[general] The Prose Medium and IF
Jim Aikin
has never played _any_ text-based games, to try it out. Here is an
edited version of her response:
"I was easily able to download the interpreter and open the story. I
read through the instructions and sample, and got to a point where I
moved compass-wise to the window and a painted-shut garage door, and
realized I had to find a key. I must admit I prefer visual puzzles to
verbal puzzles, or visually pleasing surroundings. It's 'work' for me
to visualize where I am with only a verbal description."
This suggests to me that if we want to entice more people to try (and
enjoy) IF, we may need to put a lot more effort into providing evocative
descriptions of the places and objects in the games.
I plead guilty to writing terse descriptions of rooms in the classic
post-Adventure mode. Here is the entire description of opening location
of the game she tried playing:
"The sidewalk runs east and west. To the south is a busy street, to the
north a tall fence. Just ahead to the west the fence ends, and beyond
the corner of the fence is Mrs. Pepper’s driveway."
To be sure, this follows a three-paragraph intro that's more
interesting. But at no time during the development of the game did it
occur to me (nor, I'm pretty sure, did it occur to my co-author) that
this room description was utterly, baldly inadequate. Nor did any of the
testers (who are experienced IF players) complain.
I expect that experienced IF players may complain that they don't want
to read long, boring room descriptions -- and especially not
descriptions that mention half a dozen irrelevant objects that you can't
interact with, but have to examine to learn that they're irrelevant.
The question is, who are we writing for? Are we writing exclusively for
the tastes of the tiny community of a few hundred people who are
currently playing the games? Or would we like to appeal to a broader
audience?
There are ways to approach this problem. For instance, a game might
implement a "capsule" mode that would be halfway between "verbose" and
"terse." In capsule mode, the room description would resemble old-style
IF, mentioning only a few salient features, while verbose mode would
provide a more colorful, immersive experience.
What do others think of this line of thought? I'm curious.
--Jim Aikin
Victor Gijsbers
> "The sidewalk runs east and west. To the south is a busy street, to the
> north a tall fence. Just ahead to the west the fence ends, and beyond
> the corner of the fence is Mrs. Pepper’s driveway."
I think the problem with this room description is not that it is not
evocative enough; the comments of your wife give me the same idea.
Adding more stuff in the description just makes it _harder_ to visualise
something, doesn't it? You have to visualise more.
The problem with the room description is that it describes a highly
complex geometrical situation, without helping the player to easily
construct a visual mental model. Seasoned IF player probably have
developed skills that quickly allow them to map a description like the
one above onto a mental grid; but I must say that I too would have to
reread your description a couple of times to get the picture clear.
After all, you are describing the relative locations of five different
landmarks (hard enough to make sense of quickly), and THEN you add the
clause "just ahead to the west", which involves the character's spatial
orientation and a revision of one of the original five landmarks. The
"beyond the corner of the fence" is even more taxing, partly because I
don't know which of the two corners you are referring to.
I just think you are putting too much new spatial information in your
room description, rather than putting in too little visual detail.
Regards,
Victor
Jim Aikin
>
> I think the problem with this room description is not that it is not
> evocative enough; the comments of your wife give me the same idea.
> Adding more stuff in the description just makes it _harder_ to visualise
> something, doesn't it? You have to visualise more.
I guess I'd have to disagree with that conclusion, and in pretty strong
terms. Let's compare two cases. Visualize (a) and (b) and tell me which
is harder:
a) "You're standing in front of a small white house."
b) "You're standing in front of a small white house with a red tile
roof. The chimney tilts a little at the upper end, in a way that's
either rakish or alarming (depending, perhaps, on whether you're the
homeowner, which you're not). Window-boxes full of bright red tulips are
mounted below the twin windows on either side of the yellow dutch door."
I would expect that the main reason that more IF authors don't do the
latter ... well, there may be several reasons. First, the traditions of
the medium date back to the days when 64K was a generous allotment of
memory. Second, not thinking about the writing very much, because you
know players will just skim it in any case. Third, as I mentioned
before, any noun in a description is an invitation: 'x tulips', 'x
window-boxes' 'x windows', 'x chimney', 'x dutch door', 'x roof' --
multiply that by 50 rooms and it's a lot of work to implement, with no
gain whatever in terms of gameplay.
> I just think you are putting too much new spatial information in your
> room description, rather than putting in too little visual detail.
