Nudity in IF
Magnus Olsson
little: what do people think of puzzles involving the PC having to
undress?
I'm not speaking of games with sexual content, or of gratuitous
nudity-enforcing puzzles, but of things that fit organically into the
game, such as the following scenario:
The (female) PC encounters a deep, swift river that she must
cross. The only way to cross it is by swimming. Her clothes would
weigh her down, so she has to take them off to avoid drowning. This
means she'll have to spend some time (almos) naked on the other
side. The PC isn't Tracy Valencia, so she'll want either to get her
clothes across the river or find some new ones before proceeding.
Do you think this would be considered offensive, or off-colour, or
in any way questionable?
If not, where would you draw the line?
(As you may guess, I have a very concrete reason for asking this.)
--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se, m...@pobox.com)
------ http://www.pobox.com/~mol ------
ems...@mindspring.com
> The discussion of "Heroine's Mantle" over in r.g.i-f made me wonder a
> little: what do people think of puzzles involving the PC having to
> undress?
The *fact* that the heroine had to undress in Heroine's Mantle didn't
bother me as such; it was more something about the overall tone of the
game. This came in the context of a lot of other stuff that portrayed
women and sexuality in a light that made me uncomfortable.
Perhaps the most telling question is whether the narrative feels
voyeuristic. In Heroine's Mantle I felt as though some of the passages
were designed not to be played by a woman or to replicate the actual
experience of being a woman, but to be played by a man who would be
titillated in some degree by this fantasy of being a woman. There was a
quality to the description that made me feel as though I the player were
being invited to ogle the player character along with all the other
sexual scenery.
I have, however, played other games in which clothes were removed and
replaced (whether the PC was male or female) in which I was not at all
bothered, since the act was described straightforwardly and from a
natural first-person point of view, and replicated the way I might
actually feel about changing clothes. There's no exterior
objectification of the PC's body here, just an ordinary action involving
not having clothes on.
(FWIW, it's possible to strip the (female) PC of Metamorphoses naked if
you want, and I've never heard anyone comment on this being
inappropriate. Granted, there's no one much around to see her in this
state, but on the other hand, some of the passages that bugged me in
Heroine's Mantle were solitary too. [Also also, one can see my SPAG
article for more on this, but in describing the problem I may be
sounding more offended than I actually was. My reaction was at the
level of, 'oh, brother, how teenage-boy' a lot of the time, and not at
the level of 'let me print a transcript of this so I can burn it
ritually at the next meeting of NOW.'])
Anyway. I think it's really more a matter of how material is portrayed
than of how much. That which subverts the story, overrides the natural
behavior of the characters, and distorts viewpoints in order to provide
some kind of vicarious sexual thrill is on the road to being
pornographic, though it's a long road with many increments. An honest
story, even a disturbing one with a fair amount of graphic content, as
long as it doesn't turn its female characters into shapely dolls,
usually doesn't offend me as much. It may *upset* me, but a lot of good
art is upsetting. As for a PC taking a little swim in the natural
course of the story-- big deal.
ES
Gunther Schmidl
The sheer amounts of nudity I've gotten away with in my games makes me think
nobody really gives a damn :-)
-- Gunther
Tom Waddington
> The (female) PC encounters a deep, swift river that she must
> cross. The only way to cross it is by swimming. Her clothes would
> weigh her down, so she has to take them off to avoid drowning. This
> means she'll have to spend some time (almos) naked on the other
> side. The PC isn't Tracy Valencia, so she'll want either to get her
> clothes across the river or find some new ones before proceeding.
First question: does the gender of the PC make any difference? I don't
think it should, but I can't help notice how you've stressed that this
is a female PC.
Secondly, does the PC have a strong character or are they a mere
playing piece? There was a discussion of r.g.i-f recently about games
forcing the player to do things they don't want to, or don't feel are
in character. People get surprisingly passionate about this issue. I
would say that if you have any doubt as to how people are going to
react, include an alternative solution to the river-crossing problem
that doesn't involve any nudity.
If the PC is a very specific character then their personality could
answer the question for you. A well-to-do Victorian lady would
probably never even consider stripping off and swimming across a
river. A pragmatic Xena-type character on the other hand might well do
so without a second thought.
There are plenty of ways the above example could be made more
interesting than a simple locked door situation (which is what it
amounts to, after all). Possible embellishments include: devising a
way to get your clothes across the river while keeping them dry;
stealing clothes from a charcoal burner's washing line; building a
fire to dry clothes that were soaked during the crossing, and so on.
One that turns up fairly often in literature (which may or may not be
a recommendation, depending on your point of view) is the naked
hero(ine) hiding behind a bush whilst being teased by the Romantic
Interest who just so happens to be on the clothes side of the bush.
Carefully handled, perhaps with a conversation system similar to that
in Emily Short's Pytho's Mask, such a set-piece could be funny,
entertaining and serve to significantly advance the plot.
> Do you think this would be considered offensive, or off-colour, or
> in any way questionable?
The example you've given seems completely acceptable to me.
> If not, where would you draw the line?
The one `completely unacceptable' situation I can think of, which
tends to turn up in `Generic Teenage Schoolboy's Text Adventure'
games, features a female character and a puzzle with only one
possible solution that requires sex or nudity; one particularly bad
taste example I remember playing years ago opened with you playing a
female spy in a jail cell.
The only way out of the cell was to have (clumsily written and overly
graphic) sex with the guard and steal his keys when he fell asleep.
Any attempt to avoid this course of events resulted in instant death.
You couldn't, for example, lead him on and then karate kick him across
the room when he opened the door before rabbit chopping him into
unconsciousness, it was either that solution or no game. I decided on
the latter rather rapidly.
Three guidelines I would try to abide by are:
1) Keep it tasteful.
2) If the PC has a personality, only allow it if it's in character.
3) If the PC has no personality, offer an alternative solution.
Be seeing you,
--
Tom Waddington
Brandon J. Van Every
"Magnus Olsson" <m...@pobox.com> wrote in message
news:9aije0$uq$1...@news.lth.se...
>
> Do you think this would be considered offensive, or off-colour, or
> in any way questionable?
It's going to be considered as some combination of what you as the author
intended and what the audience is squeamish about. I think worrying about
what the audience thinks is absolutely silly. Who the heck are you writing
IF for, Reader's Digest? Even Reader's Digest is pretty racey lately. Do
whatever you want to do man. Heck, make it pornographic, that would be fun.
Make a vagina problem or something.
> If not, where would you draw the line?
You don't. Make her rape Jewish boys in gas chambers if that's what you
feel like. My point is, you're the author and you're responsible for what
you write. It's not up to the IF community to decide this sort of thing for
you. Do you want to write about sex? Hot, steaming sex? Twisted,
exploitative, politically incorrect sex? Fine. Go write about it. You
don't need anybody's permission or conjecture. (Well, at least not in the
USA under the First Amendment. YMMV elsewhere.) Just be aware that whatever
you write, if you circulate your work that's what you'll be known for. That
could make some people very angry with you, depending on what you write
about. Things like the First Amendment may protect your work, but nothing
protects you from being hated by some people. Or even worse: loved and
lionized by people you'd rather not be loved by.
Anyways, I think "nudity" in and of itself is such a tame subject that I
wonder why you had a question about it. Get on with the wet T-shirt contest
in the babbling brook, woo hoo!
--
Cheers, www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA
Brandon J. Van Every
<ems...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:9ail1n$qdj$1...@news.panix.com...
>
> The *fact* that the heroine had to undress in Heroine's Mantle didn't
> bother me as such; it was more something about the overall tone of the
> game. This came in the context of a lot of other stuff that portrayed
> women and sexuality in a light that made me uncomfortable.
Literature is allowed to make people feel uncomfortable. For that matter,
so is smut.
> There was a
> quality to the description that made me feel as though I the player were
> being invited to ogle the player character along with all the other
> sexual scenery.
Oooh, how deliciously non-PC!
> (FWIW, it's possible to strip the (female) PC of Metamorphoses naked if
> you want, and I've never heard anyone comment on this being
> inappropriate.
We always have to ask, inappropriate "to whom."
> Anyway. I think it's really more a matter of how material is portrayed
> than of how much. That which subverts the story, overrides the natural
> behavior of the characters, and distorts viewpoints in order to provide
> some kind of vicarious sexual thrill is on the road to being
> pornographic, though it's a long road with many increments. An honest
> story, even a disturbing one with a fair amount of graphic content, as
> long as it doesn't turn its female characters into shapely dolls,
> usually doesn't offend me as much.
Really. And what if reality is that a lot of men *do* view women as
"shapely dolls?" Well I guess you're not going to handle a story about The
Truth very well. Those evolutionary instincts are a bitch, ain't they?
Really sucks when you want to politically disempower some man because of the
way he's looking at you, but you can't help that he's, well... hot.
Run down to the video store and rent "Eyes Wide Shut" before bothering to
challenge my basic point.
Magnus Olsson
Brandon J. Van Every <vane...@3DProgrammer.com> wrote:
>
>"Magnus Olsson" <m...@pobox.com> wrote in message
>news:9aije0$uq$1...@news.lth.se...
>>
>> Do you think this would be considered offensive, or off-colour, or
>> in any way questionable?
>
>It's going to be considered as some combination of what you as the author
>intended and what the audience is squeamish about. I think worrying about
>what the audience thinks is absolutely silly. Who the heck are you writing
>IF for, Reader's Digest? Even Reader's Digest is pretty racey lately. Do
>whatever you want to do man. Heck, make it pornographic, that would be fun.
>Make a vagina problem or something.
It's not so much worrying that the audience may dislike what I write
(not for a non-commercial game) but more that I don't want to alienate
the audience. And I don't want to send the wrong message. I don't have
a problem with writing an erotic game - but if I don't want *this*
game to be erotic, I don't want to give the impression that I write to
titillate.
A parallel would be that if I was writing a tragedy, I wouldn't want
to be flippant.
>It's not up to the IF community to decide this sort of thing for
>you.
No, definitely not, but I'm interested in having an idea of what makes
the audience react in certain ways.
>Anyways, I think "nudity" in and of itself is such a tame subject that I
>wonder why you had a question about it.
Nudity itself is a tame subject. And (as I wrote in my comment about
"Heroine's Mantle" on r.g.i-f) things like female characters losing their
clothes are genre conventions in pulp action stories.
But it's the way that nudity is used that's important. Sorry if that
wasn't clear from my post.
Gunther Schmidl
Just shut the fuck up.
*plonk*
Neil Cerutti
>> portrayed than of how much. That which subverts the story,
>> overrides the natural behavior of the characters, and distorts
>> viewpoints in order to provide some kind of vicarious sexual
>> thrill is on the road to being pornographic, though it's a
>> long road with many increments. An honest story, even a
>> disturbing one with a fair amount of graphic content, as long
>> as it doesn't turn its female characters into shapely dolls,
>> usually doesn't offend me as much.
>
>Really. And what if reality is that a lot of men *do* view
>women as "shapely dolls?"
Should I include a NAMBLA member in my game just because some men
are pedophiles?
What is your point regarding game design?
--
Neil Cerutti <cer...@together.net>
Neil Cerutti
>Secondly, does the PC have a strong character or are they a mere
>playing piece? There was a discussion of r.g.i-f recently about
>games forcing the player to do things they don't want to, or
>don't feel are in character. People get surprisingly passionate
>about this issue. I would say that if you have any doubt as to
>how people are going to react, include an alternative solution
>to the river-crossing problem that doesn't involve any nudity.
>
>If the PC is a very specific character then their personality
>could answer the question for you. A well-to-do Victorian lady
>would probably never even consider stripping off and swimming
>across a river. A pragmatic Xena-type character on the other
>hand might well do so without a second thought.
But if the well-to-do Victorian lady was forced to do so, it
might well be more dramatic.
--
Neil Cerutti <cer...@together.net>
The Iconoplast
> (not for a non-commercial game) but more that I don't want to alienate
> the audience. And I don't want to send the wrong message. I don't have
> a problem with writing an erotic game - but if I don't want *this*
> game to be erotic, I don't want to give the impression that I write to
> titillate.
If that's the major concern, be sure to ask your beta testers (make sure you
have men and women testing) what they think about the particular passage.
> No, definitely not, but I'm interested in having an idea of what makes
> the audience react in certain ways.
In that case, release some anonymously written short stories just playing
around with conventions.
-Adam
ems...@mindspring.com
> <ems...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
> news:9ail1n$qdj$1...@news.panix.com...
>>
>> The *fact* that the heroine had to undress in Heroine's Mantle didn't
>> bother me as such; it was more something about the overall tone of the
>> game. This came in the context of a lot of other stuff that portrayed
>> women and sexuality in a light that made me uncomfortable.
> Literature is allowed to make people feel uncomfortable. For that matter,
> so is smut.
As I understood it, however, Magnus was asking for information about
what would make people uncomfortable. I was answering his question, not
writing a comprehensive essay on the Purpose of Literature or the Nature
of Gender Relations; nor was anything I said meant to be proscriptive
about what should be written.
Had you read further on, you might have noted that I grant literature
the privilege of being uncomfortable. I have written my share of
material that disturbed other people; that was intended to disturb them;
and that would not have succeeded else.
And there may be also be a use for smut. It is nonetheless a valuable
skill (little relevance though it may have to you) to be able to
calibrate one's writing so that one knows whether it is likely to be
regarded as art or as verbal self-gratification.
>> Anyway. I think it's really more a matter of how material is portrayed
>> than of how much. That which subverts the story, overrides the natural
>> behavior of the characters, and distorts viewpoints in order to provide
>> some kind of vicarious sexual thrill is on the road to being
>> pornographic, though it's a long road with many increments. An honest
>> story, even a disturbing one with a fair amount of graphic content, as
>> long as it doesn't turn its female characters into shapely dolls,
>> usually doesn't offend me as much.
> Really. And what if reality is that a lot of men *do* view women as
> "shapely dolls?" Well I guess you're not going to handle a story about The
> Truth very well. Those evolutionary instincts are a bitch, ain't they?
> Really sucks when you want to politically disempower some man because of the
> way he's looking at you, but you can't help that he's, well... hot.
I find this curious, Mr. Van Every. I was answering the question Magnus
put, and in terms that (I thought) made it clear I was speaking of my
own personal experience; you react as though it had been a feminist
tract designed to undercut your manhood.
Allow me to reassure you. I have no desire to police your production or
consumption of any kind of work, artistic, smutty, or other, in any
medium, be it written, filmed, or frosted onto an erotic cake. I claim
no special superiority, either for myself or for my gender as a whole,
regarding the use of such works. I have, on the whole, very little to
say at all about the inherent Virtue or Vice of art or fantasy,
especially not in such general terms, and my only strong desire is to
avoid censorship. In that regard, if in no other, we are perhaps more
in sympathy than you would suppose.
What interested me, and continues to interest me, is this: how does the
author take into account the ethos of the reader? How does he select
the use he desires his work to be put to, and how does he communicate
that to the audience?
The fact is that if something appears to me to be pornographic, and I am
not interested in pornography (not interested at all, not interested at
the moment, not interested in this type), I am more likely to set the
work aside than to seek its further merits. In identifying itself as an
item for use rather than for reception (to fall back for a moment on CS
Lewis' Experiment in Criticism), it is actively discouraging me from
trying to see it in another light. But this turns tautologically on my
existing definition of pornography, since the presence of sexual content
alone is not (at least in my opinion) the determining factor.
[ Tangent: it is possible for a piece of smut to be sexist and
misogynist without having anything interesting to say *about* sexism and
misogyny, other than bringing to light the (already evident) fact that
people like the author exist in the world.]
I think the deeper issue here -- though I admit I didn't think of it in
quite these terms until I read your post -- is that there is an implicit
relationship between author and reader, a kind of contract, if you will,
in any piece of writing. Somewhere among all the other things an author
needs to do, he must also find a way to tell the reader what their
mutual relationship is, what the intended purpose of the work might be,
and so on. Insult or provocation; shared titillation; respect or
condescension; mannered distance, peevish correction-- the choice of
tone not only affects how the content of the writing is understood, but
makes a piece of writing active -- equivalent to what certain kinds of
theory call a Speech Act -- and becomes, in its way, a thing that the
writer does to the reader. It may fail, just as a blow to the face or
a kiss to the lips may miss its mark, but it's still an attempt of
some sort.
The lower the level on which the author wishes to reach his audience,
the more likely he is to succeed. Whoever produces smut speaks, as you
say, to the most basic, the most animal, and the most universal of
impulses; there are variations in fetish and fantasy, but the audience
response sought is universal, and anyone with the inclination to listen
will hear essentially the same thing. And as testified by the wealth
and turnover of the pornography industry, they will seek the same thing
elsewhere tomorrow.
Correspondingly, there are far more subtle and complex -- and more
distinct and memorable -- arguments that may be addressed to the
thinking mind and feeling heart of a person, provided that you do
violence neither to that person's logical sense nor to his deepest
emotions. This is the sort of offense to which I was referring: if the
author of a work -- the *author*, mind you, not the
narrator-as-character -- seems to be fundamentally incompetent to speak
to my condition, then I reserve the right to disregard her.
