Mimesis, the Proustian Madeline, and "old-school" IF: A Question from an old Infocom Fan
Kelso Lundeen
questions about (what apparently is called) "old-school" or
"old-style" IF.
I've been a long time devotee of text adventures -- dating all the way
back to the first Zork I in the plastic bag for the TRS-80 Model I. I
remember as a kid lusting after 'Deadline' and 'Starcross' after
seeing full page ads in 80 Micro and Byte and wherever else they
appeared. (And I remember sitting in front of my TRS-80 Model III on
too many sunny Saturday afternoons, completely immersed in Zork and
Enchanter.)
So after a long (college, grad school, post-grad) absence from the IF
scene, I drifted back a couple months ago -- after stumbling across
'Curses' on an old CDROM, playing it all the way through and loving
it. It was sorta like the Proustian Madeline -- an involuntary
recollection of a submerged memory. Everything came back in a flash --
stuff I hadn't even thought of in years -- my old TRS-80s, Infocom's
nifty packaging, my lusting after Deadline and Witness (and never
being able to afford them), my own attempt to write a text adventure
based on Philip Jose Farmer's 'Riverworld' series (in Z80 assembly
language), arguing with friends over which was better: Zork or
Enchanter, etc. etc.
So, okay. Here's my question: As I worked my way through the SPAG
archive this weekend, I came across the recent SPAG with the Emily
Short interview. She indicated that these days there is a distinction
between the "old-style Infocom games" and a more "artsy" type of
interactive fiction -- less emphasis on puzzles a la Infocom and more
emphasis on the 'text' (in quotes because I'm not sure I understand
the distincations between the game itself, the text contained within
the game, and the narrative structure [which is constructed, I assume,
out of the 'game' elements and 'textual elements']).
Now, if I'm reading everything correctly -- (and if I'm understanding
what I'm reading in rgif, raif, 'Towards a Theory of IF', 'Crimes
Against Mimesis', DM4, Roger Firth's great Inform pages, and lots of
other bits and pieces scattered throughout websites and on the IF
archive I've come across in recent weeks) -- there seems to be a
struggle to define IF -- define it in terms of what it was in the 80's
with the "old-school" Infocom stuff and in terms of how it's currently
'evolving' thanks to Inform, TADS, and other systems which are slowly
expanding the scope (the technical scope especially) of the classic
ZMachine.
I get the sense -- and I can't pin it down exactly -- that folks are
making an effort to go one step (or two or three steps) past the
'Infocom style' game and create a more immersive, interactive,
fictional environment. "Mimesis" seems to be the word being bandied
around. As in: "breaking mimesis".
Lots of folks talk about "breaking mimesis" in their newsgroup
postings. And this, I take it, is a bad thing. But I'm not sure if
this is breaking mimesis of the 'game world' or the game diverging
from the mimetic tendencies of the real world by introducing odd,
incongruent 'world qualities' that either aren't adequately explained
in the context of the game or don't make sense in the context of the
'real world.'
Moreover, I'm still not sure what 'mimesis' means in the context of IF
-- since it strikes me that the notion of a 'game' may be at odds with
'mimetic authenticity' [and I wonder about NPC AI especially -- what
this means, do players want this, etc.?] -- but I sort of get the idea
that the Infocom style -- especially the Infocom of Zork and Enchanter
-- has been done to death and is not of much interest to players
anymore.
So my question is this: when IF authors sit down to write their games,
are they (as in the case of Emily Short, apparently, with her recent
release) trying to emulate the things they liked in the "old-style"
games from Infocom (and deliberately to responding -- in the case of
Emily Short -- to G. Nelson's comments in DM4 regarding "old-style"
puzzles)?
Or are they trying to push the 'genre' (I think IF is a 'genre', no?)
one step beyond? (Are folks, in other words, attempting to ditch the
'old-style' image and attempt to move IF closer to 'fiction that
happens to be interactive' territory?)
And if authors do write old-school games -- I'm thinking here, for
example, of Dave Baggett's Unkuulian series or 'Curses' -- are these
games sorta frowned upon by the community?
Or is what matters -- old-school or new-school -- good writing, good
characterization, good narrative -- the stuff that matters in any
fiction, interactive or no?
(And, yes, I ask all this for selfish reasons. I'm trying to get a
read on the community because I, too, have an Inform game progessing
quite nicely but written very much in the "old-school" tradition --
but I'm also trying to pull together various threads and topic
conversations that I've been reading over the past few months. I
understand that IF has progessed quite a bit since Zork I -- and I
especially appreciate N. Monfort's cogent essay, 'Towards a Theory of
IF' -- but I'm not sure where the community -- these days, at least --
falls on the distinction between old and new-school games. What
strikes me, for example, in many games I've played over the past few
weeks -- contest games, at least -- is the overall quality of the
games is quite variable. I'm not sure what to make of this.)
--
Kelso Lundeen
Billy Harris
Lundeen <KelsoL...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> snipped discussion on evolution of IF and questions about "old-school"
Mimesis is hard to define, but I don't quite agree with your
definition. Essentially, broken mimesis is anything that flashes a
message on your screen that says "NOTE: You are playing a computer
game. Have a nice day". I ususally paraphrase breaking mimesis as
breaking immersion. There was a popular song a few years ago "Things
that make you go Hmmm...." Broken mimesis is anything that makes you
go "Huh?" and is bad.
As an example, consider a game which starts in the lobby of an office
building but mostly takes place on the 14th floor. Most likely, the
game includes an eleveator. Mimesis says that the inside of the
elevator should have buttons for each floor (14 or more) even though
the elevator only "needs" two buttons for the lobby and the 14th floor.
Some people are much more sensitive about this than others; some people
have a pet peeve about, for example, a bar of gold lying in the middle
of the hotel lobby waiting for someone to pick it up, or a porter
standing in the elevator who demands you give him a banana wrapped in a
bandana before taking you anywhere. Often labeling a game as
"old-school" is a way of shunting these off into "it's the genre"
rather than being flamed for [most commonly] puzzles scattered
senselessly across the landscape.
I do think that the IF community routinely creates better-than-Infocom
IF. Partly this is because we (they?) were able to learn from Infocom's
mistakes, and partly because many of the current authors actually are
text authors and have lots more experience with pacing, plot
resolution, and such than most programmers have.
I do encourage you to read up on the progress made [it seems like you
are already doing this]. Even an IF identified as "old-school" adapts
with the times and avoids boring mazes, unwarned deaths, unnoticed
prevention of winning, etc. I think you mentioned Emily Short's latest
game; I liked it and it shows an old-school game "done right". By the
way, the promotion for the game is very much tongue-in-cheek; her
comments on "artsy" IF could have come from the more savage reviews of
her earlier works.
Andrew Plotkin
> For the past few months I've lurked here and in raif and have some
> questions about (what apparently is called) "old-school" or
> "old-style" IF.
Okay.
> So, okay. Here's my question: As I worked my way through the SPAG
> archive this weekend, I came across the recent SPAG with the Emily
> Short interview. She indicated that these days there is a distinction
> between the "old-style Infocom games" and a more "artsy" type of
> interactive fiction -- less emphasis on puzzles a la Infocom and more
> emphasis on the 'text'
This is a good question, because I'm not sure that we have a good
distinction.
It's perfectly clear that Infocom didn't have a static style -- it is
a completely false view to say "Infocom fixed itself within these
boundaries, but nowadays we roam beyond them." Infocom was constantly
pushing their boundaries outward. That process only stopped when the
company was killed.
