anything to do with it; the success of the Hitman franchise shows that people are willing to play as evil characters. Audiences are interested in exploring evil story paths, but not interested enough to put up with the boring parts more than once.

Image credit: Lenina Libera / CC BY-SA-4.0

Current Events

A certain type of violent extremist fears what a Biden inauguration “means” for the United States.

These fears drove them to the U.S. Capitol building — I think that the idea was that by breaking enough laws, they could break the entire U.S. government? After that, they weren’t supposed to face any consequences for their actions.

The whole Quest mechanic of 'if we can only get inside the fortified enclosure and do the proper magic thing in the proper magic place, we WIN' has a lot to answer for

— Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) January 6, 2021

I have spent a lot of time doomscrolling since then — I think yesterday was the first time in a week that I’d actually been able to focus on anything. (At the moment, focusing on a bunch of things is right out.) None of the drafts that I have been working on are relevant for the current moment, so it may be a while before my next blog post is published. 

There was a Popular Mechanics article from 2016 that addressed conspiracy theorists and whether it’s possible to coexist with them. I enjoyed re-reading it because it mentions a Baked Alaska Parade that has nothing to do with neo-Nazi racists.

When Games Are Too Immersive

I made some incorrect assumptions about two entries in this year's Interactive Fiction Competition, but I wasn't the only one who misread The Call of Innsmouth and Ulterior Spirits. 

In reviews, Chlorine described The Call of Innsmouth as "a bit linear for my taste," and Stian wrote that "there does not seem to be many branching narratives that do not end with a quick death; rather, choices are usually either correct or deadly."

I thought the same thing until I uncovered branches that affect where you find the game's missing person, when you confront Innsmouth's inhabitants, and how you escape from town. The choices were not easy to miss, but they were worked into the narrative so smoothly that it was easy to underestimate their importance. 

The Call of Innsmouth had long-term choices to affect the shape of the narrative, short-term choices that end the story early, and opportunities to "undo" bad choices so that the player doesn't have to start over. I'd call that good game design!  

But the design decision had an unintended tradeoff: by immersing readers in a strong narrative, those readers didn't see how they were steering the story.

Ulterior Spirits is another entry that was carefully crafted to immerse readers in a strong narrative. Sounds, graphics, and presentation choices gave it a futuristic atmosphere that reminded me of the BBC Doctor Who webcast "Death Comes to Time."

The story worked so hard to draw me in that I couldn't tell when I was allowed back out. It wasn't clear where my choices were making changes, but I was reluctant to start experimenting — restarting the entire narrative would have been exhausting.

Autumnc's review described a similar experience, questioning whether it was possible to find alternate endings. (We got different results, so the answer is yes.)

Both of these IFcomp entries presented the audience with meaningful choices, but people failed to notice them. It seems like cognitive bias at work, and I'd be grateful if anyone could recommend resources for learning more about this aspect of game design.

During the competition, I thought about these entries in comparison to Josh Labelle's Tavern Crawler. It went in the opposite direction, presenting notifications outside the story to highlight the effects of player decisions. 

Josh explained this design choice in his post-mortem:

After making some professional interactive fiction this past year and participating in extensive UXR/focus group sessions, I saw how even significant branching in most IF can go completely unnoticed if too subtly implemented, so I purposefully swung (probably a little too) far in the other direction for this piece.

Looking at these three entries and their reception, it seems like the best way for the player to feel like they're controlling a story is to remind them that they're not part of it.

Donald and I will have to keep that in mind as we develop Tonciven further.

 

Image credit: TGLSMEDIA / CC BY-SA-4.0

Little Girl in Monsterland: IFcomp 2020

Little Girl in Monsterland is a choice-based comedy by Mike Stallone. 

This entry is full of wild ideas. It has a comic tone that matches its six-year-old protagonists (although it contained an unexpectedly large amount of poop jokes, even for a juvenile comedy) and their journey involves mermaids, werewolves, vampires, and unpaid electric bills.