Even if your desire is to give offense, I would argue, it helps if you
have at least some idea of to whom you are speaking. Indeed, it is then
especially important, since you are in that case likely to be given only
a single hearing. How disappointing it would be to solicit righteous
outrage in vain.
ES
Arcum Dagsson
Personally, I'd say, make replacing your clothing be an optional puzzle, and
handle nudity on the part of the player with tact. A normal person who is cought
outside without clothing will try to avoid other people, will be embarrassed,
and certainly won't stand around playing with their breasts, etc...
Properly written, it could add to the mood, though, and given a certain amount
of modesty, could add extra puzzles. You can get away with it, but I wouldn't
cast the PC as a nymphomanic, and would put in responses designed not to let the
player get away with such...
--
--Arcum Dagsson
"You say there's a horse in your bathroom, and all you can do is stand
there naming Beatles songs?"
OKB -- not okblacke
>The (female) PC encounters a deep, swift river that she must
>cross. The only way to cross it is by swimming. Her clothes would
>weigh her down, so she has to take them off to avoid drowning. This
>means she'll have to spend some time (almos) naked on the other
>side. The PC isn't Tracy Valencia, so she'll want either to get her
>clothes across the river or find some new ones before proceeding.
>
>Do you think this would be considered offensive, or off-colour, or
>in any way questionable?
I'd certainly raise my eyebrows and think to myself, "hmm, that's
interesting," but I wouldn't be offended.
Here's an interesting situation I just came up with. (This perhaps
stretches the boundaries of "games without sexual content", but perhaps not. I
guess the question of those boundaries is what's being asked here, in any
case.) Let's say this female PC is accompanied by a male friend (an NPC).
They have known each other for a long time, and their relationship has never
been anything other than entirely platonic.
How would this affect your (you==the player) thinking on whether
undressing would be acceptable? Would it make a difference whether the NPC
also had to undress or not? What about if the male was the PC and the female
was the NPC? Or if the male was gay, or a eunuch?
Some of these questions may themselves be offensive to readers, if they
responded affirmatively to Magnus's question, and if so I apologize. My intent
is to explore how much of the question is related to sexuality and how much is
related to mere nudity, and what (if any) connection people draw between the
two.
--OKB (Bren...@aol.com) -- no relation to okblacke
"Do not follow where the path may lead;
go, instead, where there is no path, and leave a trail."
--Author Unknown
Adam J. Thornton
>(FWIW, it's possible to strip the (female) PC of Metamorphoses naked if
>you want, and I've never heard anyone comment on this being
>inappropriate.
I was too busy salivating.
Adam
--
ad...@princeton.edu
"My eyes say their prayers to her / Sailors ring her bell / Like a moth
mistakes a light bulb / For the moon and goes to hell." -- Tom Waits
Adam J. Thornton
Brandon J. Van Every <vane...@3DProgrammer.com> wrote:
Zarf: bonus points if you can pull off an XYZZY award from a game with
this scene in it. Extra bonus points if it's a dungeon crawl treasure
hunt.
Joshua E Millard
>You know what?
>
>Just shut the fuck up.
>
>*plonk*
Yeah! Eat killfile, invisible person!
--
+---+ With great effort, you move the boulder. ################
|..$| # Josh Millard #
|.@'.##########################################################
|<d.| # pu...@wpi.edu # www.wpi.edu/~pulp - music, words, etc #
+---+ ########################################################
Magnus Olsson
Joshua E Millard <pu...@WPI.EDU> wrote:
>Gunther Schmidl (gsch...@xxx.gmx.at) uttered:
>>You know what?
>>
>>Just shut the fuck up.
>>
>>*plonk*
>
>Yeah! Eat killfile, invisible person!
I'm puzzled - whom did he just *plonk*?
Magnus Olsson
The Iconoplast <Adam_Bar...@Msn.com> wrote:
>> It's not so much worrying that the audience may dislike what I write
>> (not for a non-commercial game) but more that I don't want to alienate
>> the audience. And I don't want to send the wrong message. I don't have
>> a problem with writing an erotic game - but if I don't want *this*
>> game to be erotic, I don't want to give the impression that I write to
>> titillate.
>
>If that's the major concern, be sure to ask your beta testers (make sure you
>have men and women testing) what they think about the particular passage.
Of course; but if I reach that stage and get a negative reaction,
major rewriting may be necessary. (It's not just a case of a river
having to be crossed.)
>> No, definitely not, but I'm interested in having an idea of what makes
>> the audience react in certain ways.
>
>In that case, release some anonymously written short stories just playing
>around with conventions.
I don't think that will work - the media are too different. What I'm
after is the reaction to not just reading about a person doing certain
things, but to actually having to play that person. (This is true, of
course, for all kinds of controversial actions.)
Jake Wildstrom
Maybe we should assume all characters are nude unless clothing is
explicitly mentioned. It's an interesting visual for a lot of
games. Particularly hack-and-slash dungeon-type things.
+--First Church of Briantology--Order of the Holy Quaternion--+
| A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into |
| theorems. -Paul Erdos |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Jake Wildstrom |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
Alex Schroeder
> (FWIW, it's possible to strip the (female) PC of Metamorphoses naked if
> you want, and I've never heard anyone comment on this being
> inappropriate. Granted, there's no one much around to see her in this
That's how I solved one of the puzzles, and eventhough I did try to
look at myself before continuing, I didn't bother too much. For a
short moment I wondered wether I'd actually meet somebody in the
course of the game, but soon forgot about that, too. So getting back
to the OP's question: Undressing and swimming through a river is no
problem at all. The prospect of meeting other people while naked
could be interesting. And I share Emily's point of view that I'd put
a game aside if it started to turn pornographic because I am just not
interested in that kind of interactive fiction.
Alex.
--
http://www.geocities.com/kensanata/
Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love.
-- Turkish proverb
Magnus Olsson
Jake Wildstrom <wil...@mit.edu> wrote:
>Maybe we should assume all characters are nude unless clothing is
>explicitly mentioned. It's an interesting visual for a lot of
>games. Particularly hack-and-slash dungeon-type things.
Nethack actually does seem to make that assumption: if you take off
your armour, some of the messages you get refer to nudity. I guess
this is an aspect of the DevTeam's humour. Personally I think it
would be very uncomfortable to wear armour without any soft clothing
underneath :-).
Richard Bos
> Tom Waddington posted:
> >If the PC is a very specific character then their personality
> >could answer the question for you. A well-to-do Victorian lady
> >would probably never even consider stripping off and swimming
> >across a river. A pragmatic Xena-type character on the other
> >hand might well do so without a second thought.
>
> But if the well-to-do Victorian lady was forced to do so, it
> might well be more dramatic.
Some Victorian ladies would probably have chosen death before such
blatant dishonour. Some players might choose this option, too, when
forced to put a Victorian character in that position: end game before
breaking character.
Richard
Richard Bos
> In article <3acd7b8f$0$1910$b45e...@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu>,
> Jake Wildstrom <wil...@mit.edu> wrote:
> >Maybe we should assume all characters are nude unless clothing is
> >explicitly mentioned. It's an interesting visual for a lot of
> >games. Particularly hack-and-slash dungeon-type things.
>
> Nethack actually does seem to make that assumption: if you take off
> your armour, some of the messages you get refer to nudity. I guess
> this is an aspect of the DevTeam's humour. Personally I think it
> would be very uncomfortable to wear armour without any soft clothing
> underneath :-).
That's what Hawaiian shirts are for, right?
Richard
Magnus Olsson
Tom Waddington <t...@waddie.org.uk> wrote:
>First question: does the gender of the PC make any difference? I don't
>think it should, but I can't help notice how you've stressed that this
>is a female PC.
It does make a difference, simply because I'm male. No, I'm not going
to bring up the "men can't write about female protagonists" debate
again, but I think it's obvious that there can be problems.
>1) Keep it tasteful.
Oh, definitely.
>2) If the PC has a personality, only allow it if it's in character.
But the PC may have no choice in the matter - what if she *has* to
cross the river?
Magnus Olsson
>you want, and I've never heard anyone comment on this being
>inappropriate. Granted, there's no one much around to see her in this
>state, but on the other hand, some of the passages that bugged me in
>Heroine's Mantle were solitary too.
I only started playing "Metamorphoses" this week and haven't got very
far yet (only up to the furnace and the menagerie with stuffed
animals), but I did notice that. I'm the kind of player who tries to
manipulate everything in my inventory in all possible ways, and this
includes taking off and putting on clothes.
The nudity didn't strike me as having anything to do with sexuality,
probably because of the PC's reaction - she doesn't seem to care if
she's dressed or not; it's the mission that's important. But the
message you get when looking in the mirror while unclad is, well,
touching. I think it says a lot about the protagonist and her attitude
to life and to herself.
Also there's the fact that she's apparently not wearing anything under
the coarse dress - again, this doesn't send any sexual signals as it
might in our world - but rather one of, well, spartanity, not caring
much for comfort. Either she or her mysterious master doesn't treat
her very well.
Branko Collin
>The discussion of "Heroine's Mantle" over in r.g.i-f made me wonder a
>little: what do people think of puzzles involving the PC having to
>undress?
How about you replace 'nudity' with 'greenness' and 'to undress' with
'to bake a cake' and 'the female PC' with 'the tennis playing PC'.
I have read the entire thread and still do not see the problem. How
could nudity possibly be offensive? I feel that only things that were
meant to be offensive actually can be offensive.
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl
J.D. Berry
>(Mild spoilers for "Metamorhoses" below)
>
>probably because of the PC's reaction - she doesn't seem to care if
>she's dressed or not; it's the mission that's important. But the
>message you get when looking in the mirror while unclad is, well,
>touching. I think it says a lot about the protagonist and her attitude
>to life and to herself.
>
>Also there's the fact that she's apparently not wearing anything under
>the coarse dress - again, this doesn't send any sexual signals as it
>might in our world - but rather one of, well, spartanity, not caring
>much for comfort. Either she or her mysterious master doesn't treat
>her very well.
Interesting, delayed reactions. This didn't hit me at the time I played
Meta,
but I experienced the same effect as Magnus describes above when I was
playing. Hmmm... an impact without conscious awareness. Then again, I
usually need Cliff's notes to tell me the literary significance of anything
I
read.
Jim
Aris Katsaris
> In article <Yam2NN.AmigaOS.138586AD.64DF62DC@CastleGormenghast>,
> Tom Waddington <t...@waddie.org.uk> wrote:
> >2) If the PC has a personality, only allow it if it's in character.
>
> But the PC may have no choice in the matter - what if she *has* to
> cross the river?
Obviously most people would indeed choose nudity over death, therefore
it would be in character for most PCs. Your specific PC (a Victorian for
example, as others have said) may be an exception.
Aris Katsaris
John Colagioia
> Of course; but if I reach that stage and get a negative reaction,
> major rewriting may be necessary. (It's not just a case of a river
> having to be crossed.)
Well, depending on the point, perhaps you want a small amount of offensiveness.
It would be far better to make the player feel mildly uncomfortable than, for
example, to simply print out, "you feel rather uncomfortable standing here
without pants."
In fact, to use the same example as Ms. Short, I actually thought that was part
of the point of Heroine's Mantle at the beginning, coercing the player into
empathizing with the heroine's plight. That didn't last long, of course. But it
could have, if carried through consistently.
Personally, I don't care what hoops I have to jump through in a game as long as
it's done with a reasonable (a loaded and subjective term which is based on an
unwritten writer-author contract) amount of taste and respect, has some way of
avoiding the issue (including failure or death, incidentally--but I shouldn't
have to choose to quit to avoid a distasteful situation), and not make the player
feel like it's "just another puzzle," except with potentially-offensive text.
Whether or not that helps, though, I don't really know.
Magnus Olsson
John Colagioia <JCola...@csi.com> wrote:
>Magnus Olsson wrote:
>
>> Of course; but if I reach that stage and get a negative reaction,
>> major rewriting may be necessary. (It's not just a case of a river
>> having to be crossed.)
>
>Well, depending on the point, perhaps you want a small amount of offensiveness.
>It would be far better to make the player feel mildly uncomfortable than, for
>example, to simply print out, "you feel rather uncomfortable standing here
>without pants."
Yes, I do intend to use the enforced nudity to make the player
uncomfortable (because it's in character for PC to be uncomfortable in
the situation).
But I want the player to be uncomfortable for the right reason -
because the situation is unpleasant, not because she feels the author
is a jerk :-).
>In fact, to use the same example as Ms. Short, I actually thought that was part
>of the point of Heroine's Mantle at the beginning, coercing the player into
>empathizing with the heroine's plight. That didn't last long, of
>course. But it
>could have, if carried through consistently.
The scene with Mistletoe in the restroom could have been very
effective in that regard if it had been done a bit more
sensitively. As it was, it was more icky than cathartic.
Magnus Olsson
Branko Collin <col...@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>On 5 Apr 2001 20:09:36 GMT, m...@pobox.com (Magnus Olsson) wrote:
>
>>The discussion of "Heroine's Mantle" over in r.g.i-f made me wonder a
>>little: what do people think of puzzles involving the PC having to
>>undress?
>
>How about you replace 'nudity' with 'greenness' and 'to undress' with
>'to bake a cake' and 'the female PC' with 'the tennis playing PC'.
>
>I have read the entire thread and still do not see the problem. How
>could nudity possibly be offensive?
Obviously many people do think nudity, in itself, is offensive.
But my concern is not with those people. My concern is that I'll not
only have a female character in the game who takes her clothes off,
but I'll actually be making the player *play* that character.
And if that's insensitively done, I'm afraid some players will be
offended - for example if they feel that the PC is being objectified,
or made to do titillating things to provide thrills for male players.
>I feel that only things that were
>meant to be offensive actually can be offensive.
I'm afraid I can't agree with you.
Adam J. Thornton
Alex Schroeder <kens...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>ems...@mindspring.com writes:
>> (FWIW, it's possible to strip the (female) PC of Metamorphoses naked if
>> you want, and I've never heard anyone comment on this being
>> inappropriate. Granted, there's no one much around to see her in this
>That's how I solved one of the puzzles,
If it's the same one I solved, you can give up your dress or your
mother's ring. I found parting with the dress a great deal less
traumatic. However, one of the many wonderful things about this game is
the way the choices you make about puzzle solutions inform the
descriptions you get of various items. It's a marvelous job of
characterization-through-action: what you character does determines who
she is, and (and this is the cool part) who she *has been*. Emily
somehow manages to pull that off, which is a pretty neat trick.
Ross Presser
>In article <q16z6.5585$Kr1.5...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net>,
>Brandon J. Van Every <vane...@3DProgrammer.com> wrote:
>>rape Jewish boys in gas chambers
>
>Zarf: bonus points if you can pull off an XYZZY award from a game with
>this scene in it. Extra bonus points if it's a dungeon crawl treasure
>hunt.
>
>Adam
With dragons?
--
Ross Presser * ross_p...@imtek.com
"A free-range shoggoth is a happy shoggoth, and a happy shoggoth is
generally less inclined to eat all of you at once." - Tim Morgan
Daryl McCullough
>
>In article <98651061...@lilznntp.liwest.at>,
>Gunther Schmidl <gsch...@xxx.gmx.at> wrote:
>>> If not, where would you draw the line?
>>
>>The sheer amounts of nudity I've gotten away with in my games makes me think
>>nobody really gives a damn :-)
>
>Maybe we should assume all characters are nude unless clothing is
>explicitly mentioned. It's an interesting visual for a lot of
>games. Particularly hack-and-slash dungeon-type things.
To find out if the player character is nude, just type "remove clothes".
If the response is "You can't see any such thing." then he/she must be
nude.
So, "Spider and Web" takes place in the nude, as does "Balances" and
the original "Adventure".
[Of course, using the same logic, most player characters don't have
any body parts to cover with clothes, anyway.]
--
Daryl McCullough
CoGenTex, Inc.
Ithaca, NY
Daryl McCullough
>
>In article <9ajgfu$ikf$2...@bigboote.WPI.EDU>,
>Joshua E Millard <pu...@WPI.EDU> wrote:
>>Gunther Schmidl (gsch...@xxx.gmx.at) uttered:
>>>You know what?
>>>
>>>Just shut the fuck up.
>>>
>>>*plonk*
>>
>>Yeah! Eat killfile, invisible person!
>
>I'm puzzled - whom did he just *plonk*?
I assumed it was Brandon.
I don't use killfiles, personally. I read news using a web browser
that displays the subjects and authors of messages (about 50 or so
at a time). I just read the ones I'm interested in.
Sam Kabo Ashwell
soft-porn quality but refuses to admit that it *is* anything to do with sex:
make all the female characters run around naked giving each other massages,
but then pretend not to understand >FUCK, for example. It's on a par with
otherwise respectable broadsheets publishing photographs of celebrity
cleavage on no pretext at all, just because it sells, while assuming a tone
that it's really nothing to do with that. If you want non-sexual nudity,
put it in: personally I think that's a totally seperate issue. If you want
sexual content in your game, put it in- but for christ's sake be HONEST
about it. What you *shouldn't* do is slap in this kind of guilty voyeurism,
which pretends sex doesn't exist, while nonetheless drooling slightly. (I
need to analyse this properly and in greater length some time).