You may be right about that. Time to go back through all the room
descriptions....
--JA
Victor Gijsbers
> I guess I'd have to disagree with that conclusion, and in pretty strong
> terms. Let's compare two cases. Visualize (a) and (b) and tell me which
> is harder:
>
> a) "You're standing in front of a small white house."
>
> b) "You're standing in front of a small white house with a red tile
> roof. The chimney tilts a little at the upper end, in a way that's
> either rakish or alarming (depending, perhaps, on whether you're the
> homeowner, which you're not). Window-boxes full of bright red tulips are
> mounted below the twin windows on either side of the yellow dutch door."
For me, the first.
I can visualise a small white house quite easily; it becomes a lot
harder if I have to tack on a red tile roof, a chimney, window-boxes
with tulips and a yellow door. Just trying to keep all the details
together in one coherent picture makes my head hurt. (Well, not really,
but you know what I mean.)
Perhaps we mean different things when we speak of "easy to visualise",
or perhaps our minds just work differently?
Regards,
Victor
Jim Aikin
> Jim Aikin wrote:
>
>> I guess I'd have to disagree with that conclusion, and in pretty
>> strong terms. Let's compare two cases. Visualize (a) and (b) and tell
>> me which is harder:
>>
>> a) "You're standing in front of a small white house."
>>
>> b) "You're standing in front of a small white house with a red tile
>> roof. The chimney tilts a little at the upper end, in a way that's
>> either rakish or alarming (depending, perhaps, on whether you're the
>> homeowner, which you're not). Window-boxes full of bright red tulips
>> are mounted below the twin windows on either side of the yellow dutch
>> door."
>
> For me, the first.
Erm.... I assume you mean the first is easier for you, not harder,
right? Perhaps I should have phrased my question the other way.
> I can visualise a small white house quite easily; it becomes a lot
> harder if I have to tack on a red tile roof, a chimney, window-boxes
> with tulips and a yellow door. Just trying to keep all the details
> together in one coherent picture makes my head hurt. (Well, not really,
> but you know what I mean.)
No, I'm afraid I don't. If you can't keep five different elements of a
simple, coherent visual picture in your head at once ... I'm at a loss
for words. Really. I don't understand why that would be even faintly
difficult, or why you would prefer to avoid it.
I could speculate that perhaps you prefer vagueness because it saves you
the trouble of visualizing anything at all, but I'm not sure that's what
you're saying, and I certainly don't want this to degenerate into an ad
hominem discussion. Can you clarify what you mean?
--JA
George Oliver
> This suggests to me that if we want to entice more people to try (and
> enjoy) IF, we may need to put a lot more effort into providing evocative
> descriptions of the places and objects in the games.
>
>
> The question is, who are we writing for? Are we writing exclusively for
> the tastes of the tiny community of a few hundred people who are
> currently playing the games? Or would we like to appeal to a broader
> audience?
What you're saying is that more detail in descriptions (maybe you mean
only room descriptions, but I suspect this includes all descriptions)
will appeal to people like your ex-wife who haven't played IF. For
some people this probably is true. But she admitted she prefers
"visual puzzles" to verbal puzzles, and honestly the more detail you
put in a description the more confusing it's going to get for her.
In prose you can have the most difficult, complex passage -- but you
have an out, because there is another paragraph, another sentence, and
the reader just has to keep reading to make the transition.
Put that difficult passage in IF and not only does the reader have to
process the information, they have to figure out how to make the
transition. That can get really difficult.
I think in writing for interactive, minimalism is a good choice.
Some middle ground between terse and verbose sounds like a good idea.
Pulling spatial information out of the description and putting it in a
status bar or mini-map window helps too. You could have objects and
exits listed, so as the player goes along in a single room they don't
have to worry about re-orienting themself.
George Oliver
> Let's compare two cases. Visualize (a) and (b) and tell me which
> is harder:
>
> a) "You're standing in front of a small white house."
>
> b) "You're standing in front of a small white house with a red tile
> roof. The chimney tilts a little at the upper end, in a way that's
> either rakish or alarming (depending, perhaps, on whether you're the
> homeowner, which you're not). Window-boxes full of bright red tulips are
> mounted below the twin windows on either side of the yellow dutch door."
(B) is harder for me to visualize, not only because there are more
details to process, but the description itself is somewhat confusingly
written. On the other hand I find (a) to be, though simple,
evocative.
