11.3. Helping and Hinting

| Chapter 11: Out Of World Actions and Effects |

| 11.3. Helping and Hinting

IF is difficult to play: often harder than the writer ever suspects. Players are held up by what is "obvious", and they stumble into unforeseen combinations, or spend inordinate amounts of time working on the "wrong" problems. Too much of this and they give up, or post questions on online forums. Against this, many IF authors like to include in-game hints.

There are many approaches, which differ on two main issues.

First: do we spontaneously offer help to the player? The difficulty here is detecting the player's need: Y ask Y? tries to spot aimlessness, while Solitude has a novice mode where it is reasonable to assume that help is almost always needed. On the other hand, suppose we require that the initiative come from the player. Will a novice know to type HELP? Responding to questions starting with WHO, WHAT, etc. shows how to redirect any attempt to ask a direct question into a HELP request. At the other end of the scale, wearily experienced players may type HELP all the time, out of habit, cheating themselves of the fun of frustration: if so, Real Adventurers Need No Help provides the nicotine patch against this addiction.

Second: how do we decide what help is needed? Normally the player only types HELP, which is unspecific. The simplest approach offers a menu, diagnosing the player's problem by obliging him to make choices: see Food Network Interactive. Listing all the possible problems in the game may give away too much, though, since players may not have reached the puzzles in question yet; so some authors prefer to create menus that adapt to the current state of the game (commonly called "adaptive hints"). None of the examples demonstrate this variation because it can be a bit long-winded to set up, but several adaptive hint extensions are available for Inform.

Failing this, we can also try to parse commands like HELP ABOUT MICRODOT, as in Ish. Trieste takes a similar tack, except that instead of offering hints about puzzles, it offers help on game features (such as how to save), and lists all the available topics if the player types simply HELP.

Finally, and perhaps most stylishly, we can try to deduce what the player is stuck on from his immediate circumstances and from what is not yet solved: this needs a powerful adaptive hints system like the one in The Unexamined Life.

See Getting Started with Conversation for a way to redirect a player using the wrong conversation commands

See Footnotes for another medium by which hints could perhaps be transmitted

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| Example Y ask Y? Noticing when the player seems to be at a loss, and recommending the use of hints. |
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Suppose we'd like to watch for signs that the player is floundering, and if we see them, recommend that he try the hints. There are probably more sophisticated diagnostics, but as a first cut, let's assume that a player who repeatedly reviews descriptions of objects he's already seen, looks around the room, and takes inventory, is at a loss for more productive activities. So then... "Y ask Y?" A thing can be examined or unexamined. A thing is usually unexamined. Carry out examining something: now the noun is examined. Taking inventory is acting confused. Looking is acting confused. Examining an examined thing is acting confused. After acting confused for the sixth turn: say "(If you are feeling lost, try typing HELP for suggestions.)" And now we write a scenario which will, alas, rather encourage even a deft and clueful player to play as though he were hopelessly confused: The story headline is "or: Bad Author, No Biscuit". The description of a thing is usually "Hm. [The item described] reminds you quite a lot of [a random visible thing which is not the item described]." The Yurt is a room. Food is a kind of thing. Food is always edible. In the Yurt are a yam and a dish of yakitori. The yam and the yakitori are food. The description of food is "Well, at least it's not [a random edible thing which is not the item described]." In the Yurt is an animal called a yapok. The player wears a yukata. The player carries a yataghan. Every turn: if a random chance of 1 in 2 succeeds and something is examined: say "Your eye is attracted by some kind of surreptitious movement from [the random examined thing]."; otherwise if the player carries something and a random chance of 1 in 3 succeeds: say "[The random thing carried by the player] tries to slip from your grasp." Test me with "x yam / x yam / look / x yam / i / look / i / help / quit". And finally a little dollop of perversity from a later chapter: Check quitting the game: say "You're sure? "; if player consents, say "[line break]You were getting close to a breakthrough, you know.[line break]"; otherwise stop the action. Understand "help" as a mistake ("You're doing fine! Just keep at what you're doing now.").

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| Example Solitude Novice mode that prefaces every prompt with a list of possible commands the player could try, and highlights every important word used, to alert players to interactive items in the scenery. |
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317
| Example Query Catching all questions that begin with WHO, WHAT, WHERE, and similar question words, and responding with the instruction to use commands, instead. |
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52
| Example Real Adventurers Need No Help Allowing the player to turn off all access to hints for the duration of a game, in order to avoid the temptation to rely on them overmuch. |
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273
| Example Food Network Interactive Using a menu system from an extension, but adding our own material to it for this game. |
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285
| Example Ish. A (very) simple HELP command, using tokens to accept and interpret the player's text whatever it might be. |
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274
| Example Trieste Table amendment to adjust HELP commands provided for the player. |
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230
| Example The Unexamined Life An adaptive hint system that tracks what the player needs to have seen or to possess in order to solve a given puzzle, and doles out suggestions accordingly. Handles changes in the game state with remarkable flexibility, and allows the player to decide how explicit a nudge he wants at any given moment. |
WI

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