At some points, the comic tone made it difficult for me to follow the plot. I couldn't always tell when characters were supposed to see through transparent lies, or when I was supposed to ignore contradictions that had merely been introduced for a quick laugh. 

Little Girl in Monsterland also took an interesting approach to solving the Gabriel Knight problem: how can adventure games develop new puzzles? Game designers have endured a lot of public ridicule for presenting bizarre solutions to very old problems, like putting arbitrary obstacles in front of a player who just needs to find a key.

This entry approached its puzzle design challenges from the opposite direction. The player sets the goals to accomplish, and the characters manipulate objects to remove obstacles. 

These game mechanics elegantly sidestep a lot of parser problems, and they avoid some of the interface problems that can trip up point-and-click games. The player and the narrator agree on what should happen next, and then the characters act it out in the game. When it worked, it felt like collaborative storytelling. 

At other times, I struggled to figure out what I should be doing. There are some obvious red herrings that are only there to add some variety, but in many places the correct choice was just as absurd as the alternatives. 

Some of my confusion may have been due to a lack of imagination on my part. When I did stumble through the correct sequence of motives, it made sense within the world of the game. 

Overall, Little Girl in Monsterland is a big, ambitious entry, and I appreciate the amount of work that went into it. This game does a lot of things well, and it offers some ideas for improving adventure games.

Review Roundup: Move On

Move on is is a choice-based entry by Serhii Mozhaiskyi.

This is a game that I beta-tested, which means that I'm not going to review it. However, other reviewers made some good points. 

From Victor Gijsbers:

"Move on explores the possibility of having a tense chase scene in interactive fiction in a rather unique way: the player only gets a button that says “move on”, but what happens after moving on depends crucially on the timing of your click."

From Thomas Hvizdos: 

"The writing is solid. It’s difficult to write action–too much detail and you lose the momentum of the scene, too little and you don’t capture what makes it exciting. This game pulls it off well."

From Stian:  

"An extremely short action thriller choice game, Move On demands you figure out its rather neat trick if you want to survive. The little writing there is is good. Apart from that, it doesn’t offer much." 

It's a short entry, so you should give it a try yourself.

Creatures: IFcomp 2020

Creatures is a choice-based work by Andreas Hagelin. 

This entry deserves credit for re-creating a nostalgic experience. It's choice-based in the same way that some of the earliest computer games were choice-based — most of the game is spent choosing numbers from a menu of options. It felt like something I could have enjoyed on my Apple IIe, back when running a Dungeons & Dragons module on the computer was a huge deal. 

I would have done terrible things to get my hands on a game like this back when I was in grade school. 

Back in grade school, I would also get excited about the story elements in Creatures, which included electric lights, magic altars, knights, and medical experiments. In the present day, it is more difficult for me to identify a clear theme that links them together in a cohesive narrative.  

Unfortunately, Creatures has ignored a lot of advances in game design that have been made over the past three decades. Parts of it feel like something that the author created to see whether it could be done, instead of something that was created to be enjoyed by an audience. 

This entry has a simple play loop. Answer a riddle, fight a monster, answer another riddle, start another fight. All of the riddles involve entering sequences of numbers that unlock doors. Only 4 codes are required to complete the game, but the IFcomp details suggest that more than 2 hours may be necessary. 

Combat involves stats and random number generation, but enemies should be challenged in a specific order to gain equipment for winning the next battle. It means that the number crunching is narratively pointless. 

I do not have the programming skills that would allow me to create an entry like this from scratch, and Creatures works as a proof of concept. If the author develops this work, it would be interesting to see something more user-friendly that supported a larger, more intricate story.

Ferryman's Gate: IFcomp 2020

Ferryman's Gate is a parser-based entry by Daniel Maycock. In it, you search your uncle’s estate for his hidden legacy.

