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Scope of the site

Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 11:40 am
by Mr Creosote
Where does it end? Do games like Citadel of Chaos (or more generally: CYOA) qualify?

Re: Scope of the site

Posted: Thu May 20, 2010 10:17 am
by Gunness
Where does it end, indeed? If you look at the Adventureland site, they've had the same problem for years. There are so many hybrid genres and borderline games where it's difficult to tell what to include.
If we take a look at what's on CASA at the moment, there are definitely some titles that don't fit the description of the core selection criteria (Zak McKracken, the SSI role playing games).
I feel that these games fit the bill well enough to be included. And let's face it - a lot of older games have such limited vocabulary and linear gameplay that even though they support normal text input, they might as well have been CYOAs.

I'm not too selective about the games to include. My interest and goal has always been the "pure" text adventures, but as long as games retain an adventure-like feel, has a certain amount of text and has a decent amount of puzzle solving, I don't see any reason of keep them away.
But that's just me, of course. The site is built by the users, so if anyone feels strongly about something, I'm certainly open to suggestions.

Re: Scope of the site

Posted: Thu May 20, 2010 11:17 am
by Mr Creosote
The way I understand you, you're ok with me going ahead then. Until my next crazy idea anyway. The reason I'm asking is this:

Normally, I'd just submit those games and let the responsible people take care of discussing this with others or themselves. But for some inexplicable reason, I find myself with full access to the site these days, so there is no technical limitation stopping me from spoiling the site with stuff nobody wants included. Too much responsibility can be a problem, too ;) If I go too far at some point, please just tell me to stop.

Re: Scope of the site

Posted: Thu May 20, 2010 12:03 pm
by Mark
As the original contributor of RPG solutions to this site, my two cents:

Yeah, I know they don't really belong here, but a few exotic contributions don't hurt, I think. They add a bit of colour :-). And they have a fantastically large number of mazes to map, hehe... And more recently, I'm slowly catching up on the text only solutions front as well, having found my ecological niche in the german language mini adventures :wink:

As for games like "Citadel of Chaos" - they definetly belong here, I would say. If you categorically exclude them, you would have to exclude stuff like "Labyrinth" as well. That's an old Lucasfilm game, the grandfather of games like Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion. It's joystick and cursor controlled, with action parts and multiple choice command entries, but it starts with an introductory chapter that is text only. It's a hell of a fine game for it's time, and it would be a shame to reject a solution once someone can be arsed to write one :-).

Re: Scope of the site

Posted: Mon May 24, 2010 1:30 pm
by Samwise
New guy here ... hi. ;)

Very impressed with the new site - looks good. I only stumbled across this community just before the relaunch, but can see it's had a lot of TLC put into it.

Anyway, wrt this topic, would it make sense to just add a few new genres? Such as:

text-only
illustrated
point-n-click
rpg

with other types being easily added as required.

Then you could modify the search on the Advanced Search page so that you can search on multiple genres (e.g. search for text-only AND humour adventures), for your preferred type of games ... ? This is probably moving to more of a tag system than a genre, per se, but I think it'd work well.

Just a suggestion, anyway.

Sam.

Re: Scope of the site

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 8:50 am
by Gunness
Hi Sam, and welcome to the forum - hope you'll have a nice time here!

It's always a pleasure receiving new ideas, and yours certainly has some merit. If we were to add info on the areas you suggest, I'd prefer (as you do) to have them as tags, rather than introducing an entire new field.

I think that CYOA / selectable answers / rpg and similar could make worthy additions to the arsenal of tags. They all represent different ways of playing a game. I'm not too sure of "text only" and "text with graphics". Both because there would so incredibly many of both of them, and because I think that, pretty pictures aside, the game experience is fundamentally the same.
Anyone else have some input on this?

Re: Scope of the site

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 11:26 am
by Samwise
Gunness wrote:Hi Sam, and welcome to the forum - hope you'll have a nice time here!
Thanks, I'll certainly try. :)
Gunness wrote:It's always a pleasure receiving new ideas, and yours certainly has some merit. If we were to add info on the areas you suggest, I'd prefer (as you do) to have them as tags, rather than introducing an entire new field.
Agreed. But I thought suggesting completely replacing the genre function with a tags system in my very first post, was perhaps a little cheeky. :)
Gunness wrote:I'm not too sure of "text only" and "text with graphics". Both because there would so incredibly many of both of them, and because I think that, pretty pictures aside, the game experience is fundamentally the same.
Do you mean you wouldn't want either tag because they cover so many games? Or that there should only be one tag that covers both?

Either way:

wrt effort required to tag games - I don't think the addition of a tag to represent them is a lot of extra work. I don't know how the administrator's game submission page works, but assuming it's just a webpage that submits to the database, if tags were implemented you could just have a collection of checkboxes and you tick the ones that apply - so only one extra click when a game is submitted to add a text-only or illustrated-text tag. That's quite simple.

wrt omitting tag(s) because they cover a lot of games - the idea of arbitrarily leaving out the tag(s) for one type of game just because they cover the majority, just seems odd to me. You'd presumably add tags for all the other genres in use ...

wrt whether an illustrated-text tag is required in addition to text-only - I think there is definitely a case for distinguishing them, especially if you're playing older, classic 8-bit micro adventures. The illustrations on these platforms could often cause a lot of slow-down in gameplay due primarily to the limited capabilities of the machine, especially if they were programmed to draw the graphics rather than load a bitmap. So much so, that if a game implemented the illustrations so that they couldn't be toggled on/off and also showed them every time you entered a location, they could completely put the user off much earlier than they might otherwise have done, just because of sheer boredom/frustration of waiting for the game to respond.

The only reason I can think against applying those two tags, is the amount of time it would take to apply them to the catalogue already submitted in the db but you could always do a global apply to all of the text-only tag, and then go through and remove the tag from those games which aren't classic text adventures - that would probably be a quicker job.

Just my 2p's worth, anyway, ;)

Sam.

Re: Scope of the site

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 11:34 am
by Mr Creosote
Samwise wrote:
Gunness wrote:It's always a pleasure receiving new ideas, and yours certainly has some merit. If we were to add info on the areas you suggest, I'd prefer (as you do) to have them as tags, rather than introducing an entire new field.
Agreed. But I thought suggesting completely replacing the genre function with a tags system in my very first post, was perhaps a little cheeky. :)
Of course you didn't know that, but internally, what's displayed as "genres" is already called "tags" anyway ;)

Jacob, what is your opinion on extending the advanced search to allow more than one genre/tag to be selected at the same time as brought up by Samwise?

Re: Scope of the site

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 12:04 pm
by Samwise
haha.

Actually I pretty much did. I looked up Melbourne House's The Hobbit in the database and confirmed it was listed in two genres (Based on book, Tolkien) ... so I kinda figured the back-end database layout was already there. Hence I thought it would be easy to just extend the Advanced search page to allow purists to filter out any types of games they don't want to see. :)

If I thought it would be a lot of extra work for you guys, I'd probably have kept my mouth shut, being new to these parts and all ... !

Sam.

Re: Scope of the site

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 12:11 pm
by Mr Creosote
Well... I'm not saying it will be very easy to make it searchable that way. It is certainly possible, though. However, we would need a policy decision first: What does it mean if more than one tag is selected? OR or AND?

Re: Scope of the site

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 1:00 pm
by Samwise
If it was a choice between them, I'd suggest AND. You could always replicate an OR by running the search twice with a single, different tag/genre selected each time.

Sam.

Re: Scope of the site

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 1:19 pm
by Gunness
Sam, thanks for your response! I don't want to shoot down any ideas right away, and I can see that you've given this some thought, so let's see where this is going :)
Samwise wrote:wrt omitting tag(s) because they cover a lot of games - the idea of arbitrarily leaving out the tag(s) for one type of game just because they cover the majority, just seems odd to me. You'd presumably add tags for all the other genres in use ...
The idea with the genre tags is to help people find games of a certain type. If a genre becomes too wide, it loses its usefulness as it covers too many titles. To take an extreme example (please bear with with here!), we could have a "allows players take inventory" tag. This would cover 95% of all games. The tag fits those games but it isn't really useful.
Btw, as more tags can be created on the fly, there are potentially always additional tags that can be added.
Samwise wrote:wrt whether an illustrated-text tag is required in addition to text-only - I think there is definitely a case for distinguishing them, especially if you're playing older, classic 8-bit micro adventures. The illustrations on these platforms could often cause a lot of slow-down in gameplay...So much so, that if a game implemented the illustrations so that they couldn't be toggled on/off and also showed them every time you entered a location, they could completely put the user off much earlier than they might otherwise have done
I understand what you're saying. But I don't necessary think that illustrations is a good yard stick when it comes to telling whether a game runs fast or not. You're suggesting some of the issues yourself. What if the graphics can be turned off? What if they're only displayed the first time? What if they actually coded efficiently, so that they don't take long to render? I can think of many illustrated games that run a great deal faster than text-only games.
Samwise wrote:The only reason I can think against applying those two tags, is the amount of time it would take to apply them to the catalogue already submitted in the db but you could always do a global apply to all of the text-only tag, and then go through and remove the tag from those games which aren't classic text adventures - that would probably be a quicker job.
Well, I have a hunch that things are a bit more complex than this. Not impossible, of course, but definitely not entirely clean-cut :)
The problem is, as you mention, the games already in the archive. Perhaps I've misunderstood your definitions, but a lot of the classics aren't text only. I couldn't give you an exact figure, but let's just say, for the sake of argument, that 30% of the classic titles have different kinds of illustrations.
This would amount to something like 400 games (again, just a nice, round figure). Which would take a bit of time to update. Again, certainly doable, but quite a bit of work - which of course can be handled along the way :) Which once again gets us back to: is the distinction useful.

Just to explore the idea a bit further, what kind of subdivision (if any) would the "illustrated" games be split into? Some sites operate with "character graphics" and "graphics" (ie. bitmapped or vector). I'm not sure how useful this distinction is.
Mr Creosote wrote:Jacob, what is your opinion on extending the advanced search to allow more than one genre/tag to be selected at the same time as brought up by Samwise?
I'd normally expect a search like this to be an AND search. If we were to add the text-only / illustrated distinction, I definitely the idea has some potential. If not, I think it would make the search page more complex to use without adding anything really useful.

Re: Scope of the site

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 1:52 pm
by Mr Creosote
Alright, let me know once you've come to a decision.

Re: Scope of the site

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 2:17 pm
by Samwise
All perfectly valid points. :)

Just to add that the reason for suggesting a tag that covers 95% of the games is the subject of this topic - it would allow anyone who wasn't interested in anything other than classic adventures, to simply omit them from a search. Thus making it less of an issue if the scope of the site grows out to cover other genres.

The point of a "tag" system is that you could search for more than just one tag at a time ... so you're right that browsing through a "text-only" genre would result in far too many matches, but selecting a "text-only" tag AND a "tolkien" tag would return the Melbourne House adventures and not, say, any later Lord of the Rings RPG-type titles which might be in the database.

As for whether omitting illustrated games from a search is sensible, well I was playing devil's advocate and possibly went a bit off-topic. I know of some people who simply weren't interested in illustrated games even if they did play as well, if not better than text-only ones. From my point of view, I'd agree with you that arbitrarily ignoring graphical games is silly based on just the experience of playing a few bad titles, and I'd also suggest that many illustrated adventures were often coded by more talented progammers than many of the BASIC text-only affairs that were available in the 80s.

The point is, tho, if you provide tags to distinguish between the two genres everyone can be happy - you and I can select a search to see either type of game, whilst someone else who does want to apply their arbitrary text-only rule can filter their results, accordingly too.

Thinking on it a bit more, tho, for maximum flexibility it might be simpler to have the illustrated tag work in addition to a textual tag, rather than in place of. So, instead of "text-only" OR "illustrated", you might have "textualinterface" AND "illustrated". Thus, instead of:

Zork I tags: text-only, zork
The Hobbit tags: illustrated, tolkien

You'd have:

Zork I tags: textualinterface, zork
The Hobbit tags: textualinterface, illustrated, tolkien

This approach would also (slightly) reduce the amount of work required if you applied the global tag of "textualinterface" that I proposed. Instead of doing that and then having to manually remove it from the 30% of games that have some form of graphics, you'd only have to remove that tag from the 10% (total guess!) of games that don't have a textual interface.

The question of whether to further divide illustrated games into sub-categories, I'm perhaps not well-versed enough to comment on. I don't think I've played enough of such games to really appreciate the need for such distinction but that's probably more due to my lack of experience with such titles than anything else so I'll let other more worldly forum members comment on the relative merits of that proposal!

Anyway, I've said far more than I ever expected in this topic so probably best I stop there. :)

Sam.

Re: Scope of the site

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 7:55 pm
by dave
I'm not fundamentally opposed to the genres/tags being used like Sam described (IIRC that's how we initially discussed them working). But, and this is a big but, how do we classify those games that can be both textual and text/graphic, depending on the flavour of release?

For example, the lion's share of the Scott Adams games were released in both SACA (text-only) and SAGA (graphics and text) formats, depending on the platform and porter and on some platforms were released in both formats. We could just declare that if a version had graphics then we add the graphics tag, or we could base it on the original release (as we did with system - again, some SAGA+ games were ported across to the (IIRC) Melbourne House system when released in Europe).

One of the decisions made when we rebuilt the site was that we are not trying to be an archive of all knowledge for text adventures - we have if-wiki et al for that. Our main priority is to allow people to find solutions to the adventures they're playing (which tagging something as graphical may help).

I'm torn: if we can think of a way to cover ambiguities, then we should go ahead, but we need to make sure that we cover the ambiguities.