What we see, looking back, is a fixed corpus of games (that runs up to
about 1990), created by a small writing community. We can describe
commonalities among those games -- first because they only *got* so
far in the time they had, and second because a small number of
distinctive voices wrote many of the games and influenced most of
them.
But even then, I'm not sure that I would call _Trinity_ or _AMFV_ an
"old-school Infocom game." Certainly not _Nord and Bert_.
> Lots of folks talk about "breaking mimesis" in their newsgroup
> postings. And this, I take it, is a bad thing. But I'm not sure if
> this is breaking mimesis of the 'game world' or the game diverging
> from the mimetic tendencies of the real world by introducing odd,
> incongruent 'world qualities' that either aren't adequately explained
> in the context of the game or don't make sense in the context of the
> 'real world.'
Could you clarify that distinction?
I talk about "breaking mimesis" in a pretty simple-minded way -- it's
when I can't believe that the story coming out of the computer is from
a plausible, consistent fictional world. When I see the hand of the
author yanking something into place to make the game work.
> So my question is this:
(I've edited out the parentheticals.)
> when IF authors sit down to write their games, are they [...] trying
> to emulate the things they liked in the "old-style" games from
> Infocom...?
> Or are they trying to push the 'genre' ... one step beyond?
The answer, and you knew I was going to say this, is "both".
> And if authors do write old-school games -- I'm thinking here, for
> example, of Dave Baggett's Unkuulian series or 'Curses' -- are these
> games sorta frowned upon by the community?
I'd like to say "no", but the answer is more complicated than that.
It's more like "no, as long as you bring something new to the party."
There are a lot of unexplored ways to go -- from Infocom's territory,
from the stuff I was doing in 1996 with _So Far_, from the stuff Emily
Short is doing today.
And "frowned upon" is the wrong phrase also. A thumping good fantasy
treasure-hunt will still be received appreciatively -- look at the
comments on _Yes, Another Game With A Dragon!_ from IFComp 2000. But
it won't bring on as much comment, or have as much long-term
influence, as a game which experiments into new territory in some
direction.
This is my "Golden Age" theory, which I have tossed about from time to
time. There was a time in the world of science-fiction writing when
just *having* a new idea was all you needed. You could write your
story well or badly, and people would notice that, but even a terrible
story that pushed some boundary would get attention (and discussion,
and would influence later SF writing).
That was the golden age of SF. It's pretty much over now -- it was
pretty much over in 1970, although bursts of golden-age syndrome still
surface when people get excited about a new idea or writing technique.
Mostly, these days, people say "That's a neat idea, but is it done
*well*?" New-fangled ideas and old-school approaches are fair game,
but you'd better be a good writer.
I assert that this is still the golden age of IF. Good writing is
*appreciated*, and certainly we're all trying to produce something
which is both experimental *and* artistically brilliant. But the
experimentation is still what excites the community.
On the other hand, I'm more familiar with IFComp games than with, er,
outside-of-IFComp games. There are a lot of games from the past two
years that I haven't played, and it's possible that the transition is
slipping by under my nose.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
L. Ross Raszewski
>
>I get the sense -- and I can't pin it down exactly -- that folks are
>making an effort to go one step (or two or three steps) past the
>'Infocom style' game and create a more immersive, interactive,
>fictional environment. "Mimesis" seems to be the word being bandied
>around. As in: "breaking mimesis".
>
>Lots of folks talk about "breaking mimesis" in their newsgroup
>postings. And this, I take it, is a bad thing. But I'm not sure if
>this is breaking mimesis of the 'game world' or the game diverging
>from the mimetic tendencies of the real world by introducing odd,
>incongruent 'world qualities' that either aren't adequately explained
>in the context of the game or don't make sense in the context of the
>'real world.'
The former, generally. Technically, the word 'mimesis' only applies to
the latter (there being a separate word for the former), but eh.
>
>Moreover, I'm still not sure what 'mimesis' means in the context of IF
>-- since it strikes me that the notion of a 'game' may be at odds with
>'mimetic authenticity' [and I wonder about NPC AI especially -- what
>this means, do players want this, etc.?] -- but I sort of get the idea
>that the Infocom style -- especially the Infocom of Zork and Enchanter
>-- has been done to death and is not of much interest to players
>anymore.
The best definition of 'mimesis' in terms of IF that I've heard is to say that
"mimesis is that thing which is broken whenever the game reminds you
that it is, in fact, a game."
A problem is that mimesis is often conflated, in the eyes of the
community, with 'immersiveness', or, at times, 'convention'. Look
around here long enough and you'll be told that that disabling the
compass breaks mimesis. Enabling it breaks mimesis. DIsabling save
breaks mimesis, and so does using save.
Around here, you will more or less see 'mimesis' used as a generic
term for 'goodness'.
Dennis G. Jerz
"L. Ross Raszewski" <lrasz...@loyola.edu> wrote in message
news:arc69.9371$uO4....@nwrddc01.gnilink.net...
> The best definition of 'mimesis' in terms of IF that I've heard is to say
that
> "mimesis is that thing which is broken whenever the game reminds you
> that it is, in fact, a game."
Hmm. "Hunter, In Darkness" is based on "Hunt the Wumpus," and thus
identifies itself as a version of a game, but I don't think that this
revelation "breaks" anything.
Let me offer an alternative definition of mimesis... this is a draft of the
IF Theory Book's glossary entry for "mimesis". Eventually, we'll open up
the enitre glossary to comments and input from the whole IF community, but
here's what I have so far.. already I can see that it needs some adjustment:
Mimesis refers to that quality which enables an artistic medium to represent
something in the real world. Aristotle refers to "persons who, by conscious
art or mere habit, imitate and represent various objects through the medium
of color and form, or again by the voice" (Poetics I ś4). Children who
imitate the behavior of adults, dancers who imitate the behavior of animals,
and actors who imitate the behavior of other people are all drawing upon
their mimetic talents.
A work of interactive fiction is said to commit a "sin against mimesis"
(after an influential 1996 Usenet posting by Roger Giner-Sorolla, Roger.
"Crimes Against Mimesis.") when flaws in the game design call too much
attention to the interface. Examples may include a scenery object (such as
the sky or the grass) that is mentioned in a room description, but is not
implemented; or, when an NPC's default responses to player actions are
glaring non sequiturs (such as when "Deadline" provides the default
response, "Mrs. Roebner doesn't seem to be interested in that," in response
to "show corpse to Mrs. Roebner")
In some cases, however, the game designer may not be aiming for mimesis;
Nick Montfort's "Ad Verbum" makes direct references to the PC being a
seasoned text adventure gamer, and the narrator of "Adventure" occasionally
poses questions directly to the player.
Jeff Pack
> First off... great post, Kelso.
> "L. Ross Raszewski" <lrasz...@loyola.edu> wrote in message
> news:arc69.9371$uO4....@nwrddc01.gnilink.net...
>> The best definition of 'mimesis' in terms of IF that I've heard is to say
>> that "mimesis is that thing which is broken whenever the game reminds you
>> that it is, in fact, a game."
> Hmm. "Hunter, In Darkness" is based on "Hunt the Wumpus," and thus
> identifies itself as a version of a game, but I don't think that this
> revelation "breaks" anything.
I don't think mimesis can be broken by the mere fact that some readers
recognize the HTW allusion. The game is perfectly playable by someone who
never heard of Hunt the Wumpus.
> ...
> Mimesis refers to that quality which enables an artistic medium to represent
> something in the real world. Aristotle refers to "persons who, by conscious
> art or mere habit, imitate and represent various objects through the medium
> of color and form, or again by the voice" (Poetics I ś4). Children who
> imitate the behavior of adults, dancers who imitate the behavior of animals,
> and actors who imitate the behavior of other people are all drawing upon
> their mimetic talents.
