IF Cliches: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:13, 14 November 2005

There are some recurring themes and elements in IF that have been so overused they make seasoned players groan. Usually you want to think again before you make a story using one of these. Unless you're very, very good and can put a creative twist on it. Virtually all of these cliches have figured prominently in excellent games, but that won't stop your audience groaning at them if they have to endure them again.

See discussion on Talk:IF Cliches for the future of this page

Abandonitis: Moved to Abandonitis

Acid Whiplash: For no apparent reason, you must wander through a series of utterly disconnected environments, sometimes as utterly disconnected characters. Some might be surreal, or they might just feel that way because you've no idea what's going on. A cheap excuse for an author to rope together a bunch of incomplete games to something comp-length, and a great demotivator for players - all they're looking for is the trigger to the next head-jump.

Amnesia: Moved to Amnesia

Combinatorial Explosion: But what if the player wants to use the broadsword on the bedspread while the ferret is in the birdcage and the melted amplifier is underneath the china hippopotamus? Every object in IF can potentially interact with not only every verb but every verb multiplied by every other object. So every element you add to a game can cause a huge explosion of possibilities, if you wanted to track them all. You generally don't, which is why you have generic responses to verbs (or materials simulation libraries if you want to get really tricky) - but even the rare special cases will multiply soon enough.

Conversational Explosion: The conversation-menu equivalent of Combinatorial Explosion, if you choose to implement conversations using branching trees. At some point you'll need to prune the conversation tree by dropping back to generic responses, or ignoring or consolidating the past state of the conversation into something approaching sanity. The trick is how to do it while avoiding the dreaded Lawnmower Effect.

Cutscene: Moved to Cutscene

Dungoneers Anonymous: You are Grabthar, Champion of the Nine Realms of Cloudvassal, half-dwarven half-elf cleric with pointy ears and infravision, wielding the +3 blessed greatsword of Munchkin Slaying, sworn to avenge... zzz... in a firelit tavern where you meet your new companions... zzz... Your D&D campaign plays great around a tabletop, but in IF it's just a little too generic. You need an edge to make it stand out.

Fingers McFlashback: Your character's life story, or the story of the world in which you're exploring, is slowly revealed by the use of flashbacks - often when you physically touch objects or enter rooms. A magical or science-fictional McGuffin may be involved, or it might just be your memory. This is often combined with Amnesia and Abandonitis as a way of describing characters who can't be easily implemented.

Guess The Verb: See Guess-the-Verb.

Jail Cell: A set-piece which IF authors never tire of finding new variations on. You're in a jail cell with very limited (or bizarre) resources, and you have to get out. Parodied in Lock & Key (Adam Cadre; 2002; Glulx).

Kleptomania: moved to Kleptomania

Lawnmower Effect: What happens when you use conversational menus and all of the options can, and should, be asked about at each conversation node. The player just goes through efficiently mowing them up like a lawnmower. Essentially you've spent a lot of time and effort to simulate a non-interactive cutscene.

Magician's Nephew: Moved to Magician's Nephew

Meta-IF: You're an IF author struggling to finish your game, but the space weasels stole your backup disks! Or you're behind the scenes of the stage on which well-known IF games are acted! Or you play a poor, put-upon parser engine struggling with unreasonable demands! Or... there are a million ways to do this, and it can work, but most fall into the same basic trap: reminiscing about (or mocking) IF rather than trying to make IF that's enjoyable on its own merits.

My College Dorm Room, My Hilariously Dysfunctional Workplace, My Messy Bedroom: moved to My Apartment

Painted On: A cliche that's easy to avoid in a good programmable IF system like Inform or TADS, but was a constant nuisance in low-powered systems like AGT. An untakeable object or unrepeatable event is mentioned in a room description, and remains so even after it has long passed from relevance to pure farce, because the room description has no means of being modified. Usually a very early novice mistake.

Reality Confusion: The game has multiple levels of reality in it, usually dreams, but they could be virtual reality or psychic flashforwards/flashbacks. Often it is not obvious while you are playing which segment is dream and which is reality. Sometimes you can >WAKE UP, sometimes you can't. This can be fun, just don't overuse it. '*** It was all a dream ***' is not usually a satisfying ending in itself.

Red Key, Blue Key: There are multiple locked doors and you need to collect matching keys. Another really, really old cliche. In fantasy they're actual keys made of different metals; in a science fiction game they're colour-coded passcards. (Hello Doom). Try to think of a more interesting way to meter out progress than just collecting keys.