Poster
Jim Aikin <midig...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Since our WIP is intended for newcomers to IF, I asked my ex-wife, who
> has never played _any_ text-based games, to try it out. Here is an
> edited version of her response:
>
> "I was easily able to download the interpreter and open the story. I
> read through the instructions and sample, and got to a point where I
> moved compass-wise to the window and a painted-shut garage door, and
> realized I had to find a key. I must admit I prefer visual puzzles to
> verbal puzzles, or visually pleasing surroundings. It's 'work' for me
> to visualize where I am with only a verbal description."
>
> This suggests to me that if we want to entice more people to try (and
> enjoy) IF, we may need to put a lot more effort into providing evocative
> descriptions of the places and objects in the games.
>
Evocative, yes, but making something memorable does not rely JUST upon
description, but in the way an object responds to the player. Richness
in action; concise and incisive descriptions.
I agree that directional information is best placed elsewhere, like on a
status line, although a room description should not be utterly bereft of
it. Rather, the room description should describe directions in a more
natural sense: "Up ahead is a weathered mahogany door and crouching at
either side are dark, narrow alcoves." The status line would show exits
to the N NE and NW.
-- Poster
www.intaligo.com Building, INFORM, Seasons (upcoming!)
sge...@hotpop.com
easier for me to picture something (or understand someone else's
picture) if I am given an evocative description (Jim), but it takes
more mental effort to visualise something you are given a lot of
detail about (Victor). Personally, I think an evocative description
wins hands down every time. I love games, and believe me when I say I
think gameplay is important, but the unique thing about IF is the
story. I can get the same sort of gaming pleasure I get from solving
an IF puzzle from many video games, but the story experience you get
can only be acheived elsewhere by reading a book. Some people might
argue that many modern video games also give you a story, and they do
to some extent, but they would find it difficult to achieve the kind
of depth possible with text. It is like the difference between reading
a book and watching a film (sorry, movie in American). If you read the
book first, the film is often disappointing, because it cannot match
up to the wealth of detail supplied in the book.
What I am trying to say is that, in my opinion, the story is more
important than the gameplay. This may spark some controversy, but that
is what I think. So, the terse description of the street is poor
because it is written for gameplayers, not as if it were a real street
you were trying to describe. Some compromise is inevitable, but I
think this description is aimed firmly at making it easy for the
player to type in a direction, rather than conjuring up a picture in
their mind.
To return to the example:
"The sidewalk runs east and west. To the south is a busy street, to
the
north a tall fence. Just ahead to the west the fence ends, and beyond
the corner of the fence is Mrs. Pepper's driveway."
A quick re-write:
"You are standing on a sidewalk that runs east-west, looking south at
the busy street where traffic races past at speeds fast enough to
break the law, but slow enough for the police to ignore. Behind you,
to the north, is a tall wooden fence with a strip of spikes attached
to its top to deter intruders. A little further down the sidewalk to
the west, the fence ends, and Mrs Pepper's driveway begins."
Now this is not great prose, I admit, but I think it gives a better
picture. It introduces only one new thing to examine (the traffic),
but the description for the fence is already there, meaning a bit less
work. It also brings the player into the scene ("You are
standing..."), which the original does not.
I am not saying my version is better, but I think every description
should be written to evoke a picture in the player's/reader's mind,
not just tell them the layout of the game map.
Jim Aikin
<sighs deeply> I give up. If you honestly think (b) is harder to
visualize, while (a) is more evocative ... I don't know what to say.
Almost any response I could think of would be no more than a personal
insult, and I don't want to go there.
To me, as a writer, what you're saying is rather like, "I prefer comic
books. Picasso, Klee, Dali -- those guys make my head hurt." See, that's
as close as I can get to not insulting you. Sorry.
--JA
James Cunningham
To me, what you're saying seems rather like, "I have no imagination and
need to have every painstaking detail fed to me in order to visualize
it. If someone mentions a white house, I'd at a loss to think of
anything unless they told me, for example, what color the door was and
to what length the lawn was cut." I'd like to say more, but that's as
far as I can go without insulting you. Sorry.
Best,
James
Khelwood
(A) can evoke whatever the reader happens to associate with small
white houses (and for an IF reader there's likely to be quite a strong
association). (B) evokes a feeling of having to read a tedious passage
of waffle in order for the author to show off his writing chops.