Admittedly, my conception of the term's original meaning is limited. I
basically use it in place of "realistic" or "believable" to forestall
responses that a computer game, especially one with "unrealistic" and
"unbelievable" fantasy or science fiction elements, has no need to aspire
to verisimilitude.
> A work of interactive fiction is said to commit a "sin against mimesis"
> (after an influential 1996 Usenet posting by Roger Giner-Sorolla, Roger.
> "Crimes Against Mimesis.") when flaws in the game design call too much
> attention to the interface. Examples may include a scenery object (such as
> the sky or the grass) that is mentioned in a room description, but is not
> implemented; or, when an NPC's default responses to player actions are
> glaring non sequiturs (such as when "Deadline" provides the default
> response, "Mrs. Roebner doesn't seem to be interested in that," in response
> to "show corpse to Mrs. Roebner")
Hmm. I can overlook the corpse bug (I thought that was from Suspect,
though). It's bad design not to implement it, but not implementing it
feels like a bug on the game design level rather than a mimesis-breaking
bug on the story level. Perhaps this is because I see the response as a
parser default rather than an actual expression of uninterest, despite the
plain meaning of the response. If I were a new player, or wasn't used to
the default response for "show," I might think differently.
What tends to break mimesis for me are those situations in which an action
changes the state of the game in a way that causality can't explain. In
IF, this usually means either puzzles/solutions that make no sense (a la
7th Guest), even in retrospect, or actions that "open a door" somewhere
else in the game for no reason except to control the flow of the game
(again, a la 7th Guest).
These are also annoying on the gameplay level, of course, because they
tend to get players "stuck" and can be seen as unfair as well as
mimesis-breaking.
> In some cases, however, the game designer may not be aiming for mimesis;
> Nick Montfort's "Ad Verbum" makes direct references to the PC being a
> seasoned text adventure gamer, and the narrator of "Adventure" occasionally
> poses questions directly to the player.
Under my usage of mimesis (or whatever word I use at the moment to
describe the concept of realism-in-game), Ad Verbum doesn't break mimesis,
because the entire game is played without a fourth wall and with the same
word-based logic. Compare this to the original solution to the Loud Room
in Zork 1: the only thing resembling mimesis there is that the entire
Zork universe is a patchwork, and the player will catch on that different
rules will apply in different regions.
Jeff
Andrew Plotkin
> First off... great post, Kelso.
> "L. Ross Raszewski" <lrasz...@loyola.edu> wrote in message
> news:arc69.9371$uO4....@nwrddc01.gnilink.net...
>> The best definition of 'mimesis' in terms of IF that I've heard is to say
> that
>> "mimesis is that thing which is broken whenever the game reminds you
>> that it is, in fact, a game."
> Hmm. "Hunter, In Darkness" is based on "Hunt the Wumpus," and thus
> identifies itself as a version of a game, but I don't think that this
> revelation "breaks" anything.
The whole point of HID was to recreate the Wumpus scenario in a
strongly mimetic way. The artistic tension (or, more prosaicly, the
joke) was that you have a involving, realistic scenario which is
*also* the backdrop for a well-known simplistic non-IF game. You have
to ignore that absurd allusion to accept the scenario as plausible --
but I made that as easy as possible, by making the scenario rich and
convincing.
In other words, I was deliberately riding the edge there.
Dennis G. Jerz
news:pan.2002.08.13...@sneakemail.com...
> Under my usage of mimesis (or whatever word I use at the moment to
> describe the concept of realism-in-game), Ad Verbum doesn't break mimesis,
> because the entire game is played without a fourth wall and with the same
> word-based logic. Compare this to the original solution to the Loud Room
> in Zork 1: the only thing resembling mimesis there is that the entire
> Zork universe is a patchwork, and the player will catch on that different
> rules will apply in different regions.
>
> Jeff
Yes, I think an internal consistency is vitally important to the sense of
preserving whatever it is that we've been calling "mimesis". I think the
thing we're hoping won't break is akin to the "willing suspension of
disbelief" that Coleridge called a "poetic faith".
With respect to "show corpse to Mrs. Roebner" -- I drew that off the top of
my head, and may indeed have misremembered the source.
Dennis G. Jerz
news:ajbs1k$5gd$1...@reader2.panix.com...
> The whole point of HID was to recreate the Wumpus scenario in a
>
> --Z
That comment neatly illustrates the "old school" vs. "experimental"
distinction that Kelso noted.
Gregory Yob, creator of Wumpus, is reportedly dead -- I haven't been able to
confirm the details of what I learned through Usenet posts and e-mails.
(And no, I don't know whether arrows, bats, or pits were involved.)
"Some one said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much
more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know." -- T.S.
Eliot, "Tradition and the Indivdiual Talent"
Daryl McCullough
>Mimesis refers to that quality which enables an artistic medium to represent
>something in the real world...
>A work of interactive fiction is said to commit a "sin against mimesis"
>(after an influential 1996 Usenet posting by Roger Giner-Sorolla, Roger.
>"Crimes Against Mimesis.") when flaws in the game design call too much
>attention to the interface...
Okay, this has puzzled me. It seems to me that there two
very different qualities that are both going under the name
"mimesis".
One quality is the believability of the fictional world: Does
it have consistent rules? Do the rules make sense? Do people
act in character?
The second quality should, in my opinion, be called "immersion"
or something like that. It has to do with the extent to which
one can become absorbed in a fictional world and forget (if
only briefly) about the details of how that fictional world
is being presented.
Something that calls attention to the *interface* is, to
me, a sin against immersion, not a sin against mimesis.
A sin against mimesis would be for an NPC to jokingly
admit to knowing that he is a character in a computer game
(which is an intentional break with mimesis) or for a
player to be able to "take sun" or "put elephant into
pocket" (which are unintentional breaks with mimesis
due to lack of adequate testing). Something that happens
in the fictional world that makes no sense (in the context
of the "laws" of that world) is a sin against mimesis.
I agree that these two issues are related: When mimesis is
broken, the sense of immersion is also broken. But they
aren't the same thing.
--
Daryl McCullough
Ithaca, NY
Andrew Plotkin
> Okay, this has puzzled me. It seems to me that there two
> very different qualities that are both going under the name
> "mimesis".
> One quality is the believability of the fictional world: Does
> it have consistent rules? Do the rules make sense? Do people
> act in character?
> The second quality should, in my opinion, be called "immersion"
> or something like that. It has to do with the extent to which
> one can become absorbed in a fictional world and forget (if
> only briefly) about the details of how that fictional world
> is being presented.
> Something that calls attention to the *interface* is, to
> me, a sin against immersion, not a sin against mimesis.
The two are not orthogonal -- the whole problem with mimesis failures
is that they break the sense of immersion.
But I generally agree with you. There are two distinct categories of
failure here. If someone has locked his kitchen door with a
combination lock made of soup cans, that has nothing to do with the
interface -- it may be perfectly presented in the game's interface
idiom -- it's just an implausible situation.
Mike Roberts
> that calls attention to the *interface* is, to me, a sin
> against immersion, not a sin against mimesis.
I like to call that "transparency" - the degree to which the game mechanics,
which are interposed between the player and the game world, disappear. To
me, immersiveness is a broader category that encompasses UI transparency as
well as other things that people talk about as mimesis, like cohesion of the
story and setting. I'd be reluctant to limit "immersiveness" to the game
mechanics, since it seems possible to create a game with good mechanics that
nonetheless fails to be immersive.
As for "mimesis," I've come to shy away from the term and to try to be more
specific, preferring terms like "transparency" or "internal consistency," as
it's been clear for a long time that "mimesis" doesn't have a well-agreed
meaning here. (I won't go into why I think it's futile to try to settle the
meaning once and for all, as I've made my feelings on the merits of
prescriptive linguistics known in the past.)
--Mike
mjr underscore at hotmail dot com
Andrew Plotkin
> news:ajbs1k$5gd$1...@reader2.panix.com...
>> The whole point of HID was to recreate the Wumpus scenario in a
>> strongly mimetic way. [...] I was deliberately riding the edge there.
> That comment neatly illustrates the "old school" vs. "experimental"
> distinction that Kelso noted.
Not very well it doesn't. If Infocom is "old school", then the
original Wumpus game is nursery school! The difference between that
and even the simplest Scott Adams treasure hunt is an order of
magnitude larger than the span of IF's evolution.
Magnus Olsson
>(after an influential 1996 Usenet posting by Roger Giner-Sorolla, Roger.
>"Crimes Against Mimesis.") when flaws in the game design call too much
>attention to the interface.
I'd like to extend that definition a bit to include things that call
attention to the game or story mechanics in general, not just to
the interface. Interface, by definition, is superficial - the part of
the game where player and computer program meet - while mechanics are
what's going on far beneath the surface; what makes a story tick or
a game work. Game mechanics are things like world modelling and rules;
story mechanics are things like plot devices.
>Examples may include a scenery object (such as
>the sky or the grass) that is mentioned in a room description, but is not
>implemented; or, when an NPC's default responses to player actions are
>glaring non sequiturs (such as when "Deadline" provides the default
>response, "Mrs. Roebner doesn't seem to be interested in that," in response
>to "show corpse to Mrs. Roebner")
As you write, these are cases where attention is drawn to the
interface. An example of attention being drawn to story mechanics -
well, it's hard to give one off the cuff, but I'm thinking of the
cases similar to the ones you sometimes experience in films, where a
character's actions just seem to scream "Plot device!" at you. An NPC,
say, who insists on behaving stupidly in a way obviously designed (by
the author, not by the NPC) to push the PC in doing something; mimesis
is broken if the player reacts by saying "But he would never act so
stupidly in real life!"
--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se)
Magnus Olsson
Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>Here, Dennis G. Jerz <Jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
>> First off... great post, Kelso.
>
>
>
>> "L. Ross Raszewski" <lrasz...@loyola.edu> wrote in message
>> news:arc69.9371$uO4....@nwrddc01.gnilink.net...
>>> The best definition of 'mimesis' in terms of IF that I've heard is to say
>> that
>>> "mimesis is that thing which is broken whenever the game reminds you
>>> that it is, in fact, a game."
>
>> Hmm. "Hunter, In Darkness" is based on "Hunt the Wumpus," and thus
>> identifies itself as a version of a game, but I don't think that this
>> revelation "breaks" anything.
>
>The whole point of HID was to recreate the Wumpus scenario in a
>strongly mimetic way. The artistic tension (or, more prosaicly, the
>joke) was that you have a involving, realistic scenario which is
>*also* the backdrop for a well-known simplistic non-IF game. You have
>to ignore that absurd allusion to accept the scenario as plausible --
>but I made that as easy as possible, by making the scenario rich and
>convincing.
>
>In other words, I was deliberately riding the edge there.
And you succeeded, admirably. (At least IMHO).
At first, I didn't realize that HID was based on _Wumpus_ - and when I
did, my reaction was to chuckle at the in-joke (plus the warm, fuzzy,
feeling you get when you see this kind of thing pulled off
well). Mimesis wasn't broken; my feeling was not so much "This is just
a game" but "This is the reality on which the game is based" (a
counter-factual statement in many aspects, of course, but that was my
right-brain reaction at the time).
--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se)
A.P. Hill
and new. Also, there's a line drawn in the sand between games and
stories. Emily Short kinda writes new stories. I write old games.
If I wanted to play a new story, I'd pick up a porno mag.
Breaking memisis is frowned upon, that's why I try to do it
frequently.
A.P. Hill
A.P. Hill
That means you're trying to break memesis. It's your own fault if
things don't go your way pissboy.
A.P. Hill
Kelso Lundeen
<wha...@mail.airmail.net> wrote:
>In article <2d6904d8.02081...@posting.google.com>, Kelso
>Lundeen <KelsoL...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>As an example, consider a game which starts in the lobby of an office
>building but mostly takes place on the 14th floor. Most likely, the
>game includes an eleveator. Mimesis says that the inside of the
>elevator should have buttons for each floor (14 or more) even though
>the elevator only "needs" two buttons for the lobby and the 14th floor.
But in the reality of the game-world, this might -- possibly -- make
sense. And this is where I'm confused.
You have the game-world of the game.
You have the game-narrator narrating the game-world. (This is
interesting, I think, because it's this game-narrator that seems to
provide IF theory with its real complexity. This game-narrator seems
to straddle both the game-world (because he or she is a part of it)
and the human-world (since he or she receives actions from the
human-player). Yet the game-narrator is also depenedent on the
'Implementor' of the code.
You have the human-player directing the game-narrator.
You have the (so-called) real-world against which (I assume) all these
worlds and human/game-players somehow intersect.
And you have the human-implentor implementing the game-world, parsing
actions from the human-world, and acting as the god-like go-between
between all the worlds. (Yet the human-implentor, curiously, is absent
when the game is 'traversed' or 'played' by a non-Implentor, human
player. Sorta like Derrida's notion when he talks about the 'absent
presence' of speech and writing?)
>I do think that the IF community routinely creates better-than-Infocom
>IF. Partly this is because we (they?) were able to learn from Infocom's
>mistakes, and partly because many of the current authors actually are
>text authors and have lots more experience with pacing, plot
>resolution, and such than most programmers have.
Really? I'm interested in this comment. What sorts of "mistakes" did
Infocom make? (I ask this not to be nasty -- I'm curious. The idea of
"mistake" implies [I think] that there's a 'correct' or 'non-mistake'
way of doing things -- and in the context of Infocom (and after
recently playing through most of the games) I think I'd be
hard-pressed to find any non-bug mistakes.
Bugs, yes. But mistakes? In what sense? And on what level? The
implentation level? The game-world level?
And do you mean mistake in the sense of some kind of 'mimetic
deviation?'
Adrien Beau
> It was sorta like the Proustian Madeline
For the information of all, let me correct a typo and remind
you that the word is "Madeleine", and that it only takes a
capital when it is associated with Proust. Otherwise, it's just
some edible and great tasting food. :)
And now, back to your regular IF schedule.
--
adrie...@yahoo.guess
Dennis G. Jerz
> Here, Dennis G. Jerz <Jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
> > "Andrew Plotkin" <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in message
> > news:ajbs1k$5gd$1...@reader2.panix.com...
> >> The whole point of HID was to recreate the Wumpus scenario in a
> >> strongly mimetic way. [...] I was deliberately riding the edge there.
>
> > That comment neatly illustrates the "old school" vs. "experimental"
> > distinction that Kelso noted.
>
> Not very well it doesn't. If Infocom is "old school", then the
> original Wumpus game is nursery school! The difference between that
> and even the simplest Scott Adams treasure hunt is an order of
> magnitude larger than the span of IF's evolution.
Hmm... the avant garde gets more avant the more there is to garde. Are you
talking about technical innovations compared to what else was available
before, or aesthetic advances in content?
Dennis G. Jerz
news:ajd8c0$kvs$1...@news.lth.se...
> In article <ajbmmp$75q$1...@wiscnews.wiscnet.net>,
> Dennis G. Jerz <Jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
> >A work of interactive fiction is said to commit a "sin against mimesis"
> >(after an influential 1996 Usenet posting by Roger Giner-Sorolla, Roger.
> >"Crimes Against Mimesis.") when flaws in the game design call too much
> >attention to the interface.
>
> I'd like to extend that definition a bit to include things that call
> attention to the game or story mechanics in general, not just to
> the interface. Interface, by definition, is superficial - the part of
> the game where player and computer program meet - while mechanics are
> what's going on far beneath the surface; what makes a story tick or
> a game work. Game mechanics are things like world modelling and rules;
> story mechanics are things like plot devices.
>
In some cases, the mechanics of a game are what makes it fun, and noticing
mechanics in order to appreciate them is part of the pleasure of the
experienced player/reader/user/critic. But you're right -- it's too
limiting to define mimesis in IF in terms of the interface.
Shall I say that mimesis is broken when undue attention is called to the
artifice? In parser IF, the chief artifice is the interface, but in bad
poetry, for example, the rhymes may be forced or trite; in bad narrative,
the dialogue may be too laden with exposition; all of these call attention
to the author's struggle with the technical details that are supposed to
invoke, not threaten, the reader's willing suspension of disbelief.
--
Dennis G. Jerz, Ph.D.; (715)836-2431
Dept. of English; U Wisc.-Eau Claire
419 Hibbard, Eau Claire, WI 54702
------------------------------------
Literacy Weblog: www.uwec.edu/jerzdg
Stephen Cameron
>
>Shall I say that mimesis is broken when undue attention is called to the
>artifice? In parser IF, the chief artifice is the interface, but in bad
>poetry, for example, the rhymes may be forced or trite; in bad narrative,
>the dialogue may be too laden with exposition; all of these call attention
>to the author's struggle with the technical details that are supposed to
>invoke, not threaten, the reader's willing suspension of disbelief.
>
Heh. I wonder if intentionally breaking mimesis (this word strikes me
as not all that useful if we have to have a thread to explore what it
even means) could be done in an entertaining way. Like "breaking the
4th wall" in a movie or play, a la Wayne's World, when Wayne or Garth
talked directly to the camera. (Best example I could come up with off
the top of my head.)
Maybe a character who goes around commenting on the shoddy programming,
pointing out the "flaws" in a comical way, or maybe even (pretending to)
"fix" them... ("here, give me that flamethrower!" says the old scruffy
unix guru, as he rips the flamethrower from your hands. "These kids
today. Don't they know that an open flame in a game like this is just
asking for problems? We can't have you trying to set everything on fire!"
He drops the flamethrower into a heretofore unnoticed self-healing rip in
the space-time continuum, (through which you briefly observe several knives,
and *way* more than enough rope to hang yourself). He wanders off mumbling
something about incompetent programmers and bad writing.")
-- steve
Daryl McCullough
>Some people are much more sensitive about this than others; some people
>have a pet peeve about, for example, a bar of gold lying in the middle
>of the hotel lobby waiting for someone to pick it up, or a porter
>standing in the elevator who demands you give him a banana wrapped in a
>bandana before taking you anywhere.
But that sort of nonsense appears in classic children's stories
such as "Alice in Wonderland". A little bit of oddness can be fun.
Kelso Lundeen
wrote:
Exactly. I suspect this is why I find Infocom's games so alluring: in
the best Infocom games, the nonsensical makes perfect sense *in the
context of the game-world* -- but not necessarily in the "real-world".
And this is why the notion of "mimesis" -- and the way it's used here
and elsewhere -- confuses me. If anyone has read Auerbach's famous
_Mimesis_, you'll see he takes great care to distinguish the many
levels on which a given text works (and doesn't work) to establish a
sense of mimesis. The complexity is -- or seems to be -- staggering.
My confusion here -- in the context of IF -- stems from (I think)
uncertainty of what, exactly, the "IF-game" (or "IF-text") really is
and, once we decide what it is (and isn't), how to read it. Is it
game-as-text? Text-as-game? (Maybe these questions are at the core of
the IF Theory text. Not sure ..)
The intriguing part (at least for me) isn't the text but the idea of
the game -- and how (and where) the "game" (the interactiveness?)
interacts with the text.
I dunno. Just rambling ...
Kelso
Dennis G. Jerz
news:aje0c...@drn.newsguy.com...
Nonsense is frequently enjoyable, but you don't have to *perform* such
nonsense to make "Alice and Wonderland" happen... you just keep turning the
pages.
Dennis G. Jerz
news:slrnall026....@zuul.cca.cpqcorp.net...
> On Wed, 14 Aug 2002 10:20:42 -0500,
> Dennis G. Jerz <Jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
> [...]
> >
> >Shall I say that mimesis is broken when undue attention is called to the
> >artifice? In parser IF, the chief artifice is the interface, but in bad
> >poetry, for example, the rhymes may be forced or trite; in bad narrative,
> >the dialogue may be too laden with exposition; all of these call
attention
> >to the author's struggle with the technical details that are supposed to
> >invoke, not threaten, the reader's willing suspension of disbelief.
> >
>
> Heh. I wonder if intentionally breaking mimesis (this word strikes me
> as not all that useful if we have to have a thread to explore what it
> even means) could be done in an entertaining way. Like "breaking the
> 4th wall" in a movie or play, a la Wayne's World, when Wayne or Garth
> talked directly to the camera. (Best example I could come up with off
> the top of my head.)
Well, the Wayne and Garth characters were supposed to be hosting a TV show
from a basement somewhere in suburbia, so having them talk to the camera is
consistent with that scheme. I see your point, of course.
>
> Maybe a character who goes around commenting on the shoddy programming,
> pointing out the "flaws" in a comical way, or maybe even (pretending to)
> "fix" them... ("here, give me that flamethrower!" says the old scruffy
> unix guru, as he rips the flamethrower from your hands. "These kids
> today. Don't they know that an open flame in a game like this is just
> asking for problems? We can't have you trying to set everything on fire!"
> He drops the flamethrower into a heretofore unnoticed self-healing rip in
> the space-time continuum, (through which you briefly observe several
knives,
> and *way* more than enough rope to hang yourself). He wanders off
mumbling
> something about incompetent programmers and bad writing.")
On "The Electric Company" in the 70s, after a really lame skit, a character
named "Crank" would say, "Who's the dummy writing this show?"
I'd call that sort of thing "meta-theater" or the "play-within-the-play".
One of the things I loved about Space Quest was that there was usually a
"game within the game". (Long live Ms. Astro Chicken!)
David Thornley
Stephen Cameron <steve....@hp.com> wrote:
>On Wed, 14 Aug 2002 10:20:42 -0500,
>Dennis G. Jerz <Jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
>[...]
>>
>>Shall I say that mimesis is broken when undue attention is called to the
>>artifice? In parser IF, the chief artifice is the interface, but in bad
>>poetry, for example, the rhymes may be forced or trite; in bad narrative,
>>the dialogue may be too laden with exposition; all of these call attention
>>to the author's struggle with the technical details that are supposed to
>>invoke, not threaten, the reader's willing suspension of disbelief.
>>
I am not familiar in general with graphic adventures, so I am not
familiar with "7th Guest" and such; there may be worse examples out
there. It had to do with breaking one of the premises of the game
in order for the story to go where it did. Details below, after
the spoiler space.
>
>Heh. I wonder if intentionally breaking mimesis (this word strikes me
>as not all that useful if we have to have a thread to explore what it
>even means) could be done in an entertaining way. Like "breaking the
>4th wall" in a movie or play, a la Wayne's World, when Wayne or Garth
>talked directly to the camera. (Best example I could come up with off
>the top of my head.)
>
Dr. Gideon Fell in John Dickson Carr's "The Three Coffins", who in
Chapter 17 proceeds to give a lecture on locked-room mysteries, on
the grounds that he's in a mystery novel. The narrator in "Powerpuff
Girls" often gets involved peripherally in the action. Boris Badenoff
(on "Rocky and Bullwinkle") once asked for the cartoon to be rewound
so he could catch something the narrator said. In "The Muppet Movie",
Dr. Teeth found our heroes by grabbing a copy of the script and looking
at the scene directions. (This should give a clue as to some of my
book and movie/TV preferences.)
I don't know how well it works in serious literature; most of the
"directed at the reader" stuff I've seen there is because, for example,
the fictional character is notionally writing it, and this is a spot
where he or she would address the reader.
F
R
O
B
O
Z
Z
M
A
G
I
C
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
P
A
C
E
The problem with "Loom":
Magic, in that game, is done by playing certain notes on a certain
instrument. You start only able to play a few notes, but gain the
ability to play more notes over time. So far, so good.
As the game goes on, you learn to play more "drafts" by seeing them
in action. Once you know the "draft", and can play the notes, you
can use the magic, with two exceptions. One is that the game will
warn you not to play the "draft" to open things in a graveyard.
Again, this is fine.
You will be imprisoned by the evil person who wants to take over the
world, who will play the open spell in a graveyard, and get more than
he really wanted to get. The thing thus summoned will play the
draft to destroy things. As the player, you can't play it yet, because
you can't play the notes. As a player with very good pitch, I was
able to note it down.
In the climactic scene, you will have to destroy the loom (IIRC), and
in order to do that you will have to use the destroy draft, and you
will be able to play all the notes it needs. However, when you play it
before the demon uses it on your childhood nurse, the game simply
won't let you. This is where the conceptual world shattered for me.
--
David H. Thornley | If you want my opinion, ask.
da...@thornley.net | If you don't, flee.
http://www.thornley.net/~thornley/david/ | O-
Mike Roberts
> [reduced-spoilage spoilers for "Loom"]
> F
> R
> O
> B
> O
> Z
> Z
> M
> A
> G
> I
> C
> S
> P
> O
> I
> L
> E
> R
> S
> P
> A
> C
> E
> spell)], and you will be able to play all the notes it needs.
> However, when you play it before [a certain other character
> uses the same spell during the same scene], the game simply
> won't let you. This is where the conceptual world shattered
> for me.
Just to clarify, is the problem that the PC already knows the draft prior to
this scene, and thus ought to be able to use it without waiting for this
other NPC event? Or is the problem that you (the player) knew the draft by
virtue of having played through the scene before? If it's the former, then
I'd have to agree that this is a flaw. If it's the latter, though, it seems
reasonable and proper for the game to say that you can't use the draft
because the PC doesn't know it yet; the player's knowledge is irrelevant,
since it's outside the context of the game.
Andrew Plotkin
> On 14 Aug 2002 09:26:59 -0700, da...@cogentex.com (Daryl McCullough)
> wrote:
>>Billy says...
>>
>>>Some people are much more sensitive about this than others; some people
>>>have a pet peeve about, for example, a bar of gold lying in the middle
>>>of the hotel lobby waiting for someone to pick it up, or a porter
>>>standing in the elevator who demands you give him a banana wrapped in a
>>>bandana before taking you anywhere.
>>
>>But that sort of nonsense appears in classic children's stories
>>such as "Alice in Wonderland". A little bit of oddness can be fun.
> Exactly. I suspect this is why I find Infocom's games so alluring: in
> the best Infocom games, the nonsensical makes perfect sense *in the
> context of the game-world* -- but not necessarily in the "real-world".
I think everyone who is pushing a concept of mimesis has agreed with
this. We *don't* consider "frotz" a mimetic failure, even though
there's no such thing as a light-spell in the real world.
That's uncontroversial.
> My confusion here -- in the context of IF -- stems from (I think)
> uncertainty of what, exactly, the "IF-game" (or "IF-text") really is
> and, once we decide what it is (and isn't), how to read it. Is it
> game-as-text? Text-as-game?
I think this is where I fall off the theory merry-go-round. I have no
idea what you're asking here.
I find the notion of a plausible, self-consistent fictional world
perfectly natural. Maybe this is what I get for reading nothing but
sci-fi and fantasy for 25 years straight.
(Like all natural notions, it has fuzzy cases and edge cases. The
somewhat absurd reality-mix of the Great Underground Empire is an
example -- but that doesn't make the *notion* confusing, just the
specific case. I don't have a problem with the author saying "Okay,
you're going to have ancient Elvish swords in the same place as
inflatable rubber rafts, but don't worry -- it's just my style." If
you do, Zork is going to fail pretty miserably for you. )
Daryl McCullough
>Kelso Lundeen <kelsol...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> da...@cogentex.com (Daryl McCullough) wrote:
>>>But that sort of nonsense appears in classic children's stories
>>>such as "Alice in Wonderland". A little bit of oddness can be fun.
>
>> Exactly. I suspect this is why I find Infocom's games so alluring: in
>> the best Infocom games, the nonsensical makes perfect sense *in the
>> context of the game-world* -- but not necessarily in the "real-world".
>
>I think everyone who is pushing a concept of mimesis has agreed with
>this. We *don't* consider "frotz" a mimetic failure, even though
>there's no such thing as a light-spell in the real world.
>
>That's uncontroversial.
I'm not sure if Kelso missed my point or not. Some of the
funny parts of "Alice in Wonderland" don't make any sense,
even for a fictional world. There is no reason for a baby
to turn into a pig, or for the Cheshire Cat's grin to be
visible when the rest of him is not (I'm probably mixing
up "Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass", but it
doesn't matter for my point). It isn't as if we
could deduce these facts, if we only knew the natural
laws for "Wonderland".
But perhaps this a matter of genres. In a work of humor,
things are often intentionally absurd. Even in nonhumorous
works, things sometimes are not supposed to make literal
sense. They only make sense as metaphor or as dream logic.
>I find the notion of a plausible, self-consistent fictional world
>perfectly natural. Maybe this is what I get for reading nothing but
>sci-fi and fantasy for 25 years straight.
>
>(Like all natural notions, it has fuzzy cases and edge cases. The
>somewhat absurd reality-mix of the Great Underground Empire is an
>example -- but that doesn't make the *notion* confusing, just the
>specific case. I don't have a problem with the author saying "Okay,
>you're going to have ancient Elvish swords in the same place as
>inflatable rubber rafts, but don't worry -- it's just my style." If
>you do, Zork is going to fail pretty miserably for you. )
I would say that the Zork world doesn't try to be a consistent
fantasy world in the way that Tolkien's "Middle Earth" is. To
me, that shows that this sort of plausibility isn't necessary
for an enjoyable work of IF, rather than being a fuzzy case.
Eytan Zweig
"Mike Roberts" <mjr-S...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:3Tx69.23$R94...@news.oracle.com...
IIRC (and it's been a long time since I played Loom), the problem is that
the PC is present and able to hear the draft at the time that it is played.
But there is no real difference between this scene in which the PC heard the
draft and doesn't learn it and other scenes in which he learns drafts by
hearing them. We know that the draft is played correctly, since, by writing
it down the way David did, you can see its the same as the one played later.
So the problem is that the PC *should* know the draft by the rules of the
game, but doesn't, because it doesn't fit the plot.
And to make things worse, the game doesn't have any good reason to prevent
you from playing the new draft. It's like if you found a keypad in an IF
game, and typed in "TYPE 123", and got the message "you can't type in that
code". Then you find a note telling you the code is 123, go back to the
keypad, type "TYPE 123", and the door opens.
Eytan
Daniel Barkalow
> In article <slrnall026....@zuul.cca.cpqcorp.net>,
> Stephen Cameron <steve....@hp.com> wrote:
>
> My number one instance of a break in mimesis came in Lucas Art's "Loom".
> I am not familiar in general with graphic adventures, so I am not
> familiar with "7th Guest" and such; there may be worse examples out
> there. It had to do with breaking one of the premises of the game
> in order for the story to go where it did. Details below, after
> the spoiler space.
> In the climactic scene, you will have to destroy the loom (IIRC), and
> in order to do that you will have to use the destroy draft, and you
> will be able to play all the notes it needs. However, when you play it
> before the demon uses it on your childhood nurse, the game simply
> won't let you. This is where the conceptual world shattered for me.
I thought you got the last note, which was in that draft, only after the
demon uses it on your nurse. Of course, it's been about a decade since
I've gotten to the end, so I may be misremembering. It may just be that
the PC is too much of a nice guy to play that draft unless traumatized.
-Iabervon
*This .sig unintentionally changed*
Daniel Barkalow
> So after a long (college, grad school, post-grad) absence from the IF
> scene, I drifted back a couple months ago -- after stumbling across
> 'Curses' on an old CDROM, playing it all the way through and loving
> it. It was sorta like the Proustian Madeline -- an involuntary
> recollection of a submerged memory.
You have, I assume, played Jigsaw, right?
> So, okay. Here's my question: As I worked my way through the SPAG
> archive this weekend, I came across the recent SPAG with the Emily
> Short interview. She indicated that these days there is a distinction
> between the "old-style Infocom games" and a more "artsy" type of
> interactive fiction -- less emphasis on puzzles a la Infocom and more
> emphasis on the 'text' (in quotes because I'm not sure I understand
> the distincations between the game itself, the text contained within
> the game, and the narrative structure [which is constructed, I assume,
> out of the 'game' elements and 'textual elements']).
>
> Now, if I'm reading everything correctly -- (and if I'm understanding
> what I'm reading in rgif, raif, 'Towards a Theory of IF', 'Crimes
> Against Mimesis', DM4, Roger Firth's great Inform pages, and lots of
> other bits and pieces scattered throughout websites and on the IF
> archive I've come across in recent weeks) -- there seems to be a
> struggle to define IF -- define it in terms of what it was in the 80's
> with the "old-school" Infocom stuff and in terms of how it's currently
> 'evolving' thanks to Inform, TADS, and other systems which are slowly
> expanding the scope (the technical scope especially) of the classic
> ZMachine.
There is a lot of experimentation with different ways of doing
things. There are a number of examples of games that were successful
experiments with the technology, but where the content was
lacking. Theorizing about IF allows these techniques to be folded back
into the body of knowledge, such that authors who aren't experimenting can
use them as their stories dictate.
> I get the sense -- and I can't pin it down exactly -- that folks are
> making an effort to go one step (or two or three steps) past the
> 'Infocom style' game and create a more immersive, interactive,
> fictional environment. "Mimesis" seems to be the word being bandied
> around. As in: "breaking mimesis".
>
> Lots of folks talk about "breaking mimesis" in their newsgroup
> postings. And this, I take it, is a bad thing. But I'm not sure if
> this is breaking mimesis of the 'game world' or the game diverging
> from the mimetic tendencies of the real world by introducing odd,
> incongruent 'world qualities' that either aren't adequately explained
> in the context of the game or don't make sense in the context of the
> 'real world.'
IF sets up a world and sticks the main character in it. Ideally, the world
that the game has set up is the same one that the main character seems to
be in; that is, the ways in which the game world changes in response to
actions fits the expectations created by the descriptions. When the game
makes you think something should happen, and it doesn't, and the game
doesn't make you think that what did happen was actually right, that
breaks mimesis.
I think of IF as a bit like writing without being able to use a particular
letter. Some people will do it by managing to convey their ideas without
needing the letter. Others will do it by simply omitting the letter and
convincing the reading to overlook the omission. In the former case, a
failed attempt will fail to say anything interesting. In the latter case,
a failed attempt will annoy or confuse the reader too much.
Of course, we have better tools than Infocom did, and so the extent of
what we can just do (rather than avoiding or faking) is larger. Infocom
was working with so few letters that they had to both omit things and
constrain the world to not need things, especially in the older games.
> Or is what matters -- old-school or new-school -- good writing, good
> characterization, good narrative -- the stuff that matters in any
> fiction, interactive or no?
I think a major factor is whether the interactive aspects fit the
descriptive aspects. Static fiction is like a painting: people will look
at it, but they can't and don't expect to look behind things and feel the
textures; the impression of there behind things back there and textures at
all is purely art. Interactive fiction is more like architecture: people
get the chance to go around to the other side, look at funny angles, stand
on the thing and have it support their weight, and so forth. If the roof
leaks, you'd better have done things to make sure people don't mind.
Of course, there is IF that looks great, and people like looking at it,
but it will fall down in a stiff breeze, and IF that is not much to look
at, but an interesting feat of engineering.
Fred Jameson
Frankly, I find your categorization of those people who have completed
Sacrifice, rather insulting.
Freddy
Andrew Plotkin
> "Andrew Plotkin" <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in message
>>
>> If Infocom is "old school", then the original Wumpus game is
>> nursery school! The difference between that and even the simplest
>> Scott Adams treasure hunt is an order of magnitude larger than the
>> span of IF's evolution.
> Hmm... the avant garde gets more avant the more there is to garde.
Can't help you with that.
> Are you talking about technical innovations compared to what else
> was available before, or aesthetic advances in content?
Technical advances which allowed there to *be* content... Wumpus
doesn't have the framework to manage any amount of information about
the game world. Even if you wrote long descriptive paragraphs about
the cave and the bats and the pits, the program would be delivering it
in boilerplate chunks -- the player would (rightly) ignore all the
fancy text and go for the summary. The range of action is two commands
(move and shoot) and both are strictly bounded in their possible
interactions with the game world.
This goes back to my characterization-of-IF posts from a couple of
months ago. Wumpus has only a few possible results-of-actions, and you
learn them all quickly; it has only a few possible actions, and you
learn both of *those* quickly. Neither exploration is a significant
part of the game.
Pretty much the only thing it has in common with IF-as-we-know-it is
that it takes place in a cave, which is modelled as a graph of nodes.
Nick Montfort
A bit late to jump in here, but ...
"Mimesis" comes from drama and it seems difficult to understand it in
application to IF without discussion of what it means in drama, or what
"breaking mimesis" would mean in drama. A few dramatic examples have been
mentioned. And, based on some of the discussion, there are some good
distinctions already being made among what things we consider "mimesis" to
be, even without looking back to drama. But anyway, to make something of a
new point, or help to make one that has already been mentioned, here's
what I would consider as a clear example of such pre-interactive fiction
"breaking mimesis:"
Prospero to Ariel: My Ariel, chick,
That is thy charge: then to the elements
Be free, and fare thou well! Please you, draw near.