Space Cadets Anonymous: You are Lieutenant Gr'abThar, Away Team Leader of the Confederation Space Cruiser Cloudvassal, half-Vulcan half-Klingon technician with pointy ears and infravision goggles, wielding the +3 tachyon-multiplied phase-blaster of Redshirt Slaying... zzz... Captain has lost communications with the colony outpost... zzz... Same problem. Your space setting needs some kind of twist to distinguish itself.

Stumbler, In Darkness: see Light puzzle

Tab A In Slot B: Your game has a puzzle (often a mini- Treasure Hunt) involving several objects which can only ever be used for this one specific purpose, after which they are inactivated, permanently welded together or otherwise exhausted. Essentially it's a lock-and-key puzzle wearing a thin disguise. It's often made worse by the objects being ones which the player would reasonably expect to have multiple applications: sticks, money, blades, universal gizmos. A better approach would be to allow multiple uses for objects, and potentially multiple solutions, though this raises the spectre of Combinatorial Explosion.

Through the Rabbit-Hole: You were an ordinary kid until an interdimensional nexus sucked you into a magical fantasy land. Where you can suddenly wield a sword as if you'd been doing it for twenty years. And you are now referred to as Bivotar. And the fate of the world lies in your hands. This is a great way to enable an author to use the My College / Messy Room / Workplace genre and a stock heroic-fantasy or sci-fi genre in the same game, perhaps in the misguided belief that each will erase the sins of the other.

Treasure Hunt: The game, or part of it, is about searching a locale for objects (generally cunningly hidden or obstructed in some way), which you must then bring back to a place, an NPC, or assemble into some kind of machine. In its rawest form the search is for real treasures (see Trophy Case), but nowadays such raw greed is usually hidden under a discreet euphemism. Treasure hunting is an efficient way to force the player to explore the environment and make sure plot events happen in the right sequence, but can get extremely tedious if the objects aren't interesting in their own right.

Trophy Case: The object back in or near the adventure's starting room where you need to deposit all your *TREASURES* in order to score points, this being the entire purpose of the game. Almost completely vanished from modern games (hardly present even in Infocom's games, other than Zork), this was at one time perhaps the oldest cliche of them all. Colossal Cave had it; many of the Scott Adams games had it. Vestigial scoring mechanics remain in both Inform and TADS just to handle this situation.

Walking Books: The NPCs in your game are simple keyword-response bots who give you canned one-line responses. Almost exactly as if they were books you were >CONSULTing. The only puzzle revolves around knowing what phrase to >ASK them about (or item to give them). By contrast, they may become distinctly chatty within cutscenes. Give them a bit more colour by adding multiple responses and flavour text for actions they do on their own.

The Wumpus' Revenge: See Maze.

You Can't See That Here: Your game lists objects in the room description that you haven't bothered to implement as objects in their own right. More of a nuisance than a cliche, but at some point almost every game will run out of simulation detail and resort to generic messages. The fewer nouns you leave unimplemented, the better though.

@@ Line 7: / Line 7: @@
 ; Acid Whiplash : For no apparent reason, you must wander through a series of utterly disconnected environments, sometimes as utterly disconnected characters. Some might be surreal, or they might just feel that way because you've no idea what's going on. A cheap excuse for an author to rope together a bunch of incomplete games to something [[The Annual IF Competition | comp]]-length, and a great demotivator for players - all they're looking for is the trigger to the next head-jump.
-; Amnesia : You wake up with a head wound and no memory of who you are or where. Just like the player who's suddenly assumed your identity. Isn't that a wonderful coincidence? Yes, yes it is. And very useful if you want to get right to the point and avoid having to info-dump lots of backstory, but you might want to find a more original way of doing it.
+; Amnesia : Moved to [[Amnesia]]
 ; Combinatorial Explosion : But what if the player wants to use the broadsword on the bedspread while the ferret is in the birdcage and the melted amplifier is underneath the china hippopotamus? Every object in IF can potentially interact with not only every verb but every verb multiplied by every other object. So every element you add to a game can cause a huge explosion of possibilities, if you wanted to track them all. You generally don't, which is why you have generic responses to verbs (or materials simulation libraries if you want to get really tricky) - but even the rare special cases will multiply soon enough.
@@ Line 19: / Line 19: @@
 ; Fingers McFlashback : Your character's life story, or the story of the world in which you're exploring, is slowly revealed by the use of flashbacks - often when you physically touch objects or enter rooms. A magical or science-fictional McGuffin may be involved, or it might just be your memory. This is often combined with Amnesia and Abandonitis as a way of describing characters who can't be easily implemented.
-; Guess The Verb : The classic badly-implemented IF problem, arising from its open-ended nature. Your game at some critical point requires either an action very rarely (if ever used), perhaps one you've invented just for this game, or a unique way of phrasing an otherwise obvious action. Two forms of the problem are slightly different, but either way the player is left scratching their head at a blank parser prompt, with no idea how to make the game progress. In the worst case, the game doesn't even give an indication that this hidden action is even possible, or that it was missed. In the early days of IF, many authors considered stumping the player with unprompted verbs to be one of the goals of design. Nowadays, we're more enlightened. Maybe. There are various ways around this problem, all revolving around telling the player the exact verb to type, but doing so subtly without spoiling the puzzle. If your game has a set of nonstandard verbs which are part of the core mechanics, it's considered polite to describe these right at the start in a HELP or ABOUT verb. Another answer -- especially if the verb itself is not a puzzle -- is to use the exact form of the verb in a descriptive sentence. "You could fill the petrol can, if the top were unscrewed." Also you can try to make sure that your game actions can be invoked using common verbs rather than special ones - so that the petrol can responds to >OPEN as well as >UNSCREW, and >PUT PETROL IN CAN as well as >FILL CAN WITH PETROL. The real answer is playtesting, when you will find out not only which verbs stump people, but what weird verbs your players come up with that no sane person should have ever imagined. Parodied in ''Guess the Verb'' ([[Leonard Richardson''; 2000; [[Z-code]]).
+; Guess The Verb : See [[Guess-the-Verb]].
 ; Jail Cell : A set-piece which IF authors never tire of finding new variations on. You're in a jail cell with very limited (or bizarre) resources, and you have to get out. Parodied in ''Lock & Key'' ([[Adam Cadre]]; 2002; [[Glulx]]).
@@ Line 41: / Line 41: @@
 ; Space Cadets Anonymous : You are Lieutenant Gr'abThar, Away Team Leader of the Confederation Space Cruiser Cloudvassal, half-Vulcan half-Klingon technician with pointy ears and  infravision goggles, wielding the +3 tachyon-multiplied phase-blaster of Redshirt Slaying... zzz... Captain has lost communications with the colony outpost... zzz... Same problem. Your space setting needs some kind of twist to distinguish itself.
-; Stumbler, In Darkness (aka [[Light puzzle]]):  There is a dark room, or section of rooms, and you need to acquire a light to enter them. Darkness as a movement-blocking puzzle is so ancient (hello [[Colossal Cave]]) it has pretty much expired its use-by date and wrapped around. Try doing something different with the dark, if you want to keep it - like give the player a sense of touch and hearing, maybe.
+; Stumbler, In Darkness : see [[Light puzzle]]
 ; Tab A In Slot B : Your game has a puzzle (often a mini- Treasure Hunt) involving several objects which can only ever be used for this one specific purpose, after which they are inactivated, permanently welded together or otherwise exhausted. Essentially it's a lock-and-key puzzle wearing a thin disguise. It's often made worse by the objects being ones which the player would reasonably expect to have multiple applications: sticks, money, blades, universal gizmos. A better approach would be to allow multiple uses for objects, and potentially multiple solutions, though this raises the spectre of Combinatorial Explosion.
@@ Line 53: / Line 53: @@
 ; Walking Books : The NPCs in your game are simple keyword-response bots who give you canned one-line responses. Almost exactly as if they were books you were >CONSULTing. The only puzzle revolves around knowing what phrase to >ASK them about (or item to give them). By contrast, they may become distinctly chatty within cutscenes. Give them a bit more colour by adding multiple responses and flavour text for actions they do on their own.
-; The Wumpus' Revenge : Mazes - Just Say No. As in, unclued, unmotivated, each-exit-links-randomly blocks of linked (often identically-named) rooms that must be tediously mapped. Mazes are probably the single easiest 'puzzle' to implement for the amount of grief they inflict on the player and, because of that, the most boring and dreaded kind of puzzle to play. Many classic IF games were full of these, because they were cheap on memory space and made a game feel 'bigger'. Avoid at any costs. There can be fun angles on mazes-that-aren't-really-mazes if you want to get creative, but you run the risk of losing your audience unless you cue them in very promptly as to what the 'trick' is.
+; The Wumpus' Revenge : See [[Maze]].
 ; You Can't See That Here : Your game lists objects in the room description that you haven't bothered to implement as objects in their own right. More of a nuisance than a cliche, but at some point almost every game will run out of simulation detail and resort to generic messages. The fewer nouns you leave unimplemented, the better though.
 [[Category:Tropes|Cliches]]