In Hollywood Hijinks, your uncle Buddy was endearingly quirky, imbuing his Hollywood-themed puzzles with a kind of silver screen logic. Ferryman's Gate reminds me of Hollywood Hijinks, but Osmond Ferryman was fussy and judgmental. 

Ferryman and I agree that clear communication is difficult without clear punctuation. However, Ferryman's interior design choices suggest that people should be put to death for incorrect comma usage. I’m not sure I can support that position.

This entry is solid parser work. There are locked doors, buried chests, dark rooms, and everything you'd expect in the "treasure hunt at your wealthy relative's estate" genre. The question is whether an obsession with punctuation adds novelty to the experience. 

A lot of work went into coding, writing, and proofreading not only Ferryman's Gate as an entry, but also the style guides inside the game that explain its preferred rules of grammar. I respect that work while questioning whether it was worth risking a catastrophic invocation of Muphry's law. 

I try not to pick on typos, but it's dicey to set characters up as supreme arbiters of correct language — giving them actual power over the gates of Hell — when your work is likely to include visible errors.

At the start of Ferryman’s Gate, a "volume of Gerard Manley Hopkin's [sic] poetry" is mentioned, giving an awkward example of possessive apostrophe use. 

The Utility Closet, two rooms away from the starting point, "is empty except from [sic] a strange copper panel," which might be a figure of speech that is specific to Georgia.

Overall, I think that the obsession with perfection weighed down this parser-based treasure hunt and made it less enjoyable.

*I personally guarantee that my reviews of this year's entries are riddled with typos, which is why I try not to hold myself out as an authoritative expert. 

(s)wordsmyth: IFcomp 2020

 

(S)wordsmyth is a choice-based entry from Tristan Jacobs.

Your character in (s)wordsmyth is a lousy fighter who has been trained to end disputes with words alone. I loved the concept behind this entry, but I was baffled by its design choices. 

This is not a story about negotiation and compromise. Instead, you have to outwit mythical creatures that exist solely to hunt and kill humans. Every physical action is described to you by your sword, which made me feel distant from the narrative.

A large black display crowds all this entry’s text into a small window, which made it difficult for me to follow some of the dialogue exchanges — carefully chosen words and skilled writing were already necessary to carry its story, and then extra constraints were imposed on how that writing could be displayed. 

A lot of clicking is required to advance between choice points, and there's no ability to save the game. A bloody splash of graphics decorates the (many!) endings that you reach through incorrect choices. Although it's possible to "undo" a bad choice, it rewinds to much earlier in the confrontation and requires you to redo several choices. 

There's a fascinating journey at the heart of (s)wordsmyth, and the main character encounters a wide variety of distinct opponents. It would have helped if this story was presented in a way that was less difficult to access.

I especially enjoyed the final confrontation, which was supported by writing that did a better job of indicating which choices were correct. I wish that every encounter had been designed as carefully.

Artwork from Donald Conrad:

Deus Ex Ceviche: IFcomp 2020

Deus Ex Ceviche is a choice-based entry from Tom Lento and Chandler Groover. 

This entry is a richly designed experience guided by a clear artistic vision. My attempts to describe that vision — it’s running a business that operates a church for seafood robots — will fail to do it justice. 

The main mechanic resembles a card game where "disks" are placed in three fields that guide the story, and modifiers can be added to change their effects. Different variables are tracked on the side of the screen, and a pixel-perfect advisor offers help. 

It's quick to figure out what will happen when various disks are submitted, but it's unclear whether you want those things to happen. You gradually gain awareness as you spend more time with Deus Ex Ceviche, developing conscious control over the proceedings. This mimics the experience of “you,” the central character in the story. 

At first, I couldn't tell whether I wanted to restore things to normal or create a new order. In Deus Ex Ceviche, that might mean a religious order, a sequential order, or a restaurant order.