Matthew T. Russotto
Jake Wildstrom <wil...@mit.edu> wrote:
}Gunther Schmidl <gsch...@xxx.gmx.at> wrote:
}>> If not, where would you draw the line?
}>
}>The sheer amounts of nudity I've gotten away with in my games makes me think
}>nobody really gives a damn :-)
}
}Maybe we should assume all characters are nude unless clothing is
}explicitly mentioned. It's an interesting visual for a lot of
}games. Particularly hack-and-slash dungeon-type things.
You'll never solve +=3 that way!
Not from Zork
> KILL TROLL
With what?
> WITH SWORD
You don't have a sword.
OHHH. Well, despite your obvious interest in the troll, that still
won't make a decent weapon. And you don't REALLY want it near that
axe, do you?
--
Matthew T. Russotto russ...@pond.com
"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in pursuit
of justice is no virtue."
Brandon J. Van Every
> In article <q16z6.5585$Kr1.5...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net>,
>
> It's not so much worrying that the audience may dislike what I write
> (not for a non-commercial game) but more that I don't want to alienate
> the audience.
Who is "the audience?" What demographic are you trying to serve? I
alienate a particular audience all the time: stupid people, who think canned
Hollywood script conventions are great. There's a lot of people out there
that I couldn't give a rat's ass if they don't understand what I'm writing
about. That's not the same thing as being inaccessible. That's
acknowledging that realistically, a lot of people are bland and don't
appreciate what you personally think is interesting, funny, or creative.
So, let's say you wanted to write about sex. Why would you worry about
people who don't want to read things about sex? They're irrelevant.
They're no fun.
> And I don't want to send the wrong message.
Who's defining the right and wrong? You? If so, define what you want to
define and then send it. Someone else? Well, that gets back to whether you
are trying to please some demographic or not.
> I don't have
> a problem with writing an erotic game - but if I don't want *this*
> game to be erotic, I don't want to give the impression that I write to
> titillate.
Ah, ok, that's a different issue then. Let me ask you this: what *purpose*
does having the woman coming out of the river nude serve? How does this
thing tell your story? How does it further the aims of your story? If it
doesn't, then it shouldn't be there. Doesn't matter how great you think it
is as an isolated piece of writing. "Kill your babies" is a phrase I ran
across somewhere recently. Or if you must save it, save it for a work in
which it fits.
> A parallel would be that if I was writing a tragedy, I wouldn't want to be
flippant.
Yep. And if you already undestand this, you don't have any questions. The
line to draw is simple: chop out what is not relevant to telling your story.
Has nothing to do with taste or morality.
--
Cheers, www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA
Brandon J. Van Every
> In article <uYNFt4ivAHA.296@cpmsnbbsa09>,
>
> Of course; but if I reach that stage and get a negative reaction,
> major rewriting may be necessary. (It's not just a case of a river
> having to be crossed.)
"Writing is rewriting."
On the other hand, Hollwood film studios do "test audience" stuff, to pander
to what audiences like or don't like. It can be a useful feedback tool, so
long as you remember you're the guy in charge. But when you start worrying
about the ad execs and the bean counters and the profit margins and whether
a bunch of squirrel-headed Average Americans like your work or not, you
might as well turn your work over to a chop shop to begin with. Why are you
bothering? To perfect a process of profit? Since you're writing for a IF
crowd I'd be shocked if that was your objective.
> I don't think that will work - the media are too different. What I'm
> after is the reaction to not just reading about a person doing certain
> things, but to actually having to play that person. (This is true, of
> course, for all kinds of controversial actions.)
Then why set boundaries? Perform your experiments. Don't be afraid of the
potential results. Fear is not experiment.
My first attempt at writing, "The Game Of Mallor," was titled that way for a
reason. I wanted to see if I could psychologically wreck at least 1 player,
to make them feel angry and uncomfortable about what they were experiencing,
yet still come back for more because they couldn't put it down. As it
turned out, I don't think I succeeded in that goal. I'd have a better
chance of succeeding at it now. But in trying that experiment, I learned
that it's actually more personally rewarding to me that the players have a
good time.
Brandon J. Van Every
>
> But I want the player to be uncomfortable for the right reason -
> because the situation is unpleasant, not because she feels the author
> is a jerk :-).
You can't win that game for an arbitrary audience. What if I'm an
exhibitionist? What if even though I wouldn't walk around naked in the real
world, I'm enough of a closet exhibitionist that parading around nude in a
game turns me on? What if I really don't care? What if I'm used to beaches
where everyone goes topless and a bikini = string over the clitoris? What
if I spent my free time on nude beaches or in nudist colonies?
All you can do is posit a certain kind of person that's going to read your
work, and try to manipulate that kind of person. And I think you're going
to have to exaggerate, because it's only a work of fiction and not Real
Life. People do all kinds of things in movies that you simply can't do in
real life, and the audience doesn't bat an eyelash.
Brandon J. Van Every
"Daryl McCullough" <da...@cogentex.com> wrote in message
news:9aklt...@edrn.newsguy.com...
>
> I assumed it was Brandon.
Me too, although that's only a circumstantial guess. Some people can't
handle the taboo subjects no matter how they are framed.
Brandon J. Van Every
"Neil Cerutti" <ne...@localhost.localdomain> wrote in message
news:slrn9cpucu...@localhost.localdomain...
> Brandon J. Van Every posted:
> >
> >Really. And what if reality is that a lot of men *do* view
> >women as "shapely dolls?"
>
> Should I include a NAMBLA member in my game just because some men
> are pedophiles?
>
> What is your point regarding game design?
My point is that making a game about NAMBLA members isn't cosmically wrong.
It's your authorial perogative. If the audience squirms in their chairs
when it's time to crack the little boy's anus wide open and stick your
pee-pee in it, that's their problem. Subject to your local laws of course -
don't take on any legal entanglements you don't really want. The game
design point is the players don't have to like it. Unless, of course, your
goal is to get everyone to play it, at some kind of common denominator
marketing level.
Actually, it would be funny to make a game like that, thinking you'd get big
sales to the NAMBLA members, then have the title tank because they think
it's derogatory and misrepresentative of their practices! Piss everyone off
despite your best intents, end up poor. Notoriety with lawsuits attached.
What a bitter existence! Ah, you'll have to settle for your First Amendment
protections, the right to be a kook with a small audience.
Gabe McKean
>Me too, although that's only a circumstantial guess. Some people can't
>handle the taboo subjects no matter how they are framed.
Gunther has never struck me as being someone who shies away from taboo. Try
playing some of his games sometime. "Only After Dark" and "And the Waves
Choke the Wind" would be good choices to illustrate my point.
I don't think the subject matter was the problem, but rather the way you
'framed' it, as you put it.
Billy Harris
wrote:
> The discussion of "Heroine's Mantle" over in r.g.i-f made me wonder a
> little: what do people think of puzzles involving the PC having to
> undress?
<snip>
> Do you think this would be considered offensive, or off-colour, or
> in any way questionable?
Well, if "clothing" appears in the initial inventory description, I'll
take it off right away just to see what happens. And leave it off if
the game allows. But then I like pornographic games.
Brandon J. Van Every
<ems...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:9aj7cf$2pe$1...@news.panix.com...
> Brandon J. Van Every <vane...@3dprogrammer.com> wrote:
>
> As I understood it, however, Magnus was asking for information about
> what would make people uncomfortable. I was answering his question, not
> writing a comprehensive essay on the Purpose of Literature or the Nature
> of Gender Relations; nor was anything I said meant to be proscriptive
> about what should be written.
Well, I also understood his question to be about whether he *should* make
people uncomfortable. My basic point is if he wants to, he should.
> And there may be also be a use for smut. It is nonetheless a valuable
> skill (little relevance though it may have to you) to be able to
> calibrate one's writing so that one knows whether it is likely to be
> regarded as art or as verbal self-gratification.
What the heck is the difference? To hearken to this debate in the visual
arts, have you seen "Ilonia's Asshole?" (sp?) It is, well, a photograph of
Ilonia's asshole. How about the Robert Maplethorpe photo with a whip shoved
up a black man's butt? If literature hasn't caught up with the absurdity of
this debate, if it hasn't recognized the fundamentally political process of
it, well then it's just behind the times.
> I find this curious, Mr. Van Every. I was answering the question Magnus
> put, and in terms that (I thought) made it clear I was speaking of my
> own personal experience; you react as though it had been a feminist
> tract designed to undercut your manhood.
Yeah, well, so as a reader you get offended by certain things. My pointed
question is why?
> What interested me, and continues to interest me, is this: how does the
> author take into account the ethos of the reader?
I say, he doesn't, and shouldn't. Unless he wants to (1) maniuplate the
audience, in which case he has to posit an ethos that he can manipulate. In
this case, what he posits is guaranteed to be wrong for at least somebody,
and likely a lot of people, because humans tend to fill out a spectrum of
subtly interleaved opinions. (2) ensure acceptance of his work amongst some
demographic. In this case he can be "right" if he does sufficient market
research and test grouping. Of course, his work is going to become more
bland the more he prioritizes demographic acceptance over authorial vision.
Reaction from a crowd can only improve your work so much. At some point,
the feedback becomes insipid. If you go to its logical conclusion I suppose
you end up with Jerry Springer.
> How does he select the use he desires his work to be put to,
His authorial perogative. What kind of an asshole he is, to whom.
> and how does he communicate that to the audience?
He writes. It is far too complicated to specify all the possible ways in
which he can write.
> The fact is that if something appears to me to be pornographic, and I am
> not interested in pornography (not interested at all, not interested at
> the moment, not interested in this type), I am more likely to set the
> work aside than to seek its further merits.
Nothing wrong with that. But why should the author have sought your
attention in the first place?
I'm criticizing the perceived need of an author to be "nice" to get others
to read their work. Nice isn't the only way to go! How about being a
deliberate troublemaker, like Andy Kauphman? How about telling the Truth?
The Truth gets lotsa lotsa people reeeeeaaaallly upset. I think people who
can't handle the Truth are weak, and deserve no pity. It's not that I would
seek to annoy them, it's that they're annoying themselves with their
inability to face the Truth.
For instance, a Truth: people like to fuck. A lot. People attempt to
control their self-images of how they fuck. They have enormous layerings of
social and religious concepts to govern the fucking, to make it "acceptable"
or "comfortable" or whatever. But basically, the animal that is programmed
into the human nervous system, likes to fuck. IMHO self-delusion about this
fundamental Truth is a lot of intellectual garbage. In my own work, I would
never prioritize someone else's uncomfortability with this Truth. They can
face the Truth, or suffer their own delusions of Ego.
Of course, it should also be noted that I'm an atheist, which has a huuuuge
impact on what the world view is in the first place. Intellectually I
understand how some God-fearing folk take great umbrage at my portrayal of
the Truth. After all, their Truth is that man acts according to God's plan!
Or should. Oh well, agree to disagree.
As for Feminism: one uncomfortable aspect of the Truth about fucking, is
that we are attracted to things which subvert our Ego and political agendas.
Fucking is like this leverage that the natural world holds over you,
regardless of what you politically want. The amount of leverage varies from
person to person. Some people really are true and consistent within their
own persons. They aren't lying to themselves about their sexual Egos. But
statistically and systemically, the PC gender roles that Feminism tries to
ascribe to men and women are idealizations. They are not real, they do not
take into account the ancient aspects of fucking. Although I am for the
basic tenets of Feminism, like equal opportunity, equal pay for equal work
and so on, I have come to realize that women marshal political ammunition
for their own purposes, same as men do. There's nothing special about them
for being women. The world doesn't somehow become improved by trying to fit
it to the idealized Feminist endgame. It's still political, and everybody's
just bitching and moaning about their slice of the pie.
Whew, that was quite the rambling diversion through the funhouse mirrors!
> [ Tangent: it is possible for a piece of smut to be sexist and
> misogynist without having anything interesting to say *about* sexism and
> misogyny, other than bringing to light the (already evident) fact that
> people like the author exist in the world.]
Yep. So what?
> I think the deeper issue here -- though I admit I didn't think of it in
> quite these terms until I read your post -- is that there is an implicit
> relationship between author and reader, a kind of contract, if you will,
> in any piece of writing.
I say, screw the contract. There's no cradle-to-grave contract in the
workplace anymore, so why should there be in literature?
> Somewhere among all the other things an author
> needs to do, he must also find a way to tell the reader what their
> mutual relationship is, what the intended purpose of the work might be,
> and so on. Insult or provocation; shared titillation; respect or
> condescension; mannered distance, peevish correction-- the choice of
> tone not only affects how the content of the writing is understood, but
> makes a piece of writing active -- equivalent to what certain kinds of
> theory call a Speech Act -- and becomes, in its way, a thing that the
> writer does to the reader. It may fail, just as a blow to the face or
> a kiss to the lips may miss its mark, but it's still an attempt of
> some sort.
This contract IMO is only a thing to be ignored or maniuplated. As an
author, one can recognize that readers believe there is a contract, or that
there should be one. That is to say, the vast majority of readers are so
egocentric that they think a work of authorship should be primarily about
what *they* want to hear. *They* want their self-images to be sustained and
gratified. *They* want to be tossed and tussled in exactly the ways that
they like to be tossed and tussled. Horror is ok as long as I feel good at
the end, whew what a ride.
> Correspondingly, there are far more subtle and complex -- and more
> distinct and memorable -- arguments that may be addressed to the
> thinking mind and feeling heart of a person, provided that you do
> violence neither to that person's logical sense nor to his deepest
> emotions. This is the sort of offense to which I was referring: if the
> author of a work -- the *author*, mind you, not the
> narrator-as-character -- seems to be fundamentally incompetent to speak
> to my condition, then I reserve the right to disregard her.
Which is fine. But again, why should that author have bothered to consider
you in the first place?
Let me invert this: a theory of Thanklessness. Let's say the author really
is very "nice." He makes his most genuine and sincere effort to touch the
minds and souls of a certain class of readers. But the message is rather
subtle and complicated. Because it's rather subtle and complicated, the
opinions of the readers differ from those of the author. The thankless
readers roast the author on minor points that were major to them. A lot of
bitching and moaning about how the book wasn't this, the book wasn't that,
coulda woulda shoulda. The "nice" author throws up his hands and cries.
What did I do wrong? What did I do wrong?
IMO, the only thing he did wrong was worry about what the reaction was going
to be in the first place. Who *cares* whether readers are "reserving their
precious rights?"
> Even if your desire is to give offense, I would argue, it helps if you
> have at least some idea of to whom you are speaking.
To whom you are speaking is a fabrication. It is a product of your world
view. Your world view was what you were writing about anyways, so it's
redundant to worry about whom you're speaking to.
> Indeed, it is then
> especially important, since you are in that case likely to be given only
> a single hearing. How disappointing it would be to solicit righteous
> outrage in vain.
Well, some people don't know how to be relevant, but froth and fume anyways.
They seem to enjoy hearing their own heads roar well enough.
I am saying that the relation between author and audience isn't as relevant
as it's often made out to be. There has to be something at stake on the
table. Like how much money the book is going to make. Or if a law is going
to be overturned and set codes of public behavior for the next 50 years.
Without something at stake, this is only so many angels dancing on the head
of a pin.
Tom Waddington
>> could answer the question for you. A well-to-do Victorian lady
>> would probably never even consider stripping off and swimming
>> across a river. A pragmatic Xena-type character on the other
>> hand might well do so without a second thought.
> But if the well-to-do Victorian lady was forced to do so, it
> might well be more dramatic.
Oh absolutely. You have to be sure that you really want to be
dramatic though, that it actually adds to your plot. It might fit with
a story about a Victorian lady losing her inhibitions (in an
open ended exploration-of-Victorian-society sort of way, not a `hunt
the taboo' adventure: `Right, that's public nudity out of the way, now
to hit the opium dens and swear in church').
If the PC is a save-the-world-no-matter-what-it-takes type, having to
undress to cross the river wouldn't count as a puzzle on its own. It
would take a lot more work to make it an interesting problem.
Be seeing you,
--
Tom Waddington
Tom Waddington
>> First question: does the gender of the PC make any difference? I
>> don't think it should, but I can't help notice how you've stressed
>> that this is a female PC.
> It does make a difference, simply because I'm male. No, I'm not
> going to bring up the "men can't write about female protagonists"
> debate again, but I think it's obvious that there can be problems.
If I can't bring that up, then I can't answer. The question isn't
of character nudity, but female nudity written by men. There are
issues there but nothing, I think, that cannot be transcended by a
talented writer.
>> 2) If the PC has a personality, only allow it if it's in character.
> But the PC may have no choice in the matter - what if she *has* to
> cross the river?
What purpose, other than being an obstacle, does the river/nudity
serve in the story? If there is something to be learned or experienced
from being naked, then it can be in character; change and development
are a part of every convincing protagonist.
If, on the other hand, it is merely an obstacle, I would prefer either
alternative solutions to getting across or leaving it out altogether.
Or extending it into something a little more interesting. Or...well,
it's your story. :)
Howard Sherman
gratuitous.
Magnus Olsson wrote:
> The discussion of "Heroine's Mantle" over in r.g.i-f made me wonder a
> little: what do people think of puzzles involving the PC having to
> undress?
>
> I'm not speaking of games with sexual content, or of gratuitous
> nudity-enforcing puzzles, but of things that fit organically into the
> game, such as the following scenario:
>
> The (female) PC encounters a deep, swift river that she must
> cross. The only way to cross it is by swimming. Her clothes would
> weigh her down, so she has to take them off to avoid drowning. This
> means she'll have to spend some time (almos) naked on the other
> side. The PC isn't Tracy Valencia, so she'll want either to get her
> clothes across the river or find some new ones before proceeding.
>
> Do you think this would be considered offensive, or off-colour, or
> in any way questionable?
>
> If not, where would you draw the line?
>
> (As you may guess, I have a very concrete reason for asking this.)
Fillmore
Brandon J. Van Every wrote in message ...
>
>news:9aklt...@edrn.newsguy.com...
>>
>> I assumed it was Brandon.
>
>Me too, although that's only a circumstantial guess. Some people can't
>handle the taboo subjects no matter how they are framed.
From what I know about Gunther, I very much doubt that he gives a toss about
the taboo content of what you say. Indeed, I get the feeling that, rather
than being unhappy with the conversation as such, he just thinks your
viewpoints are, on the whole, moronic, and not worth wasting his time with.
--
Fillmore
Duncan Stevens
news:PIqz6.8317$VF3.7...@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
>
> <ems...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
> news:9aj7cf$2pe$1...@news.panix.com...
> > Brandon J. Van Every <vane...@3dprogrammer.com> wrote:
> >
> > As I understood it, however, Magnus was asking for information about
> > what would make people uncomfortable. I was answering his question, not
> > writing a comprehensive essay on the Purpose of Literature or the Nature
> > of Gender Relations; nor was anything I said meant to be proscriptive
> > about what should be written.
>
> Well, I also understood his question to be about whether he *should* make
> people uncomfortable. My basic point is if he wants to, he should.
I'm guessing you're just being deliberately obtuse now. (That implies that
you weren't before, of course, but now it's much more obvious.)
Magnus isn't interested in offending people. He's interested in (a) writing
a specific game and (b)*not* offending people. If he says what he wants to
say by including nudity but annoys/offends people in the process, he'll feel
(justifiably) that he hasn't done what he set out to do. In his mind, if
that happens, he's just as far from achieving what he wanted to achieve by
writing the game as if he'd written some totally unrelated game, or sat
around twiddling his thumbs for several months. So he posted to ask what
people's reactions would be. It's actually not any different from posting to
ask whether, say, the IF community knows what to do with gzipped and tarred
files before uploading one to the archive. If he didn't bother, uploaded
one, and then learned that no one had ever heard of gzip or tar, no one
would play and appreciate his game. Likewise, if he didn't bother to ask and
the consensus were that nudity is out, the larger point of the game would go
unappreciated as everyone deleted the game file in a huff. If nudity were
central to what he was trying to say, of course, presumably he wouldn't ask.
You're free to think that Magnus is a dweeb for caring. (Sorry, Magnus.) You
may think so privately or e-mail him to tell him so. But kindly get out of
the thread discussing whether people find nudity offensive, unless you have
something to say on that subject.
--Duncan
Duncan Stevens
"Brandon J. Van Every" <vane...@3DProgrammer.com> wrote in message
>
> "Magnus Olsson" <m...@pobox.com> wrote in message
> news:9akkre$nc6$1...@news.lth.se...
> >
> > But I want the player to be uncomfortable for the right reason -
> > because the situation is unpleasant, not because she feels the author
> > is a jerk :-).
>
> You can't win that game for an arbitrary audience. What if I'm an
> exhibitionist? What if even though I wouldn't walk around naked in the
real
> world, I'm enough of a closet exhibitionist that parading around nude in a
> game turns me on? What if I really don't care? What if I'm used to
beaches
> where everyone goes topless and a bikini = string over the clitoris? What
> if I spent my free time on nude beaches or in nudist colonies?
Then you respond and say you don't care, and Magnus notes your opinion,
along with the opinion of others, and decides whether to include nudity in
his game on that base. He's not hypothesizing his audience--it's right here.
He's asking it a question and getting a bunch of responses. Sure, not
everyone who plays the game reads this newsgroup or will respond to the
question, but Magnus's apparently sensible guess is that enough will do both
that he can get a fair sampling of opinion.
But my guess is that you're just posting so that you can write "clitoris."
Hooray for you.
--Duncan
Branko Collin
>In article <3acdb7c1...@news.xs4all.nl>,
>Branko Collin <col...@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>>On 5 Apr 2001 20:09:36 GMT, m...@pobox.com (Magnus Olsson) wrote:
>>
>>>The discussion of "Heroine's Mantle" over in r.g.i-f made me wonder a
>>>little: what do people think of puzzles involving the PC having to
>>>undress?
>>
>>How about you replace 'nudity' with 'greenness' and 'to undress' with
>>'to bake a cake' and 'the female PC' with 'the tennis playing PC'.
>>
>>I have read the entire thread and still do not see the problem. How
>>could nudity possibly be offensive?
>
>Obviously many people do think nudity, in itself, is offensive.
>
>But my concern is not with those people. My concern is that I'll not
>only have a female character in the game who takes her clothes off,
>but I'll actually be making the player *play* that character.
>
>And if that's insensitively done, I'm afraid some players will be
>offended - for example if they feel that the PC is being objectified,
>or made to do titillating things to provide thrills for male players.
I read somewhere else one of your more recent answers, in which you
say that you have a hard time putting yourself in the shoes of a
woman. Why don't you ask a woman to help you with that part of your
game?
I still feel this has nothing to do with nudity.
>>I feel that only things that were
>>meant to be offensive actually can be offensive.
>
>I'm afraid I can't agree with you.
I hope I have not offended you. ;-)
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl
Tom Waddington
>> And I don't want to send the wrong message.
> Who's defining the right and wrong? You? If so, define what you want
> to define and then send it. Someone else? Well, that gets back to
> whether you are trying to please some demographic or not.
If I understand your point correctly (and it isn't easy, swamped as it
is in reams of attention-seeking repugnance), you believe that a
creator should never compromise his or her work for the sake of
pleasing an audience. But if that creator has something to say, and
wants that message to reach as many people as possible, why should
they not couch it in terms acceptable to the audience?
Have you considered the possibility that Magnus might already have
decided on the tone for the game as a whole and is attempting to get
an idea of how people would react to the problem, better to judge
whether or not including it would be out of place? Wouldn't including
the puzzle without any thought to if it might seem out of place to the
audience risk the compromise that you are so vehemently opposed to?
Daniel Barkalow
> Yes, I do intend to use the enforced nudity to make the player
> uncomfortable (because it's in character for PC to be uncomfortable in
> the situation).
>
> But I want the player to be uncomfortable for the right reason -
> because the situation is unpleasant, not because she feels the author
> is a jerk :-).
Part of that might be to have all other possibilities sensibly
excluded; if the character is in a situation where the only sensible thing
to do would, in fact, be to strip and transport the clothes separately,
that feels a lot better than if the player can come up with alternatives
which just aren't implemented.
If the character is too modest to actually get herself seen without her
clothes, no matter what the player tries (either out of suspecting the
clothes to be unnecessary or out of trying to be seen) and this is the
extent of the implementation of nudity, I wouldn't expect players to be
upset at the author over it.
I think the tone of the text is, for this purpose, more important than
this particular event: "It looks like you're not going to get to the other
side with dry clothes if you wear them, and nobody seems to be around, so,
glancing around to make sure one last time, you remove your clothes and
roll them into a ball ... That's the way you're going, but you're not
about to go anywhere less secluded without your clothes on ..." would
probably not offend anyone except perhaps the Victorian lady; having the
character undress with lots of description or be able to (or have
to) actually run into other people while undressed might make the player
think you're trying to write porn.
For me, if the game only uses nudity to keep the character away from
populated areas, the character's clothes shouldn't be further
implemented. Since the standard library's player character seems to lack
clothes or anything particular to cover with them, I think it seems
suggestive if the player starts out explicitly wearing clothes, rather
than having the topic simply not mentioned. I.e., I would find it most
natural if the clothes were only a game object when not worn, and the
character description only mention the lack of clothes and not the fact
that you're wearing them at other times.
-Iabervon
*This .sig unintentionally changed*
ems...@mindspring.com
> If the PC is a save-the-world-no-matter-what-it-takes type, having to
> undress to cross the river wouldn't count as a puzzle on its own. It
> would take a lot more work to make it an interesting problem.
I'm not sure the point is to have the removal be a puzzle; just that
it's part of the story.
ES
Martin Julian DeMello
> The (female) PC encounters a deep, swift river that she must
> cross. The only way to cross it is by swimming. Her clothes would
> weigh her down, so she has to take them off to avoid drowning. This
> means she'll have to spend some time (almos) naked on the other
> side. The PC isn't Tracy Valencia, so she'll want either to get her
> clothes across the river or find some new ones before proceeding.
> Do you think this would be considered offensive, or off-colour, or
> in any way questionable?
Altogether unoffensive. OTOH, coming from a culture with a rather strong
nudity taboo, I'd be *conscious* of being naked on the other side, and
would expect that to affect future game responses; that is, I'd expect the
PC to be similarly and, if the situation seems to call for it, explicitly
conscious of her nudity. And if not, I'd require the game setting to
convince me that this is a world where being unclothed is unremarkable.
--
Martin DeMello
Brandon J. Van Every
"OKB -- not okblacke" <bren...@aol.comRemove> wrote in message
news:20010405234638...@ng-mb1.aol.com...
>
> Here's an interesting situation I just came up with. (This perhaps
> stretches the boundaries of "games without sexual content", but perhaps
not. I
> guess the question of those boundaries is what's being asked here, in any
> case.) Let's say this female PC is accompanied by a male friend (an NPC).
> They have known each other for a long time, and their relationship has
never
> been anything other than entirely platonic.
>
> How would this affect your (you==the player) thinking on whether
> undressing would be acceptable? Would it make a difference whether the
NPC
> also had to undress or not? What about if the male was the PC and the
female
> was the NPC? Or if the male was gay, or a eunuch?
Shoot, man, at the risk of boring you with the sordid details of my life,
let's talk about reality. I've had a girlfriend, who became an
ex-girlfriend, who held the hippie-istic opinion that it should be no big
deal for uninvolved people of opposite sex (or applicable sexual attraction,
since she was bi) to sleep together naked in the same bed without doing
anything and that's "platonic." Know what I observed about her? She's
incredibly self-delusory, passive, and irresponsible about simply wanting to
have the hell screwed out of her. So she invents this faits accompli
situation, where the guy in the sack is going to be the one of making the
"tough decision" of taking her. I'm not talking about some guy I was
jealous of. As her ex-boyfriend, I was that guy once. And it seemed she
was going through that same pattern with other guys at the time. I
confronted her with the truth of it at one point. Don't know if it helped
her grow any.
My point is, how can you even begin to question these things in a vacuum?
Why are you worrying about how the player thinks? You don't even know who
the audience really is! If that ex-girlfriend of mine picked up your work,
you wouldn't know what made her tick. *She* doesn't even know what makes her
tick.
I propose that writing does not have to be an exercise where you imagine /
fabricate the sensibilities of some audience and then set about working
around, pleasing, or "respecting" that audience. Writing can be an exercise
in confronting Truth and pushing the reader towards self-discovery, however
ugly that self-discovery may be.
Branko Collin
That is what you've got that famous 'willful suspension of disbelief'
for.
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl
Brandon J. Van Every
"Tom Waddington" <t...@waddie.org.uk> wrote in message
news:Yam2NN.AmigaOS.138586AD.64DF62DC@CastleGormenghast...
>
> Secondly, does the PC have a strong character or are they a mere
> playing piece? There was a discussion of r.g.i-f recently about games
> forcing the player to do things they don't want to, or don't feel are
> in character. People get surprisingly passionate about this issue.
Probably a function of Ego. Try getting on a MUD some time and spoofing
people, or creating a robot that mimics their actions. People *hate* that
sort of thing. People have a profound need to control what's going on with
them. When you throw them into an unusual circumstance, a lot of people get
really obsessive about maintaining their self-images. A lot is at stake for
them.
> I
> would say that if you have any doubt as to how people are going to
> react, include an alternative solution to the river-crossing problem
> that doesn't involve any nudity.
Replace "doubt" with "tremendous concern" and I'd agree with you. Doubt?
There is no doubt whatsoever. People occupy a spectrum of opinions.
Someone is going to get pissed off, probably because they enjoy getting
pissed off.
> If the PC is a very specific character then their personality could
> answer the question for you. A well-to-do Victorian lady would
> probably never even consider stripping off and swimming across a
> river. A pragmatic Xena-type character on the other hand might well do
> so without a second thought.
Ah, those survival dilemmas. If the proper Victorian lady would never
consider taking off her corset, is she going to survive when the ship is
sinking and she needs to swim? Evolution doesn't have to broker a kind
answer; she can die. But oftentimes, animal instinct overcomes social
conditioning, and people do what they gotta do.
Thus the bigger question is whether at this moment, is the consistency of
the character important, or is the advancement of the plot important? Also,
if you violate the character to advance the plot, does the violation make
sense? I do agree that if you're violating characters on a whim and failing
to advance the plot as you do so, you're gesticulating in pointlessness. In
that case, you'd need an authorial theory of Pointlessness [TM] to justify
your work. I don't really care about pointless work so I won't argue about
it.
> The one `completely unacceptable' situation I can think of, which
> tends to turn up in `Generic Teenage Schoolboy's Text Adventure'
> games, features a female character and a puzzle with only one
> possible solution that requires sex or nudity; one particularly bad
> taste example I remember playing years ago opened with you playing a
> female spy in a jail cell.
Hey, what's that title? I wanna play!
> 1) Keep it tasteful.
Aw c'mon. Put a dildo in there somewhere, otherwise it won't be any fun!
What's a little Clockwork Orange between friends....
To put this in broad, sweeping terms, literature does not have to be about
programmatic behavior. You can write about aprogrammatic behavior. Really.
You can.
Brandon J. Van Every
"Branko Collin" <col...@xs4all.nl> wrote in message
news:3acdb7c1...@news.xs4all.nl...
>
> I have read the entire thread and still do not see the problem. How
> meant to be offensive actually can be offensive.
Mostly I agree. I think that this contains some assumptions about the
audience, though. Like, they're not a bunch of fundamentalist Muslims or
something. At any rate, I think positing imagined audiences and dangers
thereto is neurotic. You can't win, you can't solve it, so just write.
Brandon J. Van Every
>
> Obviously many people do think nudity, in itself, is offensive.
Really? Which people are those? Outside of certain fundamentalist
religious groups, I can't think of any in the USA.
What is obvious, however, is that the USA thinks nudity is something that
has to be controlled. It is a site of social discourse and political power
struggle. It's not taken for granted, like, some tribe in a tropical
rainforest.
> But my concern is not with those people. My concern is that I'll not
> only have a female character in the game who takes her clothes off,
> but I'll actually be making the player *play* that character.
>
> And if that's insensitively done, I'm afraid some players will be
> offended -
Are these players going to play your character in a spirit of cooperation?
Or are you going to try to manipulate / cajole them into doing so under
duress? A receptive or a hostile audience? Me personally, I would only
bother writing for a receptive audience, unless I was deliberately intending
to manipulate a hostile audience.
> for example if they feel that the PC is being objectified,
> or made to do titillating things to provide thrills for male players.
Here's a joke for you. "Why did the chicken cross the road? 'Cuz the
chicken is white, the road is black, and it's the white man TRYIN' TO KEEP
THE BLACK MAN DOWN!!!" Certain people are going to use your work as
political ammunition no matter what you write. Don't take them seriously.
In general, don't take Political Correctness seriously. The major points of
PC are worth looking after, but in all the myriad detail it becomes a lot of
control freakishness. Terms like "Feminazi" aren't just to be derisive of
an agenda, they comment upon the minute proscriptions of an extreme agenda.
The PC message can get absurd: you're not a good person unless you're
intellectual and neurotic about your sexuality.
> >I feel that only things that were
> >meant to be offensive actually can be offensive.
>
> I'm afraid I can't agree with you.
Indeed, it is true that people feel self-entitled to get pissed off about
whatever details they want to get pissed off about, however small.
Gabe McKean
Brandon J. Van Every wrote in message ...
>
>news:3acdb7c1...@news.xs4all.nl...
>>
>> I have read the entire thread and still do not see the problem. How
>> could nudity possibly be offensive? I feel that only things that were
>> meant to be offensive actually can be offensive.
>
>Mostly I agree. I think that this contains some assumptions about the
>audience, though. Like, they're not a bunch of fundamentalist Muslims or
>something. At any rate, I think positing imagined audiences and dangers
>thereto is neurotic. You can't win, you can't solve it, so just write.
