Problem: The author has written a game with a puzzle which a player cannot solve on their own.
Context: The author has written a puzzle which is very logical--in their own mind. The player, on the other hand, is unable to comprehend what to do next, and may quit in frustration unless they can find a solution to the puzzle.
Forces: The forces involved come from the author and from the player.
The author:
- Has written a puzzle which will (until solved) block progress to another section of the game.
- Wishes to have the player play the entire game.
- Wants to present a sufficient challenge to the player.
- Does not want to have to lead the player by the hand through the game.
- Doesn't want to (or cannot) change the puzzle itself.
The player:
- Is not on the same logical track as the author. This could come in a wide variety of forms, from not knowing there is a puzzle to solve to knowing the answer but not knowing the correct grammar to complete the puzzle.
- Wants to solve the puzzle "on their own". (i.e. doesn't want to cheat)
- Wants to be entertained.
- Has set aside time to play the game, but will become bored and quit if their progress is blocked and they can't get around it.
Solution: The author (or someone else) can write hints for the player, beginning with opaque clues about the nature of the puzzle, and ending with explicit instructions about how to solve it.
A good hint system might provide the player a list of topics or questions which the player might have ('How do I get into the house?', 'What do I do about the Troll?'). These topics could be subdivided into general categories or sections, such as the physical locale within the game where the puzzles are encountered ('Outside the House', 'Beneath the House', 'The Maze and Environs', etc.) Once the player selects a topic, they are presented with a list of clues, provided one at a time, which get progressively more explicit. This is to ensure that the player may stop reading the hints at any time, once they feel they have been provided enough impetus to solve the puzzle.
Whatever form they take, the progression of clues should generally follow this series of development:
- Is the puzzle currently solvable? The player may feel that they are stuck, say, on 'How do I unlock the grate?', but they will actually be stuck on 'How do I enter the house?', inside which will be a skeleton key. The first clue given to a player should convey to the player whether or not the puzzle is solvable yet. In our example, the first clue might look like:
- How Do I Unlock the Grate?
- You'll have to get in the house first. (see How Do I Enter the House?)
- What are the clues within the game? A good puzzle should have indicators to its solution within the game itself (if not, effort should be spent to put them there, instead of writing up a hint system!) The next few clues should point the player in that direction. In our example, say the author has put a skeleton inside the grate as a clue. The next clue might therefore be:
- How Do I Unlock the Grate?
- You'll have to get in the house first. (see How Do I Enter the House?)
- Have you looked inside the grate?
- What is the logic involved? A good puzzle should be logical. (Again, if it isn't, effort should be spent making it so!) The next clue or clues should try to get the player thinking along the lines of logic needed to solve the puzzle. So, for example:
- How Do I Unlock the Grate?
- You'll have to get in the house first. (see How Do I Enter the House?)
- Have you looked inside the grate?
- The original key is probably lost.
- But another key might be useful,...
- What kind of key is known to open many different locks?
- Didn't the skeleton remind you of anything?
- What do I have to do to solve the puzzle? If the hint writer has conceded that the author's thinking might be alien to the player, they should probably also concede that the hint writer's thinking might be alien to the player as well (especially if they are one and the same!) As a last recourse, explicit answers should be provided, a la:
- How Do I Unlock the Grate?
- You'll have to get in the house first. (see How Do I Enter the House?)
- Have you looked inside the grate?
- The original key is probably lost.
- But another key might be useful,...
- What kind of key is known to open many different locks?
- Didn't the skeleton remind you of anything?
- A skeleton key!
- UNLOCK GRATE WITH SKELETON KEY, then OPEN GRATE
Also note that the player may have indeed figured out what to do, but hadn't known exactly how to phrase it: They may have tried OPEN DOOR WITH KEY or UNLOCK GRATE USING MY SKELETON KEY, which may not have worked, for whatever reason.
[Note: It is traditional to write out commands typed by the player in ALL CAPS, which in itself is probably a pattern (IntFicAllCaps? ?, but not one I'm going to write up right now :) --LucianSmith]
All of these four sections are not necessarily needed, depending on the forces involved. For example, Brendon Wyber's 'Theatre' included hints only, and no explicit instructions. For him, presumably, his desire to present a challenge to the player led him to believe that providing explicit hints would detract from that. Also, those hint systems which provide hints within the game itself ('Theatre' is one, as are 'Tapestry' and Infocom's 'Arthur', among others) might only present the topic question (like 'How Do I Unlock the Grate?') to the player once the puzzle has been reached and is solvable.
This also leads to another potential problem: If all the
topics/questions are available to the player from the beginning, their very presence can sometimes be constituted to be a spoiler. ("Aha! One of the questions is 'How do I get into the house?, so there must be some way of doing that!") The accepted method of dealing with this is to put bogus questions on the list as well as real ones. (How do I get on top of the house?, How do I revive the skeleton?) Infocom did this a lot, in their InvisiClues.
[Note: Again, this is probably another pattern in its own right, but anyway,... --LucianSmith]
Examples There are many ways of implementing this Pattern. Here are a few:
- Providing hints within the game. This is used, as mentioned, in games like 'Theatre', 'Tapestry', and Infocom's 'Arthur' and 'Zork Zero' (and in the 'Solid Gold' releases of many of their games.)
- Advantages: Hints are easily accessible to the player. The player can quickly find the solution to their problem.
- Disadvantages: Hints are easily accessible to the player. The player can too quickly find the solution to their problem, where they might have been able to figure it out on their own had they spent a little more effort.
[Note: This can't be a 'pattern' per se since I've never seen it done, but it shouldn't be too hard to incorporate a daemon that started running after you read a clue that prevented you from reading the next one until a certain number of moves have been made within the game, or a certain amount of real time has passed (or both!) --LucianSmith
-
Actually, I believe that Arthur did incorporate this to some extent -- L RossRaszewski
]
- Providing 'InvisiClues' booklets This was used by Infocom for many (if not all) of their games. Booklets were sold to eager fans with topics/questions above blank spaces with the clues written in invisible ink. A player could run a special pen across the ink to make it show up.
- Advantages: They provided some extra income for the company ;-), and they required some effort on the part of the player, but not too much. Also, there was a sense of permanency about revealing a clue that is not there in electronic forms.
- Disadvantages: They were not timeless. No one (to my knowledge) publishes such books any more, and the ink would fade with time, or the player might lose the pen(!) Re-releases of these clues by Activision simply released them in a written form, where it is shamefully easy for a 'wandering eye' to read the answer to a clue you didn't want :-(
- Providing the hints on the web In this system, you enter one link to get the first clue, another to get the next, and so on. Infocom's InvisiClues have been re-published this way by a fan (Peter Scheyen at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Invisiclues/), and I wrote clues for the game 'So Far' for this form also (http://www.bioc.rice.edu/~lpsmith/IF/sofar.html).
- Advantages: Preserves the 'one-clue-at-a-time' structure
- Disadvantages: Is a little too hard to get to to begin with, and then is a little too easy to continue with once you're there. This leads to the temptation to go ahead and go for the explicit instructions since you're there already, instead of reading one, trying it out, reading another, trying again, and so on. Also, these are even worse offenders of the 'timeless' crime, for obvious reasons!
- Converting the hints to some specialized 'hint-reading' format UHS, or the 'Universal Hint System' is one such format (http://www.uhs-hints.com/), as is THL ('The Hint Library' at http://www.rat.de/stworld/thl/thlmain.htm) There are hints for many games in the UHS format, and a growing number of hints (including many converted InvisiClues) for THL.
- Advantages: Is relatively easily accessible, and is still 'timeless' (provided backwards-compatability is maintained)
- Disadvantages: Can still be a little to easy to go on to the next clue, when it might be better to try your luck with the game.
- Providing the hints in an encrypted form The hints will take the form of straight text, but they will be encrypted in some way. This could be a letter substitution cipher, having every other letter 'flipped' (ilek htsi (like this)), having every word in the sentence replaced by a number, with a corresponding table of words somewhere else, or in some other manner (see the 'Encrypted Hints' thread from rec.arts.int-fiction, http://bang.ml.org/raif/1/msg00200.html).
- Advantages: The clues are easily accessible but take a fair amount of effort to decode. Extra clues cannot be read by a 'wandering eye'.
- Disadvantages: Harder to error-check. If this method is used, using a computer program to convert text to encrypted text is recommended. The full list of topics is still accessible to the player from the beginning, which may, again, be a spoiler.
- Providing hints within the context of the game itself. Within the game, there is some 'deus ex machina' which will give hints to your character directly. This might be explicit (There is a demon in GrahamNelson's 'Curses' which will give you hints if you show it objects or ask it questions. A similar character exists in Gareth Rees' 'The Magic Toyshop'.) or it might be more tied to the context of the plot (In our example above, if the character had never looked in the grate to see the skeleton, their attention might be drawn to it after a certain number of moves or unsuccessful attempts to open the grate. One of the versions of 'Colossal Cave' had this feature.)
- Advantages: Players receiving hints in this fashion almost never feel as if they are cheating. The hints are provided only if needed, and only after some progress has been made on the part of the player.
- Disadvantages: Giving hints in this fashion can be difficult to code well, particularly in a large and complex game. The hints also can have the tendency to not progress much past stage 2, and rarely reach stage 4, so if the player has run into a grammar problem, they remain unhelpful (and can actually become more annoying than if they hadn't existed at all!)
Resulting Context When written and utilized well, the result is that the player finds out how they were thinking wrongly with exactly the right amount of a 'push', and is able to further enjoy the game. The player still feels challenged, and the author has a happy customer.
Rationale In this system, the player can complete the game without the sense of loss consumate with either giving up on the game altogether or from being 'spoiled' for that puzzle. (See "Cheat, Beg, Wheedle, Cajole" from XYZZYNews #12, at http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.12f.html) I received the greatest validation of my hint writing efforts than when I read a post from someone who said they had just finished 'So Far' "without cheating", and only a "gentle nudge" from my clues page (above). I was ecstatic.
Also, consider the alternatives:
- Walkthroughs: In a walkthrough, explicit instructions are provided which tell the player exactly which commands to type in order to finish the game. This was the most widely-hated form of hint-giving according to the informal poll in the XYZZYNews article (above), and it is easy to see why. The player alternately feels alienated (by the puzzle) and then babied (by the walkthrough). Also, it is extremely easy to be 'spoiled' for a puzzle you weren't stuck on (or perhaps hadn't even encountered!) by the 'wandering eye' scenario. (Of course, you could take my approach and never make a game large enough or complicated enough to inspire people to make walkthroughs. -MarkMusante)
This is the opposite extreme to,...
- No Hints: The author refuses to provide any hints at all, on the theory that if they spent so much effort writing the game, the player can spend some effort puzzling it out. Alternatively, the author is so spent by writing the game that they have no energy left over to write hints for it afterwards. Unfortunately, this situation leads to the above one, Walkthroughs, when someone else writes one and uploads it to a hint service (like the InteractiveFictionArchive).
There are other possibilities, better than the above, which are out of the control of the author, but which the player can employ:
- Playing With A Friend: 'Two heads are better than one.' Since we have hypothesized that part of the problem to begin with is that the author and player are thinking along different tracks, it is reasonable to assume (and experience confirms) that two people playing at once can greatly increase the overlap of thought processes. The only disadvantage to this system is when it cannot occur :-(
- Asking questions on the net: Akin to the first, the advantage here is that you can get a specific response to a specific question, and won't be spoiled for any other puzzles. The disadvantage is that you might get a more explicit answer than you would have liked, and also that it might (again) simply not be available.[Do many players have the same difficulties. Use a spyware to log where difficulties occur and gauge their severity. You can use this data to optimise hints --DafyddRees.]
Relationships: [none yet, since we haven't written any other IntFic Patterns. If you write a related pattern, be sure to mention it here --LucianSmith]
Known Uses: (see 'Examples')
-Written by LucianSmith
-Very slightly edited by DavidGlasser
CategoryIntFic
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(last edited November 5, 1998)
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