Detail is good if it's interesting or makes some kind of point, not if
it's just "I'll put some irrelevant nonsense in here so that the
reader can visualise it."
Jeff Houck
I doubt seriously that there is a *correct* answer. People process
information according to a bewildering number of mental "rules" and this
is the bane of the writer or IF author. What works for one, may not
for another...
Personally, I find a combination of the two works best for me. I don't
require a verbose description of the house because I can visualize one
quite readily having seen quite a few in my lifetime and having an image
ready to conjure up.
On the other hand, if you were to describe a chemistry lab in terse
terms, I would have issues visualizing it. Why? Simply because I haven't
been in many chemistry labs...
My rule of thumb is to write somewhat terse descriptions *unless* there
is a clue or significant item I want the player to investigate.
Jason Dyer
both short and long descriptions to be evocative and both have their
purposes.
---
From _The Sound of One Hand Clapping_ by Erica Sadun:
Windswept Field
You are standing amidst the tall grasses in a windswept field. Above
the sky is blue. A small kill winds its way around granite boulders
down the mountain. Purple and white peaks surround you on all sides,
as does the forest. Within the greens of the summer mountain are the
brown scores where loggers were and will be again. Blue herons pass
occasionally overhead and gentle deer stop -- to eat the summer
berries or drink from the kill water. Small frogs jump in and out of
the kill and insects skim over the top, never breaking the surface.
There are grey and silvery fish darting below the sun bleached rocks.
You are surrounded on all sides by wild bushes. A narrow thorny gap
lies to the west.
From _Beyond Zork_ by Brian Moriarty:
Hilltop
The horizon is lost in the glare of morning upon the Great Sea. You
shield your eyes to sweep the shore below, where a village lies
nestled beside a quiet cove.
A stunted oak tree shades the inland road.
---
Different pieces of prose have different densities and rhythms. It's
individual based on the writer. I'd never want to kill that with some
hard rule.
(I agree that the original room description Jim quoted is weak and
could be improved. However, I think the short description of the white
house is fine.)
-- Jason Dyer
sge...@hotpop.com
white house" tells me very little. I am playing this IF game for the
author to tell me a story. Is it a futuristic white house that hovers
an inch above the ground and can cook, clean and gratify my every
desire? Is it a cottagey white house with ivy round the door and birds
nesting in the thatched roof? Is it a spooky white house with broken
windows, banging shutters, and a door hanging off its hinges leading
to a menacing passageway? Stories are about guiding the imagination of
the player/reader/listener. This is not done by writing "a tedious
passage of waffle", but helping the reader visualise the scene is not
"irrelevant nonsense" by any stretch of the (healthy and able to
visualise almost anything you care to present it with, thank you)
imagination.
Jason Dyer
> Is it a cottagey white house with ivy round the door and birds
> nesting in the thatched roof? Is it a spooky white house with broken
> windows, banging shutters, and a door hanging off its hinges leading
> to a menacing passageway?
I think the personality type that can work with the simpler
description doesn't care which type of house it is; they just pick one
of the above and run with it.
If I can make a musical analogy: in baroque music some composers were
perfectly happy specifying "loud" or "soft" for a particular section
and letting the musicians run with it however they desired. As
classical music developed composers tried to exert more and more
control over their pieces, to the point where sometimes every moment
was choreographed.
I've written music almost entirely free of markings, because I want
the performer to interpret however they see fit. I've also written
music where I had to invent my own notation to convey the precision I
need.
Neither is wrong: sometimes authorial control is important, sometimes
it isn't. If anyone visualized the white house as a futuristic HOUSE
OF THE FUTURE I do see a problem; I would guess given the minimalism
readers would default towards realism.
I'm ok with the level of spookiness of the white house being entirely
a personal choice. If you're intending a horror story, more details to
convey that are important.
-- Jason Dyer
Jim Aikin
>
> (A) can evoke whatever the reader happens to associate with small
> white houses (and for an IF reader there's likely to be quite a strong
> association).
An association, yes. A visual image, no. And a corollary of the point I
started out by addressing was that the newcomer to IF has _no_ such
associations to go by. The discussion has broadened (or devolved) since
then.
> (B) evokes a feeling of having to read a tedious passage
> of waffle in order for the author to show off his writing chops.
> Detail is good if it's interesting or makes some kind of point, not if
> it's just "I'll put some irrelevant nonsense in here so that the
> reader can visualise it."