Ariel and all the others (except Prospero) leave
the stage. Prospero stands alone for a moment. The
backdrop falls down, revealing the wings and
backstage. Prospero looks around, shakes his head,
and then shrugs as he looks out at the audience.
Prospero: Now my charms are all o'erthrown ...
The epilogue to The Tempest doesn't have to be spoken this way, of course,
but I believe (some better dramaturge can correct me on this) there is
theatrical tradition for this sort of conclusion. And, although one could
hardly be more "criminal" than in this example (again, taking a somewhat
earlier meaning of mimesis rather than the many ways it has been used with
application to IF), it certainly is not just a screw-up or mistake to end
a performance of the play this way. It might be quite effective. And this
would suggest that "breaking mimesis" can be done well or poorly in IF as
well as in drama. Whether it's done "intentionally" or not is really not
as important as whether or not it is done well. Whether this is consistent
with the Aristotelian idea of drama is another matter ...
The term "mimesis" does not appear in my "Toward a Theory of Interactive
Fiction" < http://nickm.com/if/toward.html > because there I take the
perspective that interactive fiction is diegetic (roughly, descriptive of
events) rather than mimetic (roughly, directly enacting events). An
analogue of sorts to "breaking mimesis" in this framework is the
transgression of different sorts of narrative levels -- metalepsis, an
effective technique used by many of my own favorite 20th century authors.
I give several examples (some of which have previously been mentioned,
and, I think, have be less fully understood, as "breaking mimesis") of how
metalepsis can be used deftly in interactive fiction to achieve a pleasing
result.
Whether or not mimesis is the best way of understanding certain aspects of
IF, the distinction between some things called mimesis and other qualities
more like immersion is a good start to better understanding IF, as is the
relationship between IF's nature as game and its nature as text (or, I
would say, "cybertext" or "interactively generated text" or better yet
"potential narrative").
> My confusion here -- in the context of IF -- stems from (I think)
> uncertainty of what, exactly, the "IF-game" (or "IF-text") really is
> and, once we decide what it is (and isn't), how to read it. Is it
> game-as-text? Text-as-game?
>
> Kelso
As a start on the "game-as-text" vs. "text-as-game" issue, I'd say we need
to understand each aspect on its own terms, not one aspect in terms of the
other. For instance, I wouldn't think it is helpful to try to understand
The Odyssey as "story-as-poem" or "poem-as-story." We recognize that
(among other things) it is both a poem and a narrative. Narratology can
help to understand how it works as a narrative, but we don't expect it to
tell us everything about how it works as a poem. Nor can understanding the
metrical beauty of the work by itself help to understand why certain
things happen to Odysseus or why they are narrated when they are. (Not
that meter is the only aspect of poetry, of course.) Of course, these two
aspects are related, and a full understanding of the work would require us
to integrate our concepts of the work as poem and as story, not just to
understand the work piecemeal; we'd form a concept of "narrative poem" or
more specicifially "epic poem." But this wouldn't mean settling on one or
the other of "poem-as-story" and "story-as-poem."
-Nick Montfort
http://nickm.com
Daniel Barkalow
>
> A bit late to jump in here, but ...
>
> "Mimesis" comes from drama and it seems difficult to understand it in
> application to IF without discussion of what it means in drama, or what
> "breaking mimesis" would mean in drama.
Breaking mimesis would be breaking the illusion that the events of the
narrative are actually occuring. That is, you cause the audience to drop
out of their frame in which the events of the narrative are happening into
the frame where (in drama) the action is of actors trying to put on a
show.
> The term "mimesis" does not appear in my "Toward a Theory of Interactive
> Fiction" < http://nickm.com/if/toward.html > because there I take the
> perspective that interactive fiction is diegetic (roughly, descriptive of
> events) rather than mimetic (roughly, directly enacting events).
IF is somewhat like having a phone conversation with the director of a
play while the play is going on, with the director reporting the events on
stage (as if they were the represented events) and issuing directions at
your request. The phone conversation is diegetic, certainly, but the
events that it describes are neither real nor imagined; they are enacted,
and the enactment can fail, giving different effects on the
interaction than if the description failed. The director could tell you,
for instance, that Mercutio has leapt back off of the stage and
broken his leg. Or you could realize that the blocking for the fight scene
is getting pretty shaky is that Romeo didn't show up today and the
director is just calling out his lines from offstage. In these cases it is
the mimesis that's at fault, and the diegesis is fine (or even trying to
make up for it).
It is a failure in mimesis in IF if the implementation of the model world
fails to fit the behavior the story specifies for the world. Of course,
there are cases where it is the description that fails: if the game
describes an exit that doesn't exist in the world model, that is a
diegesis problem, although the player might assume that the exit does
exist in the model but isn't working correctly.
> An analogue of sorts to "breaking mimesis" in this framework is the
> transgression of different sorts of narrative levels -- metalepsis, an
> effective technique used by many of my own favorite 20th century authors.
> I give several examples (some of which have previously been mentioned,
> and, I think, have be less fully understood, as "breaking mimesis") of how
> metalepsis can be used deftly in interactive fiction to achieve a pleasing
> result.
I think you are right about your examples of metalepsis. But I think that
there are a number of examples where it is the program-internal
enactment of the events, rather than the interactive description of them,
which breaks down. Of course, breaking the model world intentionally to
good effect is much harder than breaking the dialogue in an interesting
way, because the player doesn't have direct access to the model world-- in
fact, games generally break the model world in ways that the dialogue
fails to mention (e.g., NPCs generally don't actually "take objects"; the
world moves the object to the NPC without the NPC doing anything, but, of
course, the game tells you that the NPC acted, and the player is none the
wiser).
> Whether or not mimesis is the best way of understanding certain aspects of
> IF, the distinction between some things called mimesis and other qualities
> more like immersion is a good start to better understanding IF, as is the
> relationship between IF's nature as game and its nature as text (or, I
> would say, "cybertext" or "interactively generated text" or better yet
> "potential narrative").
I think that mimesis is more properly those aspects of the interaction
where the game is pretending to have an enactment of the events to
describe, rather than the description itself. The player could fail to be
interested, or get distracted, or fail to believe the descriptions at a
different level, rather than failing to believe that there's actually a
world hidden in there.
Gregory W. Kulczycki
>
> Essentially, broken mimesis is anything that flashes a message on your
> screen that says "NOTE: You are playing a computer game. Have a nice
> day". I ususally paraphrase breaking mimesis as breaking immersion.
I really like this as a definition of breaking immersion. Though I think
that breaking immersion is more general than breaking mimesis.
Immersion can be broken when you are constantly having to reload games
because of difficult puzzles that kill you off easily. Parenthetical
remarks often break immersion for me - (first taking the axe), (putting
the coin in your sack to make room), (the black kitten) - because they
remind me I'm dealing with a parser.
Breaking mimesis is only one way of breaking immersion.
Greg K.
Bennett Standeven
> Why would you take sun? You'd have to be an asshole to 'take sun'.
>
> That means you're trying to break memesis. It's your own fault if
> things don't go your way pissboy.
>
If I type "take sun", the response "Taken" is precisely what I want to get!
Adam Thornton
>'Curses' on an old CDROM, playing it all the way through and loving
>it. It was sorta like the Proustian Madeline
All I can say is, you ought to play "Jigsaw", if you haven't yet.
Adam, sinning mightily against mimesis
Adam Thornton
>(after an influential 1996 Usenet posting by Roger Giner-Sorolla, Roger.
>"Crimes Against Mimesis.")
Ahem.
Bruce