<sarcasm>
Unless, of course, you have direct access to (a large portion of) your
audience; say, through a newsgroup or something like that. But who would
ever think of using that?
</sarcasm>
Brandon J. Van Every
"Sam Kabo Ashwell" <ka...@btinternet.com> wrote in message
news:B6F3C40E.3BC8%ka...@btinternet.com...
> Nudity per se isn't a problem. What annoys me is when a game takes on a
> soft-porn quality but refuses to admit that it *is* anything to do with
sex:
> make all the female characters run around naked giving each other
massages,
> but then pretend not to understand >FUCK, for example. It's on a par with
> otherwise respectable broadsheets publishing photographs of celebrity
> cleavage on no pretext at all, just because it sells, while assuming a
tone
> that it's really nothing to do with that. If you want non-sexual nudity,
> put it in: personally I think that's a totally seperate issue. If you want
> sexual content in your game, put it in- but for christ's sake be HONEST
> about it.
I admit, I don't like disingeneuity either. In fact in my own work I'm
rather adamantly against it. But I'd also observe that some deliberately
flippant people have done work that has stood the test of time and has
affected societal values, thereby achieveing the label of "classic." For
instance, Oscar Wilde.
> What you *shouldn't* do is slap in this kind of guilty voyeurism,
> which pretends sex doesn't exist, while nonetheless drooling slightly. (I
> need to analyse this properly and in greater length some time).
I call such behavior dysfunctional. Personally, I choose not to write
dysfunctional work. On the other hand, if someone is wrestling with their
own sexual dysfunctionality in a work, or with sexual dysfunctionality in
general, I'm not going to condemn them for it. I am going to suggest that
there are alternatives to their world view, and question the relevance of
their world view to contemporary society, or at least what the complete
systemic package of the relevance is. After all, the USA is a sex negative
culture and we are raised in cognitive dissonance about what we're supposed
to do with our pee-pees.
Robotboy8
>your armour, some of the messages you >get refer to nudity.
Wow. So I'm not the only person who plays Nethack. Remind me to retake my
$5.00 bet with Zack...
Brandon J. Van Every
>
> If I understand your point correctly (and it isn't easy, swamped as it
> is in reams of attention-seeking repugnance),
Well 8-p 8-p 8-p 8-p 8-p to you too!
> you believe that a
> creator should never compromise his or her work for the sake of
> pleasing an audience.
Hey, BINGO! Give the man a dollar.
Or as specifically noted later, not unless there's something else at stake.
Like how much money you're going to make off the book, or you need to lobby
against a piece of legislation that's going to change how people behave for
the next 50 years or something.
> But if that creator has something to say, and
> wants that message to reach as many people as possible, why should
> they not couch it in terms acceptable to the audience?
What's at stake for the author? The author should only bother with audience
acceptance if the stakes for him are rather high.
> Have you considered the possibility that Magnus might already have
> decided on the tone for the game as a whole and is attempting to get
> an idea of how people would react to the problem, better to judge
> whether or not including it would be out of place?
I hadn't, but it doesn't matter. Magnus' specific problem is a springboard
to many points of closely related discussion.
> Wouldn't including
> the puzzle without any thought to if it might seem out of place to the
> audience risk the compromise that you are so vehemently opposed to?
I had trouble with this sentence the first time. Allow me to reparse:
"If you include a puzzle, but don't think about what the audience considers
out of place, aren't you potentially compromising your first principle?"
My answer is: nope. Because "what the audience considers" is a fabrication
of your own mind, borne of your own world view. In reality, the audience
occupies a spectrum of opinions. Some people will get it, others won't.
Some people will appreciate it, others won't.
You can, if you want, benchmark the actual puzzle. Submit it to lotsa
people for testing. But this only measures the actual puzzle. It does not
measure all your pre-conjecture about what will or won't work, what is or
isn't acceptable. Also, I predict that it is unlikely you will get a
unanimous response to your puzzle. That is, unless you present it to a
homogeneous demographic. Ergo I think the benchmarking is rather much a
waste of time. Unless you are indeed trying to make money, and you're
trying to reach a broad common denominator demographic. Something has to be
at stake. Money, social control, something like that.
Brandon J. Van Every
"Duncan Stevens" <dn...@starpower.net> wrote in message
news:9alfut$gu7$1...@bob.news.rcn.net...
>
> He's not hypothesizing his audience--it's right here.
Really? Magnus writes only for r.a.i-f? You sure? Magnus, what say you to
this?
> He's asking it a question and getting a bunch of responses. Sure, not
> everyone who plays the game reads this newsgroup or will respond to the
> question, but Magnus's apparently sensible guess is that enough will do
both
> that he can get a fair sampling of opinion.
Why is this sensible? Why isn't r.a.i-f a rather small crowd with
self-selecting tastes?
> But my guess is that you're just posting so that you can write "clitoris."
> Hooray for you.
You're not a good guesser. I write "clitoris" to bring home the difference
in sensibility. Some people find it to be an absolutely horrible, shocking,
powerful word. Other people find it to be a word. You seem to be somewhere
in the middle, having ascribed it a special import and a special/wrong
purpose in my usage of it.
The thing is, all this talk about nudity is ABOUT something. It's about
sex. It's about cultural discourse surrounding sex. To understand that
discourse, you have to realize that it's *not* all about what's PC, what's
appropriate, what's considered polite conversation. Much as another poster
commented on advertizing spreads of celebrity breasts for no particular
reason, and denying their inherent sexuality, I point the same finger at
discussions of "appropriateness" without referants.
Brandon J. Van Every
"Gabe McKean" <gmc...@wsu.edu> wrote in message
news:9alage$1bt$1...@murrow.murrow.it.wsu.edu...
>
> I don't think the subject matter was the problem, but rather the way you
> 'framed' it, as you put it.
Well, I didn't frame anything by telling him to "shut the fuck up." 'Nuff
said.
Brandon J. Van Every
"Fillmore" <Nos...@Hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:cOqz6.1908$cF4.3...@news6-win.server.ntlworld.com...
>
> From what I know about Gunther, I very much doubt that he gives a toss
about
> the taboo content of what you say. Indeed, I get the feeling that, rather
> than being unhappy with the conversation as such, he just thinks your
> viewpoints are, on the whole, moronic, and not worth wasting his time
with.
Oh well. Since I'm quite comfortable in the integrity of my intellectual
stance, and can explain it at extraordinary length to anyone who cares, I
could care less about a person who holds such a view of me, if that is
indeed the motive for Gunther's response. Part of my attitude is that I
don't bother to figure out people who say they don't wanna play in the
sandbox.
Brandon J. Van Every
>
> I'm guessing you're just being deliberately obtuse now. (That implies that
> you weren't before, of course, but now it's much more obvious.)
Well, you guessed wrong. Let me offer you an alternative world view:
Brandon is not Evil [TM]. Brandon doesn't really say things he doesn't
mean. Brandon isn't the intellectual midget that others might make him out
to be. Brandon isn't even particularly nasty to people who aren't nasty to
him (although I will admit to some discordian debating tactics in the
general case). Rather, volumes of e-mail are inherently confusing and
fraught with communication difficulty.
Do you want to be constructive, or do you want to make sure that I'm as
obtuse as you want me to be?
> Magnus isn't interested in offending people. He's interested in (a)
writing
> a specific game and (b)*not* offending people.
I'll take your claim for (b) at face value. If so, Magnus should accept the
fact that he will offend some people no matter what he does, unless he is as
bland as Walt Disney.
> Likewise, if he didn't bother to ask and
> the consensus were that nudity is out, the larger point of the game would
go
> unappreciated as everyone deleted the game file in a huff.
Since when is Art invalidated for lack of a populist audience?
> You're free to think that Magnus is a dweeb for caring. (Sorry, Magnus.)
Don't presume to speak for my viewpoints or intentions. Ever. If you want
to know what my viewpoints are, ask and I will tell you.
> But kindly get out of
> the thread discussing whether people find nudity offensive, unless you
have
> something to say on that subject.
Get your own private mailing list.
Duncan Stevens
"Brandon J. Van Every" <vane...@3DProgrammer.com> wrote in message
>
> "Duncan Stevens" <dn...@starpower.net> wrote in message
> news:9alfut$gu7$1...@bob.news.rcn.net...
> >
> > He's not hypothesizing his audience--it's right here.
>
> Really? Magnus writes only for r.a.i-f? You sure? Magnus, what say you
to
> this?
It would be fairly silly for him to do anything else, considering that the
audience for text IF these days is largely right here. The vast majority of
games uploaded to the IF-archive are advertised primarily, if not
exclusively, through this newsgroup.
> > He's asking it a question and getting a bunch of responses. Sure, not
> > everyone who plays the game reads this newsgroup or will respond to the
> > question, but Magnus's apparently sensible guess is that enough will do
> both
> > that he can get a fair sampling of opinion.
>
> Why is this sensible? Why isn't r.a.i-f a rather small crowd with
> self-selecting tastes?
Who cares if it is? This is his audience. He wants to know what it thinks.
If you don't like the way this crowd thinks, don't let the door hit you on
the way out.
> The thing is, all this talk about nudity is ABOUT something. It's about
> sex. It's about cultural discourse surrounding sex. To understand that
> discourse, you have to realize that it's *not* all about what's PC, what's
> appropriate, what's considered polite conversation. Much as another
poster
> commented on advertizing spreads of celebrity breasts for no particular
> reason, and denying their inherent sexuality, I point the same finger at
> discussions of "appropriateness" without referants.
Sorry, but
***You have missed the point entirely***
This thread (as Magnus presumably envisioned it, given his original post)
is, in fact, "all about what's PC, what's appropriate, what's considered
polite conversation." It's about what the people here consider appropriate
enough to be unremarkable. Magnus is interested in staying on one side of
that line. You're free to write your wonderful game that Shows People The
Truth Of Their Sexuality-Denying Ways. Go write it. Magnus is writing
something else.
--Duncan
Duncan Stevens
>
> "Duncan Stevens" <dn...@starpower.net> wrote in message
> news:9alfk5$fbb$1...@bob.news.rcn.net...
> >
>
> writing
> > a specific game and (b)*not* offending people.
>
> I'll take your claim for (b) at face value. If so, Magnus should accept
the
> fact that he will offend some people no matter what he does, unless he is
as
> bland as Walt Disney.
Ridiculous exaggeration there, but even granting that, he's trying to bring
down the number of offended people. Obviously that's not something you would
do. Obviously it's something he would. Different strokes.
> > Likewise, if he didn't bother to ask and
> > the consensus were that nudity is out, the larger point of the game
would
> go
> > unappreciated as everyone deleted the game file in a huff.
>
> Since when is Art invalidated for lack of a populist audience?
Assuming you mean "popular": since the artist decided that he cares about
what the audience thinks, which is the artist's prerogative. And please
spare me another rant about how True Art Is Only Achieved In Defiance Of
Societal Norms.
--Duncan
Steve Evans
<vane...@3DProgrammer.com> wrote:
<snipped>
Part of my attitude is that I
>don't bother to figure out people who say they don't wanna play in the
>sandbox.
>
So what, if anything, do you try to figure out as you sit alone in
your sandbox.
ems...@mindspring.com
> Well, I also understood his question to be about whether he *should*
make
> people uncomfortable. My basic point is if he wants to, he should.
Then you misunderstood.
Since, however, you have remade this thread in your own image, I
proceed:
>> And there may be also be a use for smut. It is nonetheless a
valuable
>> skill (little relevance though it may have to you) to be able to
>> calibrate one's writing so that one knows whether it is likely to be
>> regarded as art or as verbal self-gratification.
> What the heck is the difference? To hearken to this debate in the
visual
> arts, have you seen "Ilonia's Asshole?" (sp?) It is, well, a
photograph of
> Ilonia's asshole. How about the Robert Maplethorpe photo with a whip
shoved
> up a black man's butt? If literature hasn't caught up with the
absurdity of
> this debate, if it hasn't recognized the fundamentally political
process of
> it, well then it's just behind the times.
'likely to be regarded as', I said. Of course the matter is political;
of course it is about ethos; of course the boundaries shift like sand in
the Sahara, over time and through cultures and depending on the mood of
the viewer.
That doesn't make the point irrelevant.
>> I find this curious, Mr. Van Every. I was answering the question
Magnus
>> put, and in terms that (I thought) made it clear I was speaking of my
>> own personal experience; you react as though it had been a feminist
>> tract designed to undercut your manhood.
> Yeah, well, so as a reader you get offended by certain things. My
pointed
> question is why?
What do you care why? As a reader I and my opinions don't matter to
you.
>> What interested me, and continues to interest me, is this: how does
the
>> author take into account the ethos of the reader?
> I say, he doesn't, and shouldn't. Unless he wants to (1) maniuplate
the
> audience, in which case he has to posit an ethos that he can
manipulate. In
> this case, what he posits is guaranteed to be wrong for at least
somebody,
> and likely a lot of people, because humans tend to fill out a spectrum
of
> subtly interleaved opinions.
This is a good point, but I'm not sure that you've grasped it fully
yourself. You've posited for me an ethos of Fear of Sex, composed of
crudely mingled puritanism and political correctness, and you have
continued to address yourself to that imaginary person despite her
non-existence and the irrelevance of your words to the actual content of
the rest of this thread.
Perhaps I should introduce myself more clearly; since you've been absent
from the group a long time, you may not be familiar with everyone. I'm
a classicist with considerable undergraduate work in art history and
criticism. [Lest this seem too airy-fairy for you, I also did a minor
in Physics. Nothing to keep your mind on Scientific Reality like the
threat of receiving an acute dose of radiation if you don't follow
protocols.] But I was drawn into Classics by ancient tragedy,
particularly Euripides: an author, if you are unfamiliar with him, who
was fascinated by Aphrodite, by Dionysus, by the savage and
irrepressible in the nature of humanity, and humanity's futile struggle
for civilized order. The collision of animal and divine, of the
transcendant and the bestial, is everywhere in Greek literature, from
the Iliad to the Symposium. (I understand that you eschew reading
books; if you like I will provide a synopsis, as you were kind enough to
do with the work of Maplethorpe [though as it happens I am aware of it],
but the issues are sufficiently complex that I doubt I could represent
them in equally pithy form.)
The other half of this equation, of course, is the upward tug that
counteracts this: the aspiration, which is based partly in pride and ego
and partly on a desire for the knowledge of gods, that makes an actual
struggle of this problem. If the base desire to procreate were the only
True Motivator among humankind, there would be no dilemma, only an
abundance of children. Plato posited an Aphrodite Pandemos (everyday
Aphrodite) and an Aphrodite Ourania (heavenly Aphrodite).
So you see, the issues to which you refer are not news to me, but in
fact the matter of my daily life and work; and I'm also familiar with
_The Fountainhead_, and _1984_, and Catullus 16, and various other works
of various periods that celebrate the ability of sex to disrupt the
hypocrisy of The System. The fact that I view these issues from a
slightly different angle doesn't bespeak ignorance, loathing, or
embarrassment. It's more that I recognize, with the Greeks, that
extremes often meet, and that there is a commerce between body and soul.
The animal functions of humanity need not be a source of humiliating
filth. I will skip any remarks about love that you would probably
disregard as female romanticization of sex, and just say this: anyone
who has ever enjoyed a really good Stilton knows that eating is not just
about the biology of fuel consumption.
> (2) ensure acceptance of his work amongst some
> demographic. In this case he can be "right" if he does sufficient
market
> research and test grouping. Of course, his work is going to become
more
> bland the more he prioritizes demographic acceptance over authorial
vision.
> Reaction from a crowd can only improve your work so much. At some
point,
> the feedback becomes insipid. If you go to its logical conclusion I
suppose
> you end up with Jerry Springer.
A fierce, Ayn-Randian conclusion, but surely you realize that here as in
so many places there is a range of possibilities. Magnus is not
addressing himself to a hypothetical and contemptible group of
uneducated sheep [whether this populace actually exists or not is
another question, but from your contempt I gather you believe they do],
but to a rather smaller set of people, many of them themselves authors;
characterized for the most part, though alas not universally, by their
intelligence, their imagination, and their generous respect. It is his
choice to select an audience whom he wishes to reach, and since it is
larger than himself alone, it is also reasonable for him to think about
and solicit information about the reactions of that group.
> I'm criticizing the perceived need of an author to be "nice" to get
others
> to read their work. Nice isn't the only way to go! How about being a
> deliberate troublemaker, like Andy Kauphman? How about telling the
Truth?
> The Truth gets lotsa lotsa people reeeeeaaaallly upset. I think
people who
> can't handle the Truth are weak, and deserve no pity. It's not that I
would
> seek to annoy them, it's that they're annoying themselves with their
> inability to face the Truth.
But in order to get someone to listen to your icky, difficult Truth, you
must first get them to give you a hearing at all. You do half the work
of denial for them if you come across as the epitome of what they
already know they despise. Revelation only comes with a certain amount
of reader consent. (Again, if you read, I'd recommend the Bacchae, on
this point; hell, I'll recommend it anyway. Maybe someone else will
read it.)
You might argue that this repugnance is really a mask for repressed
desire, etc., in a rather Freudian fashion, but the fact remains: if you
are going to get past the layerings of self-protection that the ego
provides, you have to take some care to how you phrase things.
> For instance, a Truth: people like to fuck.
That people enjoy sex is neither news nor the sole piece of information
that literature might wish to convey. And if you set out to make people
uncomfortable, you will get yourself ignored, not heard.
Fine, so you don't care about those people anyway. You care about the
other people who already agree with you-- but how much do you have to
say to them that is new? Surely you don't believe that no one has
tumbled to this fact already.
Or, again, if the act of writing is fundamentally meant to explore the
Truth *purely for your benefit*, then it seems you should be writing
about the things that *you* find difficult to face; not the gritty beast
quality of sex, whose unattractive manifestations seem to be old hat to
you, and whose vocabulary trips so lightly from your metaphorical pen,
but about that other thing, whatever it is, that strikes at the
fundament of your ego and makes you insecure.
Tell me, if you dare, that no such thing exists.
> As for Feminism:
<snip rant>
My point here wasn't that I didn't understand why you might be attacking
feminism; it was that I didn't see why you were attacking my post under
that name.
>> I think the deeper issue here -- though I admit I didn't think of it
in
>> quite these terms until I read your post -- is that there is an
implicit
>> relationship between author and reader, a kind of contract, if you
will,
>> in any piece of writing.
> I say, screw the contract. There's no cradle-to-grave contract in the
> workplace anymore, so why should there be in literature?
And I say that you can't avoid this. You can set out with a will to
make your reader uncomfortable, angry, and resentful; you can attempt to
make yourself persona non grata by attacking the ethos that reigns where
you choose to speak; you can assert Yourself, your prerogative, your
individual supremacy and right to speak The Truth; but all these things
still imply a relationship between yourself and the reader. It may be a
painful, irritating, perverse relationship that makes the reader wish
you would shut up and go away, but it remains, as long as your words
reach the reader's attention.
<author-reader relationship>
> This contract IMO is only a thing to be ignored or maniuplated.
I never said it should not be manipulated. On the contrary. The
inability to strike more than one type of rhetorical tone would appear
to me a serious deficiency in an author.
And if I might for a moment wrest attention back to the actual subject
of this newsgroup: the contract of player and author is particularly
important in IF, because, in a sense, the text requires your player's
cooperation even to come into existence. If he is repelled, or
confused, or does not understand the situation in which he is supposed
to be behaving, he will go away, even if he would otherwise have been
responsive to your message. You have no choice; as an author part of
the nature of the craft is giving clues to the player. Unless you are
writing for the 'receptive' person with the dubious joy of being able to
read your mind telepathically.
>> emotions. This is the sort of offense to which I was referring: if
the
>> author of a work -- the *author*, mind you, not the
>> narrator-as-character -- seems to be fundamentally incompetent to
speak
>> to my condition, then I reserve the right to disregard her.
> Which is fine. But again, why should that author have bothered to
consider
> you in the first place?
She should if she wants me to read it, and not if she doesn't. I
imagine that the editors of Maxim are not particularly disturbed by
their failure to garner my attention; on the other hand I suppose that
someone directly addressing me does want me to listen, so it is
considerably more surprising when such a person is offensive. And there
are of course a spectrum of intermediate examples.
> Let me invert this: a theory of Thanklessness. Let's say the author
really
> is very "nice."
<snip>
I'm not arguing for niceness, per se, but rather that one's
self-positioning, as an author, needs to be consonant with one's
authorial goals. Moreover, that beginning with an affront to a person
is a good way to lose that person from your audience. (Unless of course
the person has a masochistic enjoyment of being outraged; I wouldn't
want to preclude that possibility.) This is not compromise. It is
control. Such is the flexibility of language, such is the variety of
nuance and tone, that it is possible to couch the same truth in
thousands of guises, ranging from the banal to the arresting, from the
offensive to the thought-provoking.
It may be that for you, personally, the most visceral possible
expression is also the most effective; that intellectual phrasing
strikes you as neurotic; that delicacy bespeaks only repression. That
reading is not universal, however.
> Well, some people don't know how to be relevant, but froth and fume
anyways.
> They seem to enjoy hearing their own heads roar well enough.
I couldn't agree more.
> I am saying that the relation between author and audience isn't as
relevant
> as it's often made out to be. There has to be something at stake on
the
> table. Like how much money the book is going to make. Or if a law is
going
> to be overturned and set codes of public behavior for the next 50
years.
Or honor, or respect; or intellectual progress; or reputation; or
the sharing of pleasure. Something is always at stake, or the author
would chuck the work into the back of his desk drawer and forget about
it.
Let me ask you this. You have nothing to earn, and no laws will be
enacted. The evidence suggests that you have offended, or at least
annoyed, an assortment of people on this newsgroup, though I am not
personally party to the full history to which you allude. You are also,
by your assertion, uninterested in actually convincing anyone. But in
spite of there being apparently nothing at stake (at least, nothing of
the kind you listed), you have spent what must over the last couple of
days be man hours, crafting lengthy and passionate responses. Why
are *you* doing this?
You see, there has to be something, somewhere, in your belief system or
your personality that makes it worthwhile for you. I post to this group
out of an interest in the topics involved, a respect for the other
people on it, and a desire to make progress in our mutual understanding.
You strike me -- though of course I could be wrong -- as more of a True
Believer, though admittedly the Gospel of Fucking is considered by most
organized religions to be apocryphal at best. But you also apparently
have some reaction to what people are saying, or idea of what they think
of you; else, why would you be here?
Man may be a procreative animal, but he is also a social one. So I say
again, this ethos question is not irrelevant to everyone, even if you
do not recognize it as relevant to yourself.
ES
OKB -- not okblacke
>"Gabe McKean" <gmc...@wsu.edu> wrote in message
>news:9alage$1bt$1...@murrow.murrow.it.wsu.edu...
>>
>> I don't think the subject matter was the problem, but rather the way you
>> 'framed' it, as you put it.
>
>Well, I didn't frame anything by telling him to "shut the fuck up." 'Nuff
>said.
I'm trying not to add to the tension here, but, in all seriousness, what
is your motive in publicly applying profanity to someone who you believe has
already killfiled you?
--OKB (Bren...@aol.com) -- no relation to okblacke
"Do not follow where the path may lead;
go, instead, where there is no path, and leave a trail."
--Author Unknown
OKB -- not okblacke
>news:9alfut$gu7$1...@bob.news.rcn.net...
>>
>> He's not hypothesizing his audience--it's right here.
>
>Really? Magnus writes only for r.a.i-f? You sure? Magnus, what say you to
>this?
In an earlier post you implied that you believed Mangus was "writing for a
IF crowd". I think that the r.a.i-f readership and the entire IF audience are
quite close to being the same thing.
>> He's asking it a question and getting a bunch of responses. Sure, not
>> everyone who plays the game reads this newsgroup or will respond to the
>> question, but Magnus's apparently sensible guess is that enough will do
>both
>> that he can get a fair sampling of opinion.
>
>Why is this sensible? Why isn't r.a.i-f a rather small crowd with
>self-selecting tastes?
It is. So is California. So is the United States. What minimum number
of people must there be in a group before it is no longer "small"? As for
self-selecting tastes, doesn't everyone select their own tastes?
>The thing is, all this talk about nudity is ABOUT something. It's about
>sex. It's about cultural discourse surrounding sex. To understand that
>discourse, you have to realize that it's *not* all about what's PC, what's
>appropriate, what's considered polite conversation. Much as another poster
>commented on advertizing spreads of celebrity breasts for no particular
>reason, and denying their inherent sexuality, I point the same finger at
>discussions of "appropriateness" without referants.
If I'm not mistaken, Magnus's point IS about what's considered appropriate
-- by the people who play IF. I could be wrong, but I got the clear message
that the "referants" of this discussion of appropriateness are the members of
the IF community.
The Iconoplast
> is in reams of attention-seeking repugnance), you believe that a
> creator should never compromise his or her work for the sake of
> pleasing an audience. But if that creator has something to say, and
> wants that message to reach as many people as possible, why should
> they not couch it in terms acceptable to the audience?
If I'm a creator with something to say, imagine me with a bag. This bag has
everything in it that I want to say. Now ideally, I'd like to communicate
everything in the bag to my audience. However, if something in the bag
disturbs some of my audience (in other words, they don't agree with it), by
your reasoning I should take it out. Now my bag doesn't have as many
nuggets in it as it had before. By some sort of analogous logic, my
persuasiveness has been lessened. If I take everything offensive thing out
of it (by which I mean, others don't agree with it), then I'm left with
inoffensive drivel that doesn't contain any emotion anymore. By pleasing
the audience, I'm telling them nothing, I don't learn anything, and they
don't learn anything. The main reasoning behind showing an audience
something they don't agree with (by which I've said before to mean that it's
offensive) is to convince them of agreeing with what's being shown. If the
offensiveness/disagreement is gone, then there's no point in communicating
my knowledge.
> Have you considered the possibility that Magnus might already have
> decided on the tone for the game as a whole and is attempting to get
> an idea of how people would react to the problem, better to judge
> whether or not including it would be out of place? Wouldn't including
> the puzzle without any thought to if it might seem out of place to the
> audience risk the compromise that you are so vehemently opposed to?
Like I said above, better to leave everything in and see how it goes later.
Test audiences (this thread is like one to some degree) are for people
selling a product, not people trying to create a worthwhile work. Magnus is
best of doing what he wants to do, as long as everything he puts in is
justified in the piece.
-Adam
OKB -- not okblacke
with regard to my recent statements in the thread about being nice in your
posts. I'm doing my best.
"Brandon J. Van Every" vane...@3DProgrammer.com wrote:
>> I find this curious, Mr. Van Every. I was answering the question Magnus
>> put, and in terms that (I thought) made it clear I was speaking of my
>> own personal experience; you react as though it had been a feminist
>> tract designed to undercut your manhood.
>
>Yeah, well, so as a reader you get offended by certain things. My pointed
>question is why?
I don't see how this reply relates to the text you quoted.
>> What interested me, and continues to interest me, is this: how does the
>> author take into account the ethos of the reader?
>
>I say, he doesn't, and shouldn't.
I agree that he shouldn't HAVE to, but I don't think he should have NOT to
either. I agree that the author has no mandate from any higher power or moral
code to consider his audience, and I agree that worrying too much about your
audience can stifle your ability to create. I agree that artists are not in
any way obligated to consider their audience. I do not agree that artists are
somehow obligated to ignore their audiences totally.
>Unless he wants to (1) maniuplate the
>audience, in which case he has to posit an ethos that he can manipulate. In
>this case, what he posits is guaranteed to be wrong for at least somebody,
>and likely a lot of people, because humans tend to fill out a spectrum of
>subtly interleaved opinions. (2) ensure acceptance of his work amongst some
>demographic. In this case he can be "right" if he does sufficient market
>research and test grouping.
I would add (3) get feedback. If the author wants to know how people felt
about his work, so that he can use that information in further work, he'd
better produce something that people will at least look at, not something that
people will discard out of hand.
Of course, feedback is not NECESSARY, but neither are (1) or (2). The
point is, if the author wants feedback, he should attempt to get it.
>> The fact is that if something appears to me to be pornographic, and I am
>> not interested in pornography (not interested at all, not interested at
>> the moment, not interested in this type), I am more likely to set the
>> work aside than to seek its further merits.
>
>Nothing wrong with that. But why should the author have sought your
>attention in the first place?
Because he felt like it, if nothing else. Just as the author can write
whatever he wants (without regard for the audience's opinion) on a whim, so he
can seek the opinion/attention of a reader or group of readers if he so
chooses.
I don't see why listening to the audience is so much more undesirable than
shutting your ears to them.
<snipped discussion of sexuality and feminism>
>Whew, that was quite the rambling diversion through the funhouse mirrors!
Yes, it was. Without trying to be harsh, I'd like to say that I think it
was also totally off-topic, an unnecessary distraction from your main point,
and that, for me, the house was not fun at all.
>I am saying that the relation between author and audience isn't as relevant
>as it's often made out to be. There has to be something at stake on the
>table. Like how much money the book is going to make. Or if a law is going
>to be overturned and set codes of public behavior for the next 50 years.
>Without something at stake, this is only so many angels dancing on the head
>of a pin.
I agree. But there are intermediates between "no stake at all" and "a law
that will be in effect for 50 years" -- for example, whether people will like
you, or whether people will read your work. The relative "importance" of these
stakes is up for grabs, but they are stakes nonetheless.
KayCee
news:3acd7b8f$0$1910$b45e...@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu...
> Maybe we should assume all characters are nude unless clothing is
> explicitly mentioned. It's an interesting visual for a lot of
> games. Particularly hack-and-slash dungeon-type things.
>
In a similar vein, I must confess I was interested in "Masquerade" by the
PC's self-description - "You are wearing a pair of shoes, a pair of
stockings and a dress." I wasn't able to find any use for the shoes or
stockings in the game, so couldn't help wondering why they were specifically
mentioned when other garments weren't. It seemed to imply that there WERE
no other garments, which felt rather...breezy.
...KayCee
OKB -- not okblacke
>> wants that message to reach as many people as possible, why should
>> they not couch it in terms acceptable to the audience?
>
>What's at stake for the author? The author should only bother with audience
>acceptance if the stakes for him are rather high.
You said it yourself: the stakes FOR HIM. What you consider high stakes
others may consider unimportant, and vice versa.
OKB -- not okblacke
I wasn't bored, but I didn't see how it was relevant.
<snipped description of former girlfriend>
>If that ex-girlfriend of mine picked up your work,
>you wouldn't know what made her tick. *She* doesn't even know what makes her
>tick.
But you do?
Brandon J. Van Every
"OKB -- not okblacke" <bren...@aol.comRemove> wrote in message
> "Brandon J. Van Every" vane...@3DProgrammer.com wrote:
> >Shoot, man, at the risk of boring you with the sordid details of my life,
>
> I wasn't bored, but I didn't see how it was relevant.
I suppose I'm trying to broaden the subject of nudity taboos and authorial
decisions to something more general purpose than what Magnus may have
originally been after.
> >If that ex-girlfriend of mine picked up your work,
> >you wouldn't know what made her tick. *She* doesn't even know what makes
her
> >tick.
>
> But you do?
Well, I was around her long enough to feel I understood some patterns about
her. I honestly think that some people are clouded / in denial about
certain aspects of their existence, and for people not similarly clouded,
it's easy to perceive. That said, I suppose one could claim moral
relativity and that we can't really "know" anyone at all. I'm more of a
functional realist pragmatist so at some point I just call a spade a spade,
declare mystificaton of human impulses to be bunk, accept our existence as
somewhat simplistic, and move on.
The anthropologists say that people invest an extraordinary amount of time
maintaining their public images, that shell of behavior that is deemed
socially acceptable. Put glibly, when the market researchers ask people
about how often they brush their teeth, people give the answers that are
socially correct, i.e. twice a day, rather than their actual behavior.
Probing deeper somehow got the result, once upon a time in some era, that
most people brushed their teeth mainly to freshen their breath. Not the
functional purpose, not what your dentist told you to do. Ergo the origin
of mouthwash as a product.
Brandon J. Van Every
> Brandon J. Van Every wrote in message ...
> >
> >audience, though. Like, they're not a bunch of fundamentalist Muslims or
> >something. At any rate, I think positing imagined audiences and dangers
> >thereto is neurotic. You can't win, you can't solve it, so just write.
>
> <sarcasm>
> Unless, of course, you have direct access to (a large portion of) your
> audience; say, through a newsgroup or something like that. But who would
> ever think of using that?
> </sarcasm>
Me personally, I would never write a work of IF thinking r.a.i-f was a
sizable percentage of my potential audience. You guys are grand, even if I
can't stand at least a voicferous 5% of you, which I can't say of any other
newsgroup I've ever graced. But you're also more intellectually homogeneous
than heterogeneous. I would want my work to be regarded by writers and
readers everywhere, not just who hang out in 1 newsgroup. I have a sense of
realism about how small Usenet really is, and especially how quickly it is
shrinking. In c.s.i.p.g.s people actually do statistics on exactly how much
the readership is shrinking. There is much more to game design and IF
authorship than r.a.i-f. Much more.
You guys are like an oasis, in a desert, in a far larger world with many
continents.
Brandon J. Van Every
"OKB -- not okblacke" <bren...@aol.comRemove> wrote in message
> "Brandon J. Van Every" wrote:
> >> But if that creator has something to say, and
> >> wants that message to reach as many people as possible, why should
> >> they not couch it in terms acceptable to the audience?
> >
> >What's at stake for the author? The author should only bother with
audience
> >acceptance if the stakes for him are rather high.
>
> You said it yourself: the stakes FOR HIM. What you consider high
stakes
> others may consider unimportant, and vice versa.
Ok, what potential stakes are there?
- money
- power (i.e. the legal example)
- social acceptance
- religious/cultural duty
- career prestige
It is true that in pursuing works of Art, I could care less about my social
acceptance. I care so little for it that I argue against it. Others may
have their social acceptance greatly at stake. I'll ask them "Why?" Why
limit your creative options in that way? More importantly, why stress
yourself out over that?