Wordplay is a major component of this entry, but they aren't quite puns. In the real world, people share imperfect metaphors when they’re trying to describe the workings of finance, theology, and computer programming. Deus Ex Ceviche blurs the edges of those concepts and freely substitutes nautical terms, business concepts, programming ideas, and spiritual dogma. 

In a dizzying feat of logical consistency, those substitutions are consistent throughout the story. The three fields of play are front end, back end, and hardware, and each has an equivalent marine creature that is thematically linked with the rest of the work. 

(In one of my encounters, it noted that you can translate "serpent" as "python" to create a new religious paradigm.)

Your choices to invest power and piety can result in rituals that reveal mysteries and draw the game to its conclusion. 

...although pickling is always an option.

Ulterior Spirits: IFcomp 2020

Ulterior Spirits is a choice-based work created with Unity. 

This entry uses graphics, sound, and a futuristic presentation to support a story on a space station populated by aliens and robots. A lot of background material is necessary to introduce the laws, life forms, and technology of this world, but smart design choices bring readers up to speed without being invasive. 

While popup windows appear instantaneously to give more detail about races and technology, the story itself is revealed through individual paragraphs of timed text. I wish I could have experienced the main story at the same speed as the background reading. 

I needed time to get invested in this entry's narrative, but that investment paid off. Nuanced characters with understandable motives acted out a story arc that ended in satisfying personal development. I enjoyed it as an immersive work of fiction supported by well-timed, illustrative artwork. 

However, an immersive work of fiction is not the same as an interactive one. Some choices were obviously meaningless, only altering a single line in the next passage or responding with text that ignored the choice completely. Most passages ended with simple "click to continue" buttons. 

Although I tried to make choices as a level-headed senior officer, I suspect that I would have seen the same outcome from the wild and impulsive options. It was still an enjoyable outcome, and I'd recommend it to others. 

Tombs & Mummies: IFcomp 2020

Tombs & Mummies is a parser-based entry, written in Quest, by Matthew Warner.

The magic, monsters, and ancient artifacts in this entry made it fun to explore the underground tomb of the Pharoah Haputet. Rooms are illustrated with Egyptian artwork, and an in-game hint system allows you to trade health for clues.

Instead of red herring objects, Tombs & Mummies has traps that affect how the player behaves. I enjoyed figuring out how to reverse the curses that were placed on me, but they could also be avoided entirely whenever I restarted. And I restarted frequently.

We should discuss the "torch" mechanic. Your torch is your lifeline, but if experience with other games has trained you to TAKE TORCH on the first move, then trying to light it results in the message "you don't have a torch." 

Also — you might not notice this if you restarted to use "LIGHT TORCH" on the first move — the torch is never just lying on the ground. If it's not in your inventory, it's in a wall sconce. You can only light the torch when it's in a sconce; trying to light an extinguished torch while holding it gives another "you don't have a torch" message, even when it's in your inventory.

Every time my torch went out, I had to use the DROP TORCH/LIGHT TORCH/TAKE TORCH sequence, making it faster and easier to RESTART. 

The torch experience was representative of the overall work, which has a lot of clever ideas that could be better implemented to improve the experience.

I eventually escaped the pharaoh's tomb. It was an entertaining challenge, but it would have been more entertaining if some of the challenges didn't involve figuring out what the parser expected me to type.

Artwork from Donald Conrad: 

The Impossible Bottle: IFcomp2020

The Impossible Bottle is a parser-based puzzle adventure by Linus Åkesson.

It would be an exaggeration to call The Impossible Bottle a spiritual successor to Trinity, but it wouldn't be much of an exaggeration. 

Both works involve the playful exploration of a logically consistent fantasy world, and both of them include Klein bottle references. 

Puzzles in The Impossible Bottle are beautifully integrated with its story, consistently blurring the lines between fantasy and reality in ways that weren't possible in Brian Moriarty's 1986 Infocom title. (Moriarty's London tourist obviously departs from the world that we know. It's difficult to say for certain whether Emma of the Impossible Bottle remains in the real world.)

