What the player wants

Like the old saying goes, you can have it cheap, quick, or correct; pick any two. Work that is inexpensive and fast is rarely of any quality; work that is fast and good usually comes with a high price; and work that is both correct and affordable will rarely be done by your schedule. Something similar applies to finding out what the player wants in his game. The author can ask the player an exhaustive list of highly specific questions, at some cost of time; or quickly breeze through a few questions, sacrificing either completeness or comprehension.

This is especially true when we are dealing with games that simulate social activities like flirting, relationships, and sex. Humans rarely ask for what we want; our social rules do not always allow us to. Sometimes what we want is for someone else to take charge, to not ask us what we want, like a handsome stranger who seduces the player despite her breathy protests to the contrary. Paradoxically, what we want is sometimes the very thing that it is impossible to ask for. In the real world we insist that no means no, but in a fantasy we might wish for no to mean yes.

In order to solve the problem of making a game where no can mean yes, I am writing an extension for Inform called Preferences. It allows the player to specify, in some detail, what is encompassed in his or her sexual fantasies, and to exclude that which is not. It's impossible to be complete in this endeavor, for every fantasy has myriads of sub-categories that would take infinite monkeys, splitting infinite numbers of hairs, to define. And we can't be entirely accurate in every fantasy, since what constitutes a fantasy is somewhat variable from person to person. But we can eliminate the time factor. Rather than have every game ask the same basic questions, Preferences will let the player define these things once, for all Inform games.

I will have more to say about the Preferences extension as I get closer to a release date. I do know that Body Thief will be the first game to incorporate it.