Religious / cultural duty, I'm an atheist and don't play well with other
children in the sandbox. 'Nuff said.
Career prestige, well I think lionization within your career is something to
be taken on your own terms, not someone else's. You lead and change the
discourse, you don't knuckle under to it.
Do you think there are a lot more kinds of stakes than what's on my list? I
can't think of any more right now, but maybe you can. If so I'd like to
hear about them.
Brandon J. Van Every
> >
> > Really? Magnus writes only for r.a.i-f? You sure? Magnus, what say
you
> to
> > this?
>
> It would be fairly silly for him to do anything else, considering that the
> audience for text IF these days is largely right here. The vast majority
of
> games uploaded to the IF-archive are advertised primarily, if not
> exclusively, through this newsgroup.
That smacks of parochialism. Why wouldn't / couldn't Magnus be writing for
writers and readers everywhere? People who haven't heard of IF yet? People
who have heard of it, but don't hang out in r.a.i-f? People who aren't even
born yet? It's a mistake to think that the world revolves around r.a.i-f.
Now, maybe you're right, maybe Magnus really is primarily interested in this
particular audience. But it would not be "silly" for him to envision a
broader reach, and I wouldn't assume an author's imperative without his
say-so.
Put another way, good writing is good writing. Always has been, always will
be.
> Who cares if it is? This is his audience. He wants to know what it thinks.
Ok, maybe I'm coming late to the party. Where did Magnus say "I want to
know about nudity in IF because you guys in RAIF are my primary audience and
source of approval?" Maybe you have a long history with Magnus and know it
to be so. But I would not assume it.
> If you don't like the way this crowd thinks, don't let the door hit you on
> the way out.
Oh please. Aside from other things wrong with your point, do you really
think "this crowd" is *that* intellectually homogeneous?
> Sorry, but
>
> ***You have missed the point entirely***
>
> This thread (as Magnus presumably envisioned it, given his original post)
Oh really! There you go, presuming Magnus' mind again, as though it is your
own. Never mind that his original post is open-ended, with objectives
unspecified. Never mind that it could serve as a relevant site of several
discourses. No sireeee, simple izz as simple doezz!
Let me put it this way. I think "Why are you even worried about this is in
the first place?" is a perfectly valid argumentative tack to take in
answering Magnus' original question.
Let's be real clear what the original question was: "What do people think of
puzzles involving the PC having to undress?"
He asked what I think, and I think *a lot*. But not the simple "it's good,
it's bad, it's unremarkable, it shouldn't make us uncomfortable" that some
posters chose as their response. If the game isn't supposed to have any
sexual content, than why is "uncomfortable" even an issue? Because when you
make people nude, there's sexual content whether you want to pretend it's
there or not. THAT'S WHY. (That was the point of my ex-girlfriend example,
BTW.)
If someone else thinks a *little* that's fine too. Live and let live.
Doesn't mean I have to, or that my contribution to the thread is Wrong [TM].
Brandon J. Van Every
"OKB -- not okblacke" <bren...@aol.comRemove> wrote in message
> "Brandon J. Van Every" wrote:
> >"Duncan Stevens" <dn...@starpower.net> wrote in message
> >news:9alfut$gu7$1...@bob.news.rcn.net...
> >>
> >> He's not hypothesizing his audience--it's right here.
> >
> >Really? Magnus writes only for r.a.i-f? You sure? Magnus, what say you
to
> >this?
>
> In an earlier post you implied that you believed Mangus was "writing
for a
> IF crowd".
Prove it. Find the direct quote. I get tired of people inserting their own
assumptions into my statements, as though they are my assumptions and not
theirs.
> I think that the r.a.i-f readership and the entire IF audience are
> quite close to being the same thing.
Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and thermonuclear weapons.
I don't think you realize how many people have played IF games in the past,
but do not do so now, and do not hang out in RAIF. Nor are you considering
all the people that might someday try out IF. Nor all the people who
utilize IF in some form other than a pure text adventure.
> >Why is this sensible? Why isn't r.a.i-f a rather small crowd with
> >self-selecting tastes?
>
> It is. So is California. So is the United States. What minimum
number
> of people must there be in a group before it is no longer "small"?
Well, Charlie's Angels at it's peak had 66 million viewers. *That's* a mass
market, that's large. You got those kinds of numbers? Myst sold 4 million
copies. As far as chasing a mass market is concerned, that's small, even if
it's big for the games industry. Any works in the IF archive seen that kind
of readership? Maybe the old classics, but I doubt any of the new ones
have. How about 300,000? If memory serves, I think that's a
not-too-successful break-even commercial game title. That's small. Less
than that, you're talking serious niche.
> As for self-selecting tastes, doesn't everyone select their own tastes?
Not as a matter of group behavior. People often sublimate individual taste
to the needs and purposes of a group.
> If I'm not mistaken, Magnus's point IS about what's considered
appropriate
> -- by the people who play IF. I could be wrong, but I got the clear
message
> that the "referants" of this discussion of appropriateness are the members
of
> the IF community.
There weren't any explicit referants in his question to the IF community,
nor to RAIF being the IF community. I took his question as open-ended about
nudity in IF in general.
Brandon J. Van Every
"OKB -- not okblacke" <bren...@aol.comRemove> wrote in message
> >
> >Well, I didn't frame anything by telling him to "shut the fuck up."
'Nuff
> >said.
>
> I'm trying not to add to the tension here, but, in all seriousness,
what
> is your motive in publicly applying profanity to someone who you believe
has
> already killfiled you?
I've decided I'm not going silently into the night on this one. Over a year
ago, I had some heated debates with people in this forum, and killfiles
resulted as a product of heated discourse. That hasn't happened this time.
Instead, I got crap from Adam Cadre out of the blue, about how he doesn't
like my personal style based on something that happened over a year ago.
Then bites and stings from various people jumping on the bandwagon, none of
it having any debating referants at all. Just attacks on my character,
including a thread about me. So I'm consistently labelling all my responses
with FUCK YOU to clearly indicate to people that there's no debate going on,
there never was any debate, I'm not going to entertain a debate. FUCK YOU
is my way of stating that I do not dignify the responses, and I am angry.
In 8 years of heavy Usenetting, uniform replies of FUCK YOU to several
people is not something I've ever done before. And I've pissed off many a
person in a debate! Congratulations, your newsgroup RAIF is uniquely
priveledged to have a shining 5% populace that can draw it out of me. Must
have something to do with some of those people being the leading members of
your community. Although in truth, I haven't killfiled Adam Cadre. Even if
I find his ability to hold a grudge legion and ridiculous, I did not find
his barb to be quite as inflammatory as those of latter posters.
Jason Melancon
<jdb...@MailAndNews.com> wrote:
>>===== Original Message From m...@pobox.com (Magnus Olsson) =====
>>Also there's the fact that she's apparently not wearing anything under
>>the coarse dress - again, this doesn't send any sexual signals as it
>>might in our world - but rather one of, well, spartanity, not caring
>>much for comfort. Either she or her mysterious master doesn't treat
>>her very well.
>
>Interesting, delayed reactions. This didn't hit me at the time I played
>Meta, but I experienced the same effect as Magnus describes above when I was
>playing. Hmmm... an impact without conscious awareness. Then again, I
>usually need Cliff's notes to tell me the literary significance of anything
>I read.
Enh, seems to me a bunch of implemented underclothes and so on would
have been distracting, red-herring-like. I guess there's a limit to
the utility, or applicability, of simulationism after all.
--
Jason Melancon
Brandon J. Van Every
>
> Ridiculous exaggeration there, but even granting that, he's trying to
bring
> down the number of offended people. Obviously that's not something you
would
> do. Obviously it's something he would. Different strokes.
I'm curious, in this calculus of reduced offenses, what's the goal that
Magnus wants? I have a simple goal: I don't care. Piss off everybody if
that's what it takes! But Magnus cares, so he has a tougher problem, unless
he wants to be as bland as Disney. When does Magnus stop caring? When does
he start caring? When are the imagined demographic numbers high/low enough
for him? I don't think these questions are quantifiable without a lot of
money to do market research, it's finger-in-the-air conjecture. So really,
the bright line has to be about what Magnus wants. Which was my original
point: do what *you* want, not what the audience wants. The audience is
going to want a whole spectrum of things on a bell curve, and it's you, the
author, who must decide where you want to stand on the bell curve.
> Assuming you mean "popular": since the artist decided that he cares about
> what the audience thinks, which is the artist's prerogative.
"The audience" doesn't think one thing. It occupies a spectrum on a bell
curve. Talking about what "the audience" thinks is a fiction. You invent
that audience to affirm your own world view.
Unless, of course, as others have pointed out, your writing really is aimed
only at people who read RAIF.
> And please
> spare me another rant about how True Art Is Only Achieved In Defiance Of
> Societal Norms.
Actually I don't recall that being my rant. I ranted about Truth in art,
which isn't the same thing as the moral valuation "true art" as you are
using it. "true art" could be composed entirely of Lies, as Oscar Wilde was
fond of doing.
I never said "only achieved," but I do think you obey societal norms at your
own peril. The more norms you obey, the more demographics you imagine you
have to please, the more you will water down your work. It is like the
other poster said, about his bag of rocks. In the extreme case you end up
with Jerry Springer.
Magnus Olsson
Brandon J. Van Every <vane...@3DProgrammer.com> wrote:
>
><ems...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
>news:9aj7cf$2pe$1...@news.panix.com...>> As I understood it, however, Magnus was asking for information about
>> what would make people uncomfortable. I was answering his question, not
>> writing a comprehensive essay on the Purpose of Literature or the Nature
>> of Gender Relations; nor was anything I said meant to be proscriptive
>> about what should be written.
>
>Well, I also understood his question to be about whether he *should* make
>people uncomfortable.
No, sorry, Emily is right: I wanted to know what makes people
uncomfortable.
>My basic point is if he wants to, he should.
And I will, be sure of that.
--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se, m...@pobox.com)
------ http://www.pobox.com/~mol ------
Magnus Olsson
Branko Collin <col...@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>On 6 Apr 2001 14:57:18 GMT, m...@pobox.com (Magnus Olsson) wrote:
>>But my concern is not with those people. My concern is that I'll not
>>only have a female character in the game who takes her clothes off,
>>but I'll actually be making the player *play* that character.
>>
>>And if that's insensitively done, I'm afraid some players will be
>>offended - for example if they feel that the PC is being objectified,
>>or made to do titillating things to provide thrills for male players.
>
>I read somewhere else one of your more recent answers, in which you
>say that you have a hard time putting yourself in the shoes of a
>woman. Why don't you ask a woman to help you with that part of your
>game?
No, That's not really the problem. Since this thread is turning into
a morass of flames (how's that for a mixed metaphor? :-) ), I think
I'll save that discussion for another thread.
>I still feel this has nothing to do with nudity.
You're right. Nudity was just used to illustrate a point.
>>>I feel that only things that were
>>>meant to be offensive actually can be offensive.
>>
>>I'm afraid I can't agree with you.
>
>I hope I have not offended you. ;-)
Not at all :-).
What I meant was that intent doesn't really count. Some people are
offended by "Harry Potter" because they think the books glorify black
magic (OK, those people are on the loony fringe of religious
fundamentalists, but they are people, and have a right to be offended).
I'm sure that was very far from the author's intentions.
In this case, the postmodernists are right: authorial intention
is irrelevant.
Brandon J. Van Every
<ems...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:9altoo$8gv$1...@news.panix.com...
>
> This is a good point, but I'm not sure that you've grasped it fully
> yourself. You've posited for me an ethos of Fear of Sex, composed of
> crudely mingled puritanism and political correctness, and you have
> continued to address yourself to that imaginary person despite her
> non-existence and the irrelevance of your words to the actual content of
> the rest of this thread.
Ah, but you have mistakenly assumed that your own position in the thread is
of fundamental importance to me. Rather, I injected materials that people
could respond to. It doesn't matter if people didn't/haven't responded to
them, they were available materials, and are representative of issues that
artists mull over when contemplating nudity, sexuality, and society. Just
because they're not a part of *your* bell curve, today, doesn't mean they
aren't part of the bell curve. We're just limited in how much we
can/will/are willing to talk about all at once.
> Perhaps I should introduce myself more clearly;
Thanks. I mean that. But my responses got so long that I'm now editing
them ruthlessly. And not ruthlessly enough, this is still *long.*
> Magnus is not
> addressing himself to a hypothetical and contemptible group of
> uneducated sheep [whether this populace actually exists or not is
> another question, but from your contempt I gather you believe they do],
Well, yes they do. Our media frenzied, time crunched society creates it. I
call it "Innundation." Even intelligent people are so innundated by
information overload, that they behave stupidly in any realm that isn't
directly important to them. Such behavior is defensible: it is an efficient
allocation of priorities. Still, intelligent people behave stupidly because
there isn't enough brainpower in anyone's head to be brainy about everything
24-7. What does this say for people who are less-than-bright? I sure hope
that ignorance affords some form of bliss, because otherwise, they're
goners.
> But in order to get someone to listen to your icky, difficult Truth, you
> must first get them to give you a hearing at all.
Must I? How about I plant the land mine somewhere, and they run into it?
> You do half the work
> of denial for them if you come across as the epitome of what they
> already know they despise.
Go rent Man On The Moon. Andy Kauphman's joke on everybody was exceedingly
long term.
Also, recall I did not say (hmm, is that possible?) that I sought converts.
If someone has an opportunity to explore Truth, but doesn't choose to do so
because they are invested in seeing the world as they wish to see it, that
does not concern me. They can continue to delude themselves and pass the
reading by. Only those who want to awaken are going to awaken. I am not
interested in forcing people to take their first steps, they should take
their own first steps.
> Revelation only comes with a certain amount of reader consent.
No, that is too easy. Revelation is hard, and takes courage. Those without
the courage to face their own perceptions aren't going to make it.
> (Again, if you read, I'd recommend the Bacchae, on
> this point; hell, I'll recommend it anyway. Maybe someone else will
> read it.)
Sounds interesting, I'll look for it. Only ancient book I've read lately
was the Poetics.
> You might argue that this repugnance is really a mask for repressed
> desire, etc., in a rather Freudian fashion, but the fact remains: if you
> are going to get past the layerings of self-protection that the ego
> provides, you have to take some care to how you phrase things.
Not my paradigm. My paradigm is, the Tao will trick you.
> Fine, so you don't care about those people anyway. You care about the
> other people who already agree with you-- but how much do you have to
> say to them that is new?
Is the Tao new?
> Surely you don't believe that no one has tumbled to this fact already.
Of course they have. But in the pop cultural shopping bag, the eternal
Truth does not get much press. And this leads people to neuroses about lots
of things they don't need. Ok, it is true I offer a first door, a message
easily digested that people can follow: you don't have to be neurotic about
the audience concerns and whatnot. You don't have to ground your work in
audience expectations, it's a fabrication of your own mind anyways. But
walking through that door, it is not my job. Each person has to walk
through *their own* door.
> Or, again, if the act of writing is fundamentally meant to explore the
> Truth *purely for your benefit*, then it seems you should be writing
> about the things that *you* find difficult to face; not the gritty beast
> quality of sex, whose unattractive manifestations seem to be old hat to
> you, and whose vocabulary trips so lightly from your metaphorical pen,
> but about that other thing, whatever it is, that strikes at the
> fundament of your ego and makes you insecure.
>
> Tell me, if you dare, that no such thing exists.
"No such thing exists."
And remember, before your brain gears start whirring and buzzing with
outcomes, that I said the Tao will trick you. Contact me by private e-mail
2 weeks from today if you want to hear a longer answer. If not, or even if
so, it is your door....
> > As for Feminism:
> <snip rant>
> My point here wasn't that I didn't understand why you might be attacking
> feminism; it was that I didn't see why you were attacking my post under
> that name.
It was a material put on the table.
> > I say, screw the contract. There's no cradle-to-grave contract in the
> > workplace anymore, so why should there be in literature?
>
> And I say that you can't avoid this.
You can't avoid people having their own expectations, that they will layer
upon your work. But contract??!? There's no money changing hands here, why
should there be a contract? The author and the reader don't owe each other
anything.
> You can set out with a will to
> make your reader uncomfortable, angry, and resentful; you can attempt to
> make yourself persona non grata by attacking the ethos that reigns where
> you choose to speak; you can assert Yourself, your prerogative, your
> individual supremacy and right to speak The Truth; but all these things
> still imply a relationship between yourself and the reader. It may be a
> painful, irritating, perverse relationship that makes the reader wish
> you would shut up and go away, but it remains, as long as your words
> reach the reader's attention.
Really? I'd say there's a spectrum of people on this newsgroup. Again,
"the reader" is a fiction borne of your own world view.
> And if I might for a moment wrest attention back to the actual subject
> of this newsgroup: the contract of player and author is particularly
> important in IF, because, in a sense, the text requires your player's
> cooperation even to come into existence.
Which begs a question of whether the text *needs* to come into existence.
But let's assume it needs to come into existence because you *want* it to
come into existence.
