The Five Senses.
Andrew C. Plotkin
possible, including lots of senses. (Why stop with five? There's the
sense of balance -- recall the bit of Unnkul 0 (?) where you suffer
vertigo on the edge of a cliff. Senses of electrical charge, wind, air
pressure, humidity -- of course, these are all called "touch" by boring
people. Go wild.)
Excerpts from netnews.rec.arts.int-fiction: 24-Apr-94 The Five Senses.
Gerry Kevin Wilson@uclin (7873)
> Oh yeah, while I'm on the subject, it turns out that I would like
> to include digitized sound in the IBM, Amiga, and Mac versions of Sight
> Unseen.
Spellcasting 1/2/301 had this sort of thing. It demonstrated pretty
conclusively that tacking some sounds into a text game is exactly as bad
(or good) as tacking a few graphics in. (I turned them off within
minutes.)
The same issues present themselves as with graphics -- 1) make sure the
user can switch the sounds off; 2) make sure that switching them off
doesn't lose important game information; 3) make sure that #2 is
mentioned in the documentation.
> Preferably with an interrupt key built in.
Definitely. Nothing worse than forcing the player to wait and listen to
some footsteps he's already heard fifteen times before. Better yet, have
the sound play in the background and let the game continue immediately
-- that way the player can whiz through known sections of the game at
normal speed but still listen for unusual noises.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
Gerry Kevin Wilson
do it myself. After all, I'll be writing a game soon that only deals
with four of them. It's easiest to discuss each sense seperately.
1. Sight - Sight is almost always a major part of any text adventure.
But, in my opinion, is seldomly used as well as it could be. Consider
Adventure with its volcano room, since that seems to be the most well
known room in IF. The room is very 'busy', there's a lot going on there,
a lot of motion, nearly a visual assault. Nobody, except perhaps Steven
Spielberg, could do justice to this room in a movie or picture. The
image summoned up is one of Hell, one that Dante would be proud of. But
what makes this room so visually interesting? Well, obviously the motion
is part of it. All that lava and steam and sulfer bubbling around. The
other thing effective is the sheer number of things described so
prosaically. Lastly, I think that the authors just spent a lot of time on
that room, refining it until they had what they wanted. Just remember
these things when writing room descriptions.
1.) Our eyes are drawn to motion first. It's an instinctive thing
dating back to our hunting days.
2.) Even a very mundane item can be described in flowing terms if you
put the effort into it. A sword, for instance, can have details such as
a large nick halfway down the blade, a splash of rust near the tip, and a
weathered leather wrapping around the handle. An item doesn't even
neccessarily have to be useful in the game to look interesting, although
the player may try and do something with it if it is.
3.) We don't see the world in black and white, even if our monitor is
monochrome. Colors are essential to an effective visual presentation.
Lastly, I'd just like to mention that I think this technique works more
effectively when applied to a few select rooms in your game rather than
every room. It has more emotional impact that way.
Ok, now that I've detailed what I'll be doing without in Sight Unseen,
I'll try and expand more on the senses that I will be using.
Hearing - Sound has been largely ignored in IF, which is a shame. It is
second only to sight in the amount of information it can gather for the
player. Really, I shouldn't say second, because it can gather just as
much info as sight if attention is paid, and the listener can recognize
the sounds. Think of how much information you hear just sitting in your
room. Is it quiet? Then nobody's around, or if they are, they're not
moving around. Do you hear laughter and the sounds of a ball being
kicked or hit? Someone's playing a sport outside your window. Do you
hear footsteps? Someone's walking nearby, and you can tell whether
they're walking towards or away from you unless the place you're in has
weird acoustics. You can tell when someone is fixing breakfast, or
watching tv, or making love upstairs, or having an argument, all sorts of
things. Now consider how much of this usually makes it into IF. I know,
I'm guilty too. Avalon neglects sound just as much as the next game. I
can think of only two places I used it, once to mention the lack of birds
in Avalon, and once when you hear a voice nearby and follow it to its
source. Oh yes, actually you also deal with the loss of hearing in one
spot. Three rooms. That's a pretty lousy record for a game with about
50 rooms so far. I think I'll go back and pay more attention to it as I
read through my room descriptions. I can think of one point where
breathing should definitely be heard, and another that could use the
crash of the thundering surf. That's just off the top of my head. I
mean, we concentrate on all the human noises in IF, and neglect the
background sounds when it's in our own best interest to include them. So
look over your game with an eye for sound. :)
Oh yeah, while I'm on the subject, it turns out that I would like
to include digitized sound in the IBM, Amiga, and Mac versions of Sight
Unseen. If you have experience in programming sound for these computers,
drop me a note, because I'd like to get someone to write TADS user exits
that will play .voc files over a soundblaster compatible card, Amiga, or
Mac. Other sound file formats are okay as well as long as they have good
clarity and a few good editors out there for them. I plan to use the
directed dialog module in this game and I'd like to have the responses
spoken. Preferably with an interrupt key built in. It'll also be used
for background noises like footsteps, cars, buses, etc. Of course text
will still be displayed along with the voices. It should make for an
interesting technical twist.
