WELL, IT'S 1-2-3, WHAT ARE WE WRITIN' FOR?

(Thoughts on Automating Notetaking)
by R. Derleth

Since 1984, when I started playing computer games, I've filled notebook after notebook with scribbled maps and notes required to keep track of dozens of games, and I can't help but wonder why I'm still doing it a decade later. While game technology and design philosophies have raced forward with beautiful graphics and elegant interfaces, the tedium and hassle of manual note-taking are still an unwelcome part of the gaming experience. "Ease of Use", the Holy Grail of game designers into the early `90s, has developed into a science, with the confounding exception of automatic notetaking. This, folks, is a glaring oversight and it's high time we get it fixed.

With this article, I'll take note of some of the autonote schemes that have been tried, and respectfully indicate where they have failed. I'll propose some ideas for developers to consider, and finally, present a few hoary arguments against auto-notetaking, if only to beat them into well-deserved oblivion. Mapping is the subject for another article, and will be dealt with here only in its relation to notetaking.

What's wrong with paper and pencil?

Most people use some combination of mouse and keyboard to play a game, and they interact primarily with the images on the screen. Leafing through the manual for copy protection and information, while sometimes necessary, pulls the gamer out of the medium and detracts from the game. Grabbing a pen and transcribing every interaction is a chore, and it punctuates an otherwise absorbing game with moments of real-world drudgery.

But that's just half of it. Maybe you've had this experience: You're playing the newest Ultima/Xeen/Wizardy, talking to every NPC in sight, dutifully recording their musings, desires, advice, and demands, into a notebook you've bought for the occasion. This person wants something in that town, that person advises talking to someone in such-and-such a dungeon, a random rumor mentions a certain artifact, and you write it all down. As you edit long-winded NPC commentary into usable form, you can never be sure if you've got quite the info you need. As the game progresses, your notes occupy several pages and searching for information begins to resemble a bad copy-protection scheme, as you flip through pages of notes in search of clues. If you pre-organize your notebook by subject, town, or quest, and record each note under the proper heading, you end up with some pages nearly blank and others so full you have to create annexes on distant pages. Are we having fun yet?

Back to Basics (On-line Notepads)

In some ways, I was better off on my old Macintosh playing Infocom games, thanks to the "desk accessory" Notebook. I could keep the notebook just visible behind the game and click on it to add something, then click back to the game. Ultimas I-VI were playable through Windows, so I could jump back and forth between the game and the Notepad, where I organized notes by location received and locations referred to. The freedom to keep my hands on the keyboard or the mouse was a real boon, and it took the work out of the play. But it's a bygone luxury; most current games won't even run under the DOSShell Task Switcher, much less Windows.

An on-line notepad that can be called up during play would be a minor feat of programming compared to what game developers pull off nowadays, and should be the minimum standard in RPG and adventure game design. I'll repeat that: The Minimum Standard. You could call up the notepad with a hotkey, add and remove text from it at will, perhaps format and highlight it, and perform phrase searches. Ideally, these notes could be saved as a text file, printed out and pondered over lunch, offered to friends, or uploaded to the internet. If the notes exist in a separate file, you won't be forced to reconstruct them if you have to reinstall the game. You could even take notes from a phone conversation, write a review of the game, or jot down sudden poetic inspirations without having to exit the game. Those who hate typing can always ignore the notepad and stick to written notes.

How about a little assistance, here? (AutoNotes)

I bring the following scenario up as a worst case overresponse to pen-and- paper notetaking; something we can bounce a few ideas off of. Say an ambitious designer decides to make his game a totally keyboard-free experience, so every utterance and observation gets recorded onto a notepad that the player can read but not edit. This is a nice try, but in any moderately complex game, the player will soon be hunting through excess verbiage and local color searching for the needed information. This approach was taken in The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, in which Watson indiscriminately jots down every bit of speech, so by game's end you've got several hundred pages to sift through. The inclusion of a search feature is welcome, but as the case becomes harder to follow, the player yearns for something less chatty and repetitive.

The solution to this, you might assume, is to have the game edit down the information the player comes across and present only those elements needed to finish the game. Clouds/Darkside of Xeen used this system, and it was mighty handy, but real usability was elusive for a few reasons. First, a typical notepad phrase, "Find Rhinestone Jacket and return to Elvis at E22, 43" doesn't give you a clue as to where to look for the Jacket, even if an NPC has told you. Second, some conversations are never recorded in the AutoNotes, so one has to write conversations down and then check the Notes to see if they recorded. Finally, long after you finish a given quest, all of its clues stay in the AutoNotes; this becomes bothersome in the later stages of the game.

So a decent AutoNotes system should be trustworthy, in both the completeness and the exactness of the info. Also, the information base should shrink and grow appropriately as the game progresses. Clearly, a system of editing should be available to the user. The next question is this: Should editing be a manual or automatic procedure, or a combination of both?

One of the more interesting systems has been in a few Origin games, Savage Empire, for instance. A cub reporter tagged along taking notes of the major quests. When you asked him for a status report, he'd tell you that X wants Y and Z needs A, but that B, C, and D are happy that you finished their quests. The system suffered mainly from incompleteness. Many minor quests and details were ignored and had to be written down anyway. Still, it showed that an intelligent note-taking device could have a sense of history and priority, and actually be a part of the story.

Writing a fully detailed, completely automatic note-taking system may be difficult for the same reason that uninstalling programs from Windows is difficult: As new elements are introduced to the system and old ones are deleted, you can accidentally delete an element that forms the context for another element. For instance, one clue may describe Devil's Gap as a mining settlement, and another could say that you have to search for a miner wearing a green cap. Sometime after you go to Devil's Gap and find the miner, a third clue may tell you that a certain NPC keeps a lucky horseshoe in his green cap. If the Autonotes has deleted the second clue, you lose the context that makes sense of the third clue. Unless designers want to invoke elaborate clue-branching systems, it may be easier to provide some fusion of editibilaty into a notation system, by which some clues disappear after they are no longer relevant, and others can be deleted as necessary.

Still other games may require that clues stick around for some time after their immediate usefulness runs out. For instance, the goal of a mystery, like The Dagger of Amon Ra, is to seek out a single truth from a complex web of facts, events, and stories. If the game keeps and deletes notes as you play, it's actually doing the deduction for you and minimizing the challenge.

A related issue arises when automatic editing is present. I, for one, like to be misled occasionally by false or misinterpreted clues and red herrings. If I've formed a theory about some aspect of the game based on a few clues, which suddenly disappear from the notepad because they've been "solved", I feel cheated of the chance to think for myself. I'd rather disprove the theory through deduction than by discovering that the game has disproved it for me.

So what about manual editability? This presents a few of its own problems. What if you delete a note, perhaps accidentally, and want it back? Or if you get stuck in a game and you want all your notes back so you can see if you missed anything? With handwritten notes, the information is never really gone until you throw the notes away. With on-line notes, you may have to (shudder) replay the game to get the information back.

I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave. (Is it solvable?)

Is there an answer to the quandary of on-line notetaking? What single system could present information both complete enough and terse enough to be useful, preserve the notes we foolishly delete, be flexible enough to present the level of detail we prefer, appeal to mouse-o-philes and keyboard lovers alike, make the game easier to play but keep the challenge of the game intact, not get in the way of people who want to take their own notes, and be smoothly integrated into the game world and the scenario? Perhaps there isn't a system that could do all of that, but here are some ideas to bring the goal a little closer.

When you take notes on paper, you are usually doing it on an ad hoc basis, choosing what to write as you go. Why can't that happen on-line? If you have a conversation with an NPC and he says something you want to keep, click on an icon or hit a hotkey to put his words into the notebook. NPC's that merely offer the time of day can be left out of the notebook. Alternatively, you can set the game to write everything down, then you can click an "eraser" icon to keep any NPC's words out of the notebook. When you look at the notebook, you can edit the information down to a level you can live with, or click an icon to "auto-edit" a given utterance down to a selectable level of detail.

Written notes are searchable and can be compared against each other. Likewise, the information in an on-line notebook should be searchable and organizable by search. For instance, search for the phrase "eye in the pyramid" and every occurrence could be shown on-screen at the same time, instead of one-by-one, and saved onto a unique "page" of the notebook.

How about recalling lost notes? The system could, instead of deleting notes, hide them and actually keep a separate searchable notebook of "hidden" notes. When you edit them down, the full original text is kept in the "hidden" notes. For example, you've spoken to the Wordly Knight, who buries a few clues in a long-winded description of his lineage. You edit his words down to size in the notepad and discover later that you needed some of that lineage to solve a puzzle. You jump to the "hidden" notepad to search for the info, or to copy all or some of what he said back into the appropriate entry in the regular notepad. At any time, you can browse the hidden notepad for ideas, and you can temporarily link the notepads together to perform full searches.

What about simplicity and verisimilitude? Would the above system make a player feel as if he's running a database instead of playing a game? The keyword here is "customizable." The player should be able to avoid any level of auto-notetaking altogether. If she wants to use written notes, fine. If she wants to have the notebook record everything, okay. If she wants to select what goes into the notebook but not bother editing it, or be able to delete stuff without worrying about recalling it, that's okay too. Every step along the way should be an option, not a necessity. If the player desires only an on-line notepad, to type exactly what she wants, that should be available too.

What about keeping the flavor of the game, trying to make the notetaking part of the fiction? It shouldn't be too hard, depending on the genre. Science fiction games could feature a handheld "Newton" (or 500 years from now it might be called a "Wozniak") or a Threepio-like droid to keep notes. Any real-life detective has a flexible system for notekeeping, using index cards or whatever, and rewriting notes frequently; a mystery game should be able to follow suit. As for fantasy games, a "info-nymph" could float nearby collecting data for review, or a "spell of remembering" or a "palimpsest" or simply a hobbit with perfect memory. Or you could just ignore verisimilitude altogether, as the Xeen autonotes do, with probably minimal impact on the suspension of disbelief.

Looking at it in Context

One of the best note-taking systems we've yet seen is in the Ultima Underworld games. While the system is primarily considered an automap, and has almost none of the notetaking features mentioned above, it is great for two reasons. First, it's beautiful, and fits perfectly into the gaming world. Secondly, it provides notes in context. When you type in a note, you can write it on the map page where you received the information, or on the map page where the information will come into use. When you get to a given level of the Underworld, you can call up the appropriate map page to see what has to be accomplished there.

Despite the fine automaps, I took a lot of manual notes while playing Ultima Underworld, because the effect of writing notes on the map was a little like using Edlin on a parchment backdrop. There almost no editing flexibility, and while you could jump to a blank page to take random notes, you could never be sure if you would soon have a map drawing itself on the page under your notes. I bring up the UU system to introduce the idea of context. As games get bigger and the fiction becomes better written and more intricate, the player will need to have more than searchable notes. The beauty of the Ultima system is that you can put notes on a map level and ignore them until you get there.

Most games already provide context sensitive dialogue, and your conversational options become tailored to the person you are speaking with. These games would also benefit from providing notes in context about people, places, things, and events. For example, Megatraveller 2 sometimes changed the description of an item to reflect new information received about it, like so: "This is an old copper shield." eventually becomes "This is an ancient ceremonial shield coveted by artifact collectors throughout the galaxy. Bingtardy of Rhylanor has dispatched assassins to steal it." Another example: While playing Wizardry, you visit Umpaniville. Click on your "info-nymph" and she'll tell you what you've learned so far about Umpaniville, and what you have to accomplish while you are there. Finally, characters may be flagged to respond to events, to help you keep quests in mind amid the busy tangle of subplots, for instance, "Avatar, the moon will be full tonight. Perhaps we should go to Moonglow for the Beerfest."

AudioPhobia

In this age of CD-ROM, with the spoken word beginning to overshadow written text, a common design flaw is emerging: repeating speech. Most games can't be played without interacting with the same characters repeatedly and hearing the same lines over and over. Even the best performances can try one's patience after a dozen recurrences. Designers should design a customizable switch into games that can revert from spoken dialogue to readable text after a given number of repetitions. Autonotes, particularly in larger games, should be available entirely in text format, to speed up the review process.

Objection overruled

This is where I get to bring up objections to the above schemes, or the idea of auto-notetaking in general, and play a little bit of skeetshoot. First question?

No-one likes to type anymore!

Not true. I love to type, and it I think the variety of input can enrich the gaming experience. Legend's text & graphics games are a great example of that. I think it's more accurate to say that people don't like to write. A notepad feature can be an option for those who would rather type than take manual notes. Even a wholesale stenographer, like Watson in The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes can make life easier than pen and paper.

Most adventure games don't need notepads.

It's true that many adventure games, particularly those broken down into chapters like Conquest of the Longbow, can be played without written notes. Nonetheless, a generic on-line notepad would still be welcome part of the game engine, particularly if the notes could be saved separately as a text file. As I said before, this would enable players to type reviews, walkthroughs, random thoughts, particularly good jokes from the game, ideas for other games, and even phone messages and other personal business without having to leave the game environment. If it makes the player a little more a little more at home in the game, it should be there.

AutoNotes make games too easy.

AutoNotes, unless overimplemented, won't answer the puzzles and questions that make a good adventure or RPG. They won't take note of things you haven't already observed yourself or conversations you haven't taken part in. They won't do your thinking for you. They won't help you win the spitting contest in Monkey Island 2 or stop the snail stampede in Phreddy Pharkas. In short, they would provide the same benefit that written notes would, but with a little technological assistance thrown in solely for purposes of organization. Any game made easier by automatic notetaking should get a good looking at; it's probably too easy already.

Any more objections or comments? I'd love to hear them. Send a letter to GameBytes or to me at rderleth@well.com.

This article is Copyright (C) 1994 by R. Derleth for Game Bytes Magazine. All rights reserved.