> If he is repelled, or
> confused, or does not understand the situation in which he is supposed
> to be behaving, he will go away, even if he would otherwise have been
> responsive to your message.
You are positing that the player *needs* to continue, to something called
"The End," and that this has something to do with the player responding to
"the author's message." To my mind, that's a lot of suppositions. True of
a mass audience's expectations, but a lot of suppositions.
> You have no choice; as an author part of
> the nature of the craft is giving clues to the player.
There is always choice. If you feel you have no choice, you are not
creative. Well, at least you're not creative enough to survive a
meaningless universe.
> Unless you are
> writing for the 'receptive' person with the dubious joy of being able to
> read your mind telepathically.
That is not the only possibility. You might be writing as a mirror, so that
the person sees themself more than they see your fabricated "authorial
message." You might be writing with the deliberate aim of making the reader
put the work down, to challenge how far they're willing to go with it. For
instance, a choose-your-own-adventure that reeenacts the Holocaust. How far
would you be willing to go?
> > Which is fine. But again, why should that author have bothered to
> > consider you in the first place?
>
> She should if she wants me to read it, and not if she doesn't.
And what if she left that decision in your hands?
> I'm not arguing for niceness, per se, but rather that one's
> self-positioning, as an author, needs to be consonant with one's
> authorial goals.
I'm arguing that we have a lot less control over authorial goals than we
like to believe, and we codify "the reader" with the wrong model. We should
be habitually forced to use a plural, "the readers." Even that is really
not enough.
> > I am saying that the relation between author and audience isn't as
> relevant
> > as it's often made out to be. There has to be something at stake on
> the
> > table. Like how much money the book is going to make. Or if a law is
> going
> > to be overturned and set codes of public behavior for the next 50
> years.
>
> Or honor, or respect; or intellectual progress; or reputation; or
> the sharing of pleasure. Something is always at stake, or the author
> would chuck the work into the back of his desk drawer and forget about
> it.
Now wait a minute. Of your laundry list, I'll acknowledge "the sharing of
pleasure" as a subsidiary goal of mine. I do write to please people other
than myself, but that's not the main goal. I give it a really low weight.
The main goal for me is intellectual progress. But whose intellectual
progress is it? It's *my* intellectual progress, first and foremost.
Secondarily, there is perhaps the measure of intellectual influence. But
influence becomes really petty when you start considering the cosmic scheme
of things. Even much of Aristotle's work is lost in the sands of time.
Your own work is going to be lost, someday. Maybe your work is good for a
few hundred years, maybe a few thousand, but then what?
So really, there's this shell game where our egos delude us into thinking
that we must achieve intellectual relevance. Yet our intellects tell us
that logically, it doesn't matter in any ultimate sense. And there lies the
dissonance. How much is your puny existence worth? That's the basic
Existential crisis. Why are we choosing any one thing over another? There
are ways out of this trap, but it's all a shell game.
At any rate, what's at stake is not social. It's personal. Basically, your
own sanity.
If you can delude yourself with social structures, I suppose that's a way to
keep your sanity. But it is not possible to have both society and Truth at
the same time.
> Let me ask you this. You have nothing to earn, and no laws will be
> enacted. The evidence suggests that you have offended, or at least
> annoyed, an assortment of people on this newsgroup, though I am not
> personally party to the full history to which you allude. You are also,
> by your assertion, uninterested in actually convincing anyone. But in
> spite of there being apparently nothing at stake (at least, nothing of
> the kind you listed), you have spent what must over the last couple of
> days be man hours, crafting lengthy and passionate responses. Why
> are *you* doing this?
I love a good argument! I derive tremendous pleasure from it, much like
others might prefer to turn on the TV. It often provides glimpses of Truth,
and occasionally I get to share something with kindred souls along the way.
It keeps my neurons in shape. Literally. There have been studies on that
sort of thing, that exercising your brain is as important as exercising your
muscles. The stimulation is different than the other intellectual
stimulations I do or don't get in a day, although truth be known, I have
other forums to draw upon where dialogue is more universally constructive.
This is actually a form of slumming it, I run a moderated mailing list
surprise surprise. You might call it the intellectual equivalent of sowing
wild oats. Also I do like yanking people's chains when I know that all I've
done to yank their chains is argue with integrity. It is a form of
self-validation to see people condemn me for arguing rationally, even if the
emotional side of me finds it slightly unpleasant. Hey, a horror movie is
unpleasant too, right? How can you put people through unpleasant authorial
experience if you never face unpleasantry in your own life? Finally, it's
just easy to get caught in the sweep of things, by scripted patterns of
behavior that usually have more reward than suffering. I think I originally
came here for something else, a simple question about the Erasmatron. I got
that answer, but then there were, like, 2 juicy topics worth arguing about.
What do you guys come here for? To talk RAIF tech notes, compare cobbling
skills, bond, and affirm your committments to each other as a community?
Including inclusive/exclusive behavior?
> You see, there has to be something, somewhere, in your belief system or
> your personality that makes it worthwhile for you.
Yep! I gave you quite the laundry list above, have fun dissecting it.
> I post to this group
> out of an interest in the topics involved, a respect for the other
> people on it, and a desire to make progress in our mutual understanding.
> You strike me -- though of course I could be wrong -- as more of a True
> Believer, though admittedly the Gospel of Fucking is considered by most
> organized religions to be apocryphal at best. But you also apparently
> have some reaction to what people are saying, or idea of what they think
> of you; else, why would you be here?
Well, it's really to see what Ideas people can marshal to the problem. "Go
fuck yourself" is not an idea, I'm not here for that. You've been Best Of
Show so far. I did, however, enjoy the other poster's explanation about the
bag of rocks.
Brandon J. Van Every
"OKB -- not okblacke" <bren...@aol.comRemove> wrote in message
>
NOT to
> either. I agree that the author has no mandate from any higher power or
moral
> code to consider his audience, and I agree that worrying too much about
your
> audience can stifle your ability to create. I agree that artists are not
in
> any way obligated to consider their audience. I do not agree that artists
are
> somehow obligated to ignore their audiences totally.
Well I see it as more of a "if you want X, do Y" proposition.
> I would add (3) get feedback. If the author wants to know how people
felt
> about his work, so that he can use that information in further work, he'd
> better produce something that people will at least look at, not something
that
> people will discard out of hand.
Actually that's a good point I didn't think of. An experiment, a test case.
> Yes, it was. Without trying to be harsh, I'd like to say that I
think it
> was also totally off-topic, an unnecessary distraction from your main
point,
> and that, for me, the house was not fun at all.
Waaaaah. Pick up brick. Throw brick. Say, "I hate this" to robot.
> I agree. But there are intermediates between "no stake at all" and "a
law
> that will be in effect for 50 years" -- for example, whether people will
like
> you, or whether people will read your work. The relative "importance" of
these
> stakes is up for grabs, but they are stakes nonetheless.
Fair enough; I don't think about people in RAIF liking me, because I've
already determined who likes, tolerates, and despises me quite in advance of
having presented any work! :-) Sometimes I wonder if presenting a work
would change some people's opinions of me. But to me, the joke is that I
would not have changed, there would just be a work. So what would that say
about the people who disliked me, then decided they liked me, if such there
were? Hopefully, people who dislike me now will always continue to dislike
me, until they go through their own doors and *they* change. I'm just going
to continue being me.
John Colagioia
> In article <3ACDC7FE...@csi.com>,
> John Colagioia <JCola...@csi.com> wrote:
> >Magnus Olsson wrote:
> >> Of course; but if I reach that stage and get a negative reaction,
> >> major rewriting may be necessary. (It's not just a case of a river
> >> having to be crossed.)
> >Well, depending on the point, perhaps you want a small amount of offensiveness.
> >It would be far better to make the player feel mildly uncomfortable than, for
> >example, to simply print out, "you feel rather uncomfortable standing here
> >without pants."
> Yes, I do intend to use the enforced nudity to make the player
> uncomfortable (because it's in character for PC to be uncomfortable in
> the situation).
So far, so good, then.
> But I want the player to be uncomfortable for the right reason -
> because the situation is unpleasant, not because she feels the author
> is a jerk :-).
Well, that's going to be in the writing. Not the situation.
OK, technically SOME people will just be bothered by the situation, and will call
you a jerk outright. Same would probably happen if you portrayed combat, theft, or
any number of other activities, so I'd rule those people out right off the bat.
But, yeah. I'd write it and hand it off to a few people who you can trust to know
what you're looking for and ask them to...well, "edit" is a strong word, but at
least comment on where the language might be "shifted" to convey what you want.
> >In fact, to use the same example as Ms. Short, I actually thought that was part
> >of the point of Heroine's Mantle at the beginning, coercing the player into
> >empathizing with the heroine's plight. That didn't last long, of
> >course. But it
> >could have, if carried through consistently.
> The scene with Mistletoe in the restroom could have been very
> effective in that regard if it had been done a bit more
> sensitively. As it was, it was more icky than cathartic.
I didn't even find that problematic. Well, no moreso than reading a fight scene by
somebody who's never fought or studied combat, anyway--I considered it more
"uninformed" than "icky." Or maybe the ickiness of the situation made me feel for
the character, and I "displaced" my feelings onto Mistletoe, rather than the
author. Who knows?
The descriptions of underwear, however, I thought were definitely far too much, and
there was no character around to blame.
Nospam
writes
>>2) If the PC has a personality, only allow it if it's in character.
>
>But the PC may have no choice in the matter - what if she *has* to
>cross the river?
I think this is where the puzzle element that was referred to comes in.
Simply removing clothes, tying up in a bundle and swimming across may be
the very straight forward answer. An obtuse programme about surviving in
the Australian Outback, called Bush Tucker Man, tackles the problem of
crossing a river and keeping clothes dry in said straight forward
manner. Even so it has a problem solving element to it using local flora
and a plastic bag (the latter of course may not be available, especially
to a Victorian lady).
I'm don't know how many players would have a problem with nudity, for my
own part it is not something I immediately consider within a game. The
author may develop the issue and so raise the question, as a forced
river crossing in the nude may do. That in itself need not be a problem
either because the player doesn't care about nudity or the player
perceives it as something within the character of the PC. For it to be
an issue I would expect the author to make it so (this applies to me,
others may have different views). It could be as simple as a failure to
find appropriate clothing leads to a dead end within the game, such that
I know that I have to either get my clothes across or obtain some new
clothes. Equally the author may have made it clear that this is
something the PC would only do under duress. The answer might remain the
same but in such a scenario I would spend time trying to find a solution
for the PC that accorded with the PC's own views/social
mores/inhibitions. It is this latter puzzle that potentially holds out
some interesting interaction between the PC, the player and the game
overall.
Cheers
Versif
Adam Cadre
following untruth more than once, so...
Brandon Van Every wrote:
> I got crap from Adam Cadre out of the blue, about how he doesn't like my
> personal style based on something that happened over a year ago.
This is incorrect. Reread my post. It was not a "barb," and made no
reference to any of your previous appearances. It was simply alerting you
to the fact that the persona you were projecting *this time around* was
acting as a barrier against people accepting or even considering your
arguments.
Now, you've said you don't care about that. My mistake was in assuming
that when you mentioned having written in a "debating manner for years
and years and years," that that's what you were attempting to do here.
And debate *is* about persuasion. Not persuasion of the person whom
you're debating, but of the people reading or listening and making up
their minds -- the people who are coming out of the woodwork to say that
your abrasiveness has led them to conclude that you're "an absolute moron"
(not my words) whose ideas are unlikely to be worth their time.
But now you say that:
> there's no debate going on, there never was any debate, I'm not going to
> entertain a debate.
So, again, apparently I was mistaken as to your goals here. Back-and-forth
argumentation yes, debate no, it seems. Fair enough.
-----
Adam Cadre, Brooklyn, NY
web site: http://adamcadre.ac
novel: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060195584/adamcadreac
Jason Melancon
<vane...@3DProgrammer.com> wrote:
>Let me offer you an alternative world view:
>Brandon is not Evil [TM]. Brandon doesn't really say things he doesn't
>mean. Brandon isn't the intellectual midget that others might make him out
>to be. Brandon isn't even particularly nasty to people who aren't nasty to
>him (although I will admit to some discordian debating tactics in the
>general case). Rather, volumes of e-mail are inherently confusing and
>fraught with communication difficulty.
I don't think you're evil. I don't think anyone here thinks you're
evil, or stupid. I think we want you to participate! Come play in
*our* sandbox.
Despite the fact that I'm jealous of the amount of attention you've
managed to draw, I remain convinced that the gains from the approach
you seem to have decided upon would feel hollow to me. Unfortunately,
I'm not very good at modelling any better approach. But with your
ebullient personality, you wouldn't have any problem gaining a real
following, with interesting, friendly, on-topic posts that engage
people in a dialogue that they will be interested in on *your* terms.
--
Jason Melancon
Tom Waddington
>> If I understand your point correctly (and it isn't easy, swamped as
>> it is in reams of attention-seeking repugnance), you believe that a
>> creator should never compromise his or her work for the sake of
>> pleasing an audience. But if that creator has something to say, and
>> wants that message to reach as many people as possible, why should
>> they not couch it in terms acceptable to the audience?
> If I'm a creator with something to say, imagine me with a bag. This
> bag has everything in it that I want to say. Now ideally, I'd like
> to communicate everything in the bag to my audience. However, if
> something in the bag disturbs some of my audience (in other words,
> they don't agree with it), by your reasoning I should take it out.
No, no, no. That isn't what I was trying to say at all. Compromise
doesn't necessarily mean fatal compromise.
For example, consider a story about a one night stand. There are a
large number of people who believe that sex is a dirty and casual sex
even more so. If you want to open with a sex scene and then show the
events leading up to it for dramatic effect, the segment of your
audience with the most to learn from the story will put it down at
scene one. Organise the story more conventionally and you have a
chance to try and make them understand why a man might want to spend
one night with that vision of Ishtar he glimpsed across the dance
floor, despite the knowledge that one night is all it could be. You've
told the same story with the same elements, but more people will be
willing to hear you out, even if they don't agree with you at the end.
Be seeing you,
--
Tom Waddington
Tom Waddington
>> If I understand your point correctly (and it isn't easy, swamped
>> as it is in reams of attention-seeking repugnance),
> Well 8-p 8-p 8-p 8-p 8-p to you too!
Was it an unfair assessment?
>> But if that creator has something to say, and wants that message to
>> reach as many people as possible, why should they not couch it in
>> terms acceptable to the audience?
> What's at stake for the author? The author should only bother with
> audience acceptance if the stakes for him are rather high.
If the author is trying to write something that will be enjoyed by a
specific group of people, they should probably get an idea of what
will offend those people.
>> Have you considered the possibility that Magnus might already have
>> decided on the tone for the game as a whole and is attempting to
>> get an idea of how people would react to the problem, better to
>> judge whether or not including it would be out of place?
> I hadn't, but it doesn't matter. Magnus' specific problem is a
> springboard to many points of closely related discussion.
And apparently also completely unrelated discussion.
>> Wouldn't including the puzzle without any thought to if it might
>> seem out of place to the audience risk the compromise that you are
>> so vehemently opposed to?
> I had trouble with this sentence the first time. Allow me to
> reparse:
Apologies for any lack of clarity.
> "If you include a puzzle, but don't think about what the audience
> considers out of place, aren't you potentially compromising your
> first principle?"
That isn't what I was getting at. If you're aiming for a particular
atmosphere, including something that spoils that atmosphere is going
to compromise your grand vision.
Writers get very close to their work, often too close to be sure that
something says what they want it to. At such times it can help to ask
for other opinions.
Tom Waddington
>> forcing the player to do things they don't want to, or don't feel
>> are in character. People get surprisingly passionate about this
>> issue.
> Probably a function of Ego. Try getting on a MUD some time and
> spoofing people, or creating a robot that mimics their actions.
> People *hate* that sort of thing. People have a profound need to
> control what's going on with them. When you throw them into an
> unusual circumstance, a lot of people get really obsessive about
> maintaining their self-images. A lot is at stake for them.
That's a lot of words you've used to repeat what I'd already said
there, Brandon.
> Replace "doubt" with "tremendous concern" and I'd agree with you.
> Doubt? There is no doubt whatsoever. People occupy a spectrum of
> opinions. Someone is going to get pissed off, probably because they
> enjoy getting pissed off.
I don't think anybody else is talking about trying to please
everybody, but instead trying to write about things the target
audience might not like in such a way that they won't just quit the
game in disgust.
>> possible solution that requires sex or nudity; one particularly bad
>> taste example I remember playing years ago opened with you playing
>> a female spy in a jail cell.
> Hey, what's that title? I wanna play!
`Natasha', if I remember correctly. An old MSX game.
>> 1) Keep it tasteful.
> Aw c'mon. Put a dildo in there somewhere, otherwise it won't be any
> fun! What's a little Clockwork Orange between friends....
You seem to be assuming that I would be offended to find a sex aid in
a game. I wouldn't, but neither would I think particularly highly of
an author who included it for the sake of some vicarious sexual
thrill.
Clockwork Orange is clever. Including elements you think will offend
people with no thought for their purpose in the plot is not.