Smell - Of course, most of us can't afford to include scratch n' sniff
cards with our games, so we do the next best thing and describe the
smells. The tangy scent of oranges, the fresh smell of a pine forest,
the sweet smell of a forest meadow filled with flowers in bloom...these
things have a very strong emotional impact on people. Consider the smell
of cookies baking. Doesn't that make you feel comfortable, and a bit
hungry? What sort of memories does it evoke? Grandma, most likely. Now
think what an excellent trap that smell would make. The adventurer is
wandering around some caves...dum de dum.. *sniff* Mmmm...cookies. He
follows the smell, and ends up on the dinner menu of some monster who
smells like chocolate chip. :) Or think, what if you lived alone, and
you came home to the smell of cookies baking. Now, you're sure that you
didn't put any cookies in the oven before you left, so who did? I'm sure
you see how this works now, so I'll move on to the next sense.
Touch - Here's another highly underrated sense in IF. Touch is our only
real link to reality, if you think about it. How do you know that
something is real? Sure, you can see and hear it, but you could be
hallucinating for all you know. Touch is the final arbitrater on what is
real, and what isn't. If you can feel it, then it doesn't matter what
else you think you see or hear, you know it's there. And consider all
the textures we encounter everyday. Sharp, rough, smooth, fuzzy,
serrated, squishy, doughy. gritty, hard, soft, etc. There's a lot to be
learned by touching things. Think of the difference between having a
knife waved at you, and feeling its point pricking at your neck. One is
frightening, the other terrifies into immobility. Consider trying to put
your back against the wall in a dark cave and bumping into something
large and hairy. Consider the feel of running your hands through
someone's hair, be they lover or whatnot. When choosing the warmest
blanket for the night, which do you go for, the quilted one, or the fuzzy
one? We touch things all the time, every day, and half the time we don't
even notice what we're feeling. Well, maybe we should pay more attention.
Taste - I put this sense last because it has very limited usefulness in
real life and in IF. To be sure, it's a great sense, but we don't use it
unless we're eating something, and you can't eat all the time. Of
course, it might be useful to tell the difference between salt and sugar,
or two other similar substances, but that's about all we use it for.
Although it might be nice to slip it into your game sometime. Maybe
include little bags of powder or something. :) It could be interesting,
but it anyone puts 'decaying corpse' in there, they'll hear from my lawyer.
--
<~~~~~E~~~G~~~SIGHT~UNSEEN~~~LOST~IN~THE~FOG~~~CYBER~CHESS~~~SPAM~~~|~~~~~~~>
< V R I O Software. We bring words to life! | ~~\ >
< T "We at Vertigo apologize for the delay. Sorry." | /~\ | >
<_WATCH for Avalon in early AUGUST!___wh...@uclink.berkeley.edu__|_\__/__>
Lucia Greco
games is visually impaired users, one of us being included in
that group. If sound is to be used, it should not interfere with
any screen reader software. I realize this can be hard to check
for authors, but that is what beta testing is all about :-).
Seriously, I think it is quite novel that while so many IF games
are very visual in their rendering of scene (not implying
graphically, but textually), they are nonetheless so popular with
people who don't use that sense in their daily lives.
Mike Duigou & Lucia Greco
Gerry Kevin Wilson
Re: Visually impaired reader software
Don't worry, I'm taking that into account and will try and get a few
betatesters that use those programs. After all, it would be foolish not
to, since, as you say, the blind compose a good chunk of the current text
adventure following. I thought about that as soon as I decided to add
sound to it. I'll probably have an option to turn off text display, or
sound, in order that neither interferes with the other.