I was concerned that the story of a six-year-old doing housework might be unapproachably childlike, and instead I discovered an entertaining challenge that re-defined conceptual space.    

Each puzzle in The Impossible Bottle asks whether you need to change objects so that they can better relate to their environment or change the environment so that it can better relate to the objects. 

Despite the constantly shifting perspective, the parser still understood what I was trying to accomplish. It must have required a lot of work to implement smoothly. 

I appreciated the tone of this entry's narration. Descriptions were clear and earnest, with the kinds of wry observations you'd expect from someone who doesn't quite understand the tedious social rituals of adulthood. Prompts from the environment gently steered me towards the entry's main mechanic, which was a deceptively simple concept enabling a large number of complex interactions. 

The Impossible Bottle is an incredible triumph.

Electric word, "life": IFcomp 2020

Electric word, "life" is an interactive story by Lance Nathan. 

In his author's note, Nathan states "I like games with meaningful choices and branching paths, but this is what I wrote." 

This is a linear Twine work where the reader can receive more detail about specific passages before arriving at the conclusion. It plays to its strengths, narrating a 1999 Halloween party and examining the protagonist's relationship with the guests. 

As a work of fiction, Electric word, "life" has been carefully constructed. The writing is thoughtful and polished. The reader is free to explore the party environment and learn more about the narrator's life, but facts are also revealed in a deliberate sequence to tell a complete story.

There is one instance of timed text that I understand from an artistic perspective, but as a reader it looked like a broken passage — the "back" arrow, displayed prominently throughout the story, was the first thing that caught my attention before the rest of the text materialized on the screen. 

This is a solid entry, and my main recommendation would be stronger packaging (blurb, cover image). It's the story of five friends who won't recognize the importance of their Halloween encounter until it's over.

Review Roundup: The Eleusinian Miseries

The Eleusinian Miseries is is a parser-based work by Mike Russo.

This is a game that I beta-tested, so I'm not going to review it. 

Instead, you should listen to these people of unusual taste and discernment. 

From Herr M:

"Really solid debut that plays like a mix of Asterix, Monty Python and Terry Pratchett"

From Lynda Clark: 

"A funny, nicely written romp through (I think) Ancient Greece with a really well made hint system that offers information nice and gradually to give you a nudge in the right direction without spoiling things."

From Anssi:  

Based on what I was able to play, it was a hilarious, fun experience, and definitely worth checking out for the language used. 

From Walter Sandsquish: 

"Eleusinian Miseries" is a funny, engaging, well-structured game, with only a few implementation problems.

From Radioactive Crow:

"While many of the puzzles were very enjoyable, it is really the humor that makes this game great. Don't forgot to stop and read the prose in between completing tasks as there are more than just funny lines, but hilarious whole scenes. It is unusual to me to see humor mixed into a parser game this well and at this level."

The Call of Innsmouth: IFcomp 2020

The Call of Innsmouth is a choice-based horror story by Tripper McCarthy. 

This entry is a serviceable addition to the Lovecraft universe. The work stumbles over some common challenges that plague initial releases, but its attention to detail suggests that the author will publish outstanding work in the future.

The story visits standard New England locations that are central to Lovecraft's work, and design choices support a creepy atmosphere. Presentation details, like the custom background and buttons to choose your next action, are a welcome departure from Twine's black-and-white defaults. 

I enjoyed my experience in the town of Innsmouth. It was briskly paced and full of suitably tense decisions. There are multiple ways to encounter plot points before fleeing to safety, and although bad decisions can end in disaster, the author allows players to undo their mistakes. 

The investigation that led the narrator to Innsmouth was much less exciting. Early pages end with the equivalent of "click to continue" buttons, and every possible conversation option must be exhausted before doing something else. I felt less like a sharp-eyed detective and more like a bored student hearing lectures that repeated the same few ideas about Innsmouth and its sinister residents. 

The writing in this entry suffered from a lack of trust — I couldn't tell whether the author didn't trust me to notice details the first time they were mentioned, or whether they didn't trust their own skills to correct the bloated, repetitive excesses of Lovecraft's source material. 

My hunch is that later parts of this entry worked better because of lessons learned during the development process. My hope is that this drive for improvement will lead to great work in the future.

Artwork from Donald Conrad:

BYOD: IFcomp 2020

BYOD is a parser-based entry from n-n.

Gameplay in BYOD is not so much a limited parser as it is an alternative parser. Although standard commands are present for exploring your character's physical environment, the main action takes place through your smartphone's custom VFS software. The VFS commands were easy to understand and I correctly followed the author's trail of clues to reach the "good" ending.

The virtual feelies that accompany this entry include newsletters and supplemental information formatted to look like Usenet discussions and GameFAQs walkthroughs. I don't know enough to judge whether these are accurate representations of hacker culture, but they certainly evoke the 1990's mood of a group that I was never cool enough to join in real life.

They also make it unexpected for the main character to be using apps on a smartphone; I remember those showing up much later.

The packaging for this entry deserves special recognition — the files bundled with the game itself are accessed online through a menu designed to look like a C:> prompt.

You can't actually type any commands on that screen (and I had to learn that the hard way), but hovering your mouse over the different files shows that you can click on them.

These outstanding presentation details support a shallow narrative that needed more development. In this entry, corporate stereotypes tell a brief story about the abuse of power. When BYOD ended, my character had accomplished very little.

The powerful CEO retained his job, perpetuating an industry described as the root of all evil. The secretary was momentarily protected, but what happens in the future? (And what happens to other employees who catch the CEO's eye?)

BYOD offers a tight, carefully defined experience that let me feel like a hacker. I wish it had put a similar amount of effort into telling an engaging story.

Quest for the Sword of Justice: IFcomp 2020

Quest for the Sword of Justice is a choice-based comedy by Damon L. Wakes. 

This entry first looks like an abnormally well-implemented fantasy adventure created with RPG Maker. The player starts in a small village, and obstacles are presented with obvious clues for overcoming them. Then the game delivers its punchline — the big twist might be familiar to fans of Chrono Trigger. 

Quest for the Sword of Justice differs from Chrono Trigger in that the proceedings have (at least) two possible outcomes. When I acted like I was in a normal RPG, I ended up in an increasingly silly situation that seemed like a permanent end state. Starting over and changing my behavior led to a different outcome with a clear "game over" screen. 

Wakes has a past record of well-implemented Twine games that blend the solemn and the silly, and the use of RPG Maker software skillfully delivers Interactive Fiction conventions through a new medium. 

This entry is a polished, smoothly executed joke, but it ends quickly.

Artwork from Donald Conrad:

Chorus: IFcomp 2020

Chorus is a choice-based urban fantasy by Skarn. 

This entry asks you to divide six people between three different community service projects. The enjoyable twist is that they're all monsters and mythological creatures integrated into modern society. (Oddly detailed personnel files offer scientific discussions of their abilities.) 

The story follows a run down, under-funded nonprofit that is already stretched to the breaking point. In a normal city, these organizations serve different groups of people whose needs are regularly in conflict with each other. When those people are harpies, gorgons, and beings from alternate universes, the conflicts become more interesting.

Chorus relies on a player who is willing to return to the story and learn from repeated playthroughs. Early remarks about "the reorganization of the district" hint at tensions behind the scenes, and my first experience left me eager to investigate why the city felt like Nazi-occupied Paris.    

Individual paragraphs of text fade in gradually, but a prominent "animations" toggle allows you to access entire pages rapidly. That was helpful for speeding through familiar passages to focus on new behavior from different members of the group. 

The different factions in Chorus interact with each other behind the scenes to create an intricate backstory, and the result is an experience that replaces the worst aspects of community service drudgery with tense fantasy conflict.

Artwork from Donald Conrad: