| 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. Failing this, we can also try to parse commands like HELP ABOUT MICRODOT, as in Ish. 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
| Example Y ask Y? Noticing when the player seems to be at a loss, and recommending the use of hints. | |
| Example Ish. A (very) simple HELP command, using tokens to accept and interpret the player's text whatever it might be. | |