On Jan 10, 2:14 pm, Jim Aikin <midigur...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I do think that "sound pretty" is needlessly pejorative, because both
> setting the mood and immersing the player in the scene both require
> wordage, none of it necessarily "pretty" or included merely for the "sound."
Perhaps you underestimate how much I value the musicality of prose.
However, I'll accept the criticism and try to address this more
fairly. Of course I believe that setting the mood and immersing the
player are important; but my experience suggests that the *immersive*
effect works best, in this medium, if the player is allowed to
discover some of the physical details himself, through EXAMINE, TOUCH,
SMELL, etc.; having these richly layered creates far more of a You Are
There experience than a room description heavy with detail and minimal
follow-up descriptions.
As to mood, on the other hand-- well, I have two answers. One is that
some of the most effective writers of mood create their effect not
with a large number of common details (the flowers are red, the door
is yellow, etc) but with a small number of very particular ones; and I
think that that is especially true in IF.
As I've said before, I think words in interactive fiction
*individually* carry more weight than they carry in static prose, if
only because of the amount of attention we demand the player give to
each one. We ask people to notice, to remember, to wonder about, in a
way that static fiction authors do not. At the end of reading a short
story, would you be able to sit down and write out a list of all the
objects the author mentioned? It would be absurd -- but I suspect you
could come much closer to producing such a list for an IF game you'd
just finished. In fact, for some games I can still visualize scenes
and critical inventory objects years after playing, in some cases
complete with tactile impressions and sounds and even smells. So there
is, at least potentially, a lot more moodiness available in a given
thing that you mention in IF, just because of how much the player gets
involved with it.
I've often noticed how particular and detailed and physical are the
descriptions in P. D. James' mystery novels: she likes to spend quite
a lot of time describing people's clothes, possessions, and living
spaces as a way of revealing their personalities. But, for all their
apparent similarity to IF descriptions, I think I would find these to
be overkill in an IF game. They'd need to be shortened and tightened
and focused, because each sentence would do the work of three or four
sentences in the static prose version. In this respect IF is closer to
poetry than to conventional prose: it is worth taking more time to
select fewer words, because each one will be inspected through a
jeweler's loupe.
The other answer is: yes, fine, if the object matters to the mood of
the piece, then mention it -- and implement it! I'm *not* arguing
against putting in objects that don't have a puzzle function. But I'm
also not particularly impressed by the argument that it's just too
much trouble for the author to implement all the things that he put
into his descriptions. If you've got a clear and specific vision for
your work, then, in my experience, you also have the motivation to
carry that vision out, even if it means making an extra three or four
objects per room.
> My bias in this whole discussion, which I may as well make explicit, is
> that I'm also a writer of conventional fiction. That being the case, I'm
> a lot more interested in story than in gameplay, and I'm reluctant to
> sacrifice story values for the sake of giving players a more satisfying
> gaming experience.
I think (sorry) that this is bogus. I mean, I believe your statements
about your intentions; my experience of your released work has mostly
involved puzzle-heavy, story-light material, but possibly you're
changing focus, and I haven't tried Lydia's Heart, so perhaps that
nails the plot better than Last Resort. But whatever your background
and artistic intentions, I think saying "well, I care about story, so
I don't mind making the player have a harder time playing" is a cop
out, and I also think it doesn't recognize what's most interesting
about writing *interactive* stories.
> The fact that two paragraphs, or even three, might be needed to describe
> the setting of an important scene doesn't faze me at all. Granted,
> reading text on a computer screen is less than ideal, but I've been
> doing it for more than 20 years, and I don't find it especially taxing.
> This whole thread has helped me understand the extent to which other IF
> authors are coming from other backgrounds, such as RPGs. For those
> folks, a more utilitarian approach to prose may indeed be preferred. I
> hadn't really considered that angle before.
publish, no, but wrote -- a fair amount of conventional fiction before
coming to IF; read writing books, participated in workshops, the whole
bit. RPGs, on the other hand, were barely on my radar.
I tried to argue against the story/game dichotomy in my longer post. I
realize it's pretty much accepted dogma in IF discussions that there
are these two separate components that are fighting one another for
dominance, and I think that may in fact have been a good description
of the state of the field when Graham Nelson wrote his "narrative at
war with a crossword" line in the mid-90s. But I *don't* think that
expresses the best of what IF is now, and I certainly don't think it
describes the ideal future of the medium. The trick for interactive
storytelling is to make the player's actions fundamentally part of the
way he comes to understand the story's meaning.
If that doesn't sound interesting to you, and you're indifferent to
the interactive experience of the player, then you're working in the
wrong medium.
A concern for interactive functionality doesn't mean that the prose
has to be "utilitarian". Let it be lyrical, let it be elegant, let it
be polished. Let it evoke ruined empires. Let it turn tight corners in
a small space. Let it sound like music. Let it do all those things and
*also* guide the player.
This doesn't have to be an either/or. To do both is harder, yes -- but
weren't you telling us all to put on our fins if we want to swim with
sharks?
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