This is interesting. Perhaps not extremely surprising, but interesting
and a bit sad. It would appear that there are people in the IF author
community who are actively hostile to good writing.
Please don't misunderstand. I'm not saying that my little description of
a white house was good writing. I dashed it off in about 15 seconds,
solely as an illustration of how detail might be added. (I do rather
like the description of the chimney, though.)
Whether the details in it are "irrelevant," as Khelwood is quick to
claim, would depend on the game. Since the game doesn't exist,
characterizing the details as irrelevant is surely premature. There
might be a golden key hidden in the window-box, beneath the tulips. The
chimney might fall and kill the player character. We don't know.
My suspicion, which I would be happy to see proven wrong, is that the
kind of dismissive attitude to which Khelwood gives voice in the passage
quoted above is probably not unique to him, but is shared more or less
broadly within the IF authoring community.
It could be argued that such an attitude, if it exists, is responsible
in no small part for the extremely limited audience enjoyed today by
text-based games. It was in the interest of testing such an assertion
that I started this thread.
Or, to put it in plain language, readers don't respond well to bad
writing. Of course, we can talk about what constitutes "bad writing,"
but I claim that inadequate or confusing descriptions of the places in
which the story takes place would be very near the top of any
well-considered list.
Conversely, good writing provides vivid detail. In fiction, at least,
good writing evokes emotion in the reader through the writer's careful
choice of details. I don't think it's possible, really, to disagree with
that, and I don't think it matters in the least whether the fiction is
static or interactive.
--JA
Khelwood
I am not hostile to good writing. I am a little hostile to assumptions
such as "brief = bad" and "readers need things described in detail in
order that they visualise it correctly".
Re "characterizing the details as irrelevant is surely premature.
There might be a golden key hidden in the window-box"
In that case the apparent choice you offered, between descriptions A
and B, is a choice between a description that leaves out vital
information, and one that includes it. That didn't seem to be what you
were asking.
S. John Ross
> What do others think of this line of thought?
"Brevity is wit."
--
|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn/bio.htm
David Fisher
news:47814ef5$0$85790$e4fe...@news.xs4all.nl...
> Jim Aikin wrote:
>
>> "The sidewalk runs east and west. To the south is a busy street, to the
>> north a tall fence. Just ahead to the west the fence ends, and beyond the
>> corner of the fence is Mrs. Pepper’s driveway."
>
> The problem with the room description is that it describes a highly
> complex geometrical situation, without helping the player to easily
> construct a visual mental model.
Some people seem to find descriptions using compass directions easier to
visualise than others; it's still hard for me to do. I know it's been
brought up before, but particularly for beginners, I think it can be a good
idea to describe things in the terms they are used to thinking in
(left/right/in front, etc.) ... although this can mean a lot more work,
since you need to adjust the description depending on the direction the room
was entered from.
Assuming the player entered from the east:
"You are on a sidewalk on the right side of a busy street. A tall fence
comes to an end just ahead of you, where you can see the start of Mrs.
Pepper's driveway."
David Fisher
aaroni...@gmail.com
mentioned, it's not important." Say I enter a room reading "You are
standing before a small, white house." An experienced IF player knows
they're not likely to get a response from "examine shingles," even
though their mental picture might include them.
The corollary convention is "If you mention it, it should be
important." If you add on a sentence about a window box full of
tulips, that should be there for a reason, not just to pad the text.
Are the tulips part of a puzzle? Do they say something important about
the person who occupies the house? Are they part of some recurring
theme or imagery we're making use of as an artistic device? In all
three cases, they should be implemented, with responses to attempts to
take them, smell them, etc. You've gone out of your way to tell the
player that their imaginary white house differs from yours in this
important respect; not fully integrating this detail into your
environment is abdicating some of your responsibility as a
storyteller.
--Aaron
Jim Aikin
>
> The corollary convention is "If you mention it, it should be
> important." If you add on a sentence about a window box full of
> tulips, that should be there for a reason, not just to pad the text.
Agreed, but with the proviso that "important" doesn't necessarily mean
"important for solving a puzzle." It can, and often should, mean
"important for providing an immersive experience by adding atmosphere
and three-dimensional vividness."
