The Zarfian Cruelty Scale, Revisited

The Zarfian Cruelty Scale, Revisited

The Zarfian Cruelty Scale is 23 years old as of last month. That’s not a numerically interesting anniversary, but it’s respectable age for a offhand scrap of critical theory that still gets mentioned regularly.

I am pleased and amused by the Cruelty Scale’s continuing currency. But I also worry that people might apply it more broadly or rigidly than it deserves. The Cruelty Scale has had caveats almost from the beginning; it embodies many 1996-ish assumptions about IF and game design. I think it’s time to, at minimum, dig into those assumptions. We should make sure we know what we’re thinking when we use it.

What is this thing?

In 1996, when releasing So Far, I included a comment in the ABOUT text:

This is a shortish-to-medium-sized game. More than a short story, less than a full-length novel. Its rating is “cruel.” It is possible to make mistakes which will prevent you from winning. Sometimes common sense will serve to avoid such mistakes; sometimes insight is necessary; sometimes neither will help. Save often, and keep your old saved games.

(Note the unsubtle nudge that IF should be considered on par with prose fiction! I thought this was a wagon worth hauling, back then.)

I must have had a set of ratings laid out somewhere, but I don’t think I tried to publicize them until someone mentioned the comment on rec.games.int-fiction. I then laid out the scheme:

Merciful: cannot get stuck

Polite: can get stuck or die, but it’s immediately obvious that you’re stuck or dead

Tough: can get stuck, but it’s immediately obvious that you’re about to do something irrevocable

Nasty: can get stuck, but when you do something irrevocable, it’s clear

Cruel: can get stuck by doing something which isn’t obviously irrevocable (even after the act)

My clarification, a few days later:

Merciful: You only ever need one save file, and that only if you want to turn the computer off and go to sleep. You never need to restore to an earlier game.

Polite: You only need one save game, because if you do something fatally wrong, it’s blatantly obvious and you’ll know better than to save afterwards.

Tough: There are things you can do which you’ll have to save before doing. But you’ll think “Ah, I’d better save before I do this.”

Nasty: There are things you can do which you’ll have to save before doing. After you do one, you’ll think “Oh, bugger, I should have saved before I did that.”

Cruel: You think “I should have saved back in the third room. Now I’ll have to start over.”

This all looks simple, but the edges are curiously hard to pin down. Even the ordering can be questioned. Is Tough (“it’s obvious that you’re stuck”) fundamentally different from Nasty (“it’s obvious when you’ve become stuck”)? I hope so. I intended to distinguish two mindsets: saving to checkpoint concrete progress (Polite), and saving because you’re worried you’re about to lose progress (Tough). And then Nasty is the additional strain where you always have to worry about losing progress, because the game won’t clue you in that trouble is ahead.

My aim was to refine the notion of “losable” versus “unlosable” adventure games. Those terms were proposed in 1994 by Mike Threepoint; the concept had been floating around for years. Myst was a well-recognized example of a game designed to be “unlosable”. (At least until its endgame! But let’s not get distracted.)

The ambiguity of “losable” is between a game you can lose and a game in which you can fail to win. Losing is only one kind of not-winning: the explicit, you-have-died, game-over kind. One can also not-win by failing to solve puzzles, or by being stuck – locked out of victory by past actions. The Cruelty Scale doggedly refuses to concern itself with puzzle difficulty. (A weighty subject which we will not tackle today.) Being locked out of victory, in contrast, is a central concern. It is the essence of the Cruel rating. Tough and Nasty are lock-outs mitigated by, respectively, player foresight and player recovery.

What does the thing mean?

The labels have a slant. Merciful, Polite, and Tough games sound “fair”, in some sense. Nasty and Cruel, in contrast, attach moral censure. I didn’t mean this judgementally, of course. (Nearly all of my games were Cruel until The Dreamhold in 2004!) The moral bent is intended to correspond to that sense of player frustration. “I should have saved, but I didn’t, and now the game is punishing me by forcing me to replay this part.” This is not the only way games can be “unfair”, but it does capture one sense of unfairness that players feel.

From its beginning, the Cruelty Scale was about the player’s responsibility to manage game state. The second list above makes this explicit. As with any contract, one party’s responsibility is the other party’s freedom, and vice versa. If the player is responsible for saving before trying anything clearly dangerous, then the author is free to create...