> Are the tulips part of a puzzle? Do they say something important about
> the person who occupies the house? Are they part of some recurring
> theme or imagery we're making use of as an artistic device? In all
> three cases, they should be implemented, with responses to attempts to
> take them, smell them, etc. You've gone out of your way to tell the
> player that their imaginary white house differs from yours in this
> important respect; not fully integrating this detail into your
> environment is abdicating some of your responsibility as a
> storyteller.
In general, I agree. OTOH, it's a lot of work to let people smell the
tulips. TADS 3 implements a Decoration class, which is quite useful in
this respect. You can add any sensory features you like to a Decoration
-- a description, a smell, or whatever. Anything you haven't implemented
gets the default response, "The tulips aren't important." (Of course,
you can also change the default response.)
It's impossible to implement _everything_ that might be found in an
environment, nor would it be desirable. If nothing else, it would be
boundlessly frustrating for the game player, who has to examine
everything to determine that it's not important.
But I do think that an immersive experience starts with a solid,
readable room description in all of the major rooms, coupled with good
descriptions of most of the primary objects in the room. Even if a
fireplace is a Decoration, it's a _particular_ fireplace, not a generic
fireplace.
If there is a printer on the desk in an office in a game, maybe it's a
generic printer. Printers are mass-manufactured. But a fireplace isn't,
usually: It's built brick by brick, and its appearance says something
about the personality of whoever lives in the house.
--JA
Jim Aikin
>
>> What do others think of this line of thought?
>
> "Brevity is wit."
Shouldn't that be, "Brevity is the soul of wit"?
If brevity were wit, stand-up comics could make a living reading aloud
from collections of haiku.
Actually, a work of IF in which every description was a haiku might be
interesting ... at least, if they were decent haiku.
>l
The forest path ends
at a sheer rock face. Southward
lies the only route.
>x rock face
Lichen-dotted stone
in which a crude inscription
is deeply chiseled.
>read inscription
"Seek not the serpent
in the depths of the blue lake.
It soars on gold wings."
>s
A rainbow membrane
blocks the path. As if rubber
it flexes, repels.
>u
You find few footholds,
yet ascend precariously
to a dizzying height.
--JA
JDC
> S. John Ross wrote:
>
> >> What do others think of this line of thought?
>
> > "Brevity is wit."
>
> Shouldn't that be, "Brevity is the soul of wit"?
I've usually seem it as:
"Brevity is ... wit."
-JDC
JDC
> Khelwood wrote:
> > (B) evokes a feeling of having to read a tedious passage
> > of waffle in order for the author to show off his writing chops.
> > Detail is good if it's interesting or makes some kind of point, not if
> > it's just "I'll put some irrelevant nonsense in here so that the
> > reader can visualise it."
>
> This is interesting. Perhaps not extremely surprising, but interesting
> and a bit sad. It would appear that there are people in the IF author
> community who are actively hostile to good writing.
My reaction depends a lot on what is currently happening in the work.
At the beginning, when the scene is being set so to speak, a longer
and more florid passage can be good. Similarly for a longer passage in
a coda. But if I am in the middle of solving an intricate or timed
puzzle, or moving around a large map, I would react more like
Kelwood's comment to a lengthy passage with a lot of detail. I guess
what I am saying is that an overly descriptive passage can disrupt the
flow of the game if it is inappropriate to the pacing, but I certainly
enjoy evocative passages when they fit the mood.
_JDC
Eric Eve
news:cd3abb04-59b6-4fcd...@f47g2000hsd.googlegroups.com...
>I find this "all one or the other" attitude puzzling. I have found
> both short and long descriptions to be evocative and both have
> their
> purposes.
Quite so.
[snip examples]
> Different pieces of prose have different densities and rhythms.
> It's
> individual based on the writer. I'd never want to kill that with
> some
> hard rule.
I'd agree with that too.
But it's not just a question of different authorial styles, it is,
as you suggested with the word "purposes" above, a matter of what
kind of game the description is being written for.
> (I agree that the original room description Jim quoted is weak and
> could be improved. However, I think the short description of the
> white
> house is fine.)
It's fine for a puzzle-oriented game with minimal plot, or perhaps
for a more story-oriented game in which the house functions as no
more than a landmark as the player character passes by on his/her
way to where the main story is going to occur. The longer
description might be more appropriate in a story-oriented game in
which much of the action is going to take place in and around the
white house. In other words, no one can decide which description is
better irrespective of the context in which it occurs.
Another point that I don't think has been made in this thread is
that, quite apart from the needs of game play, people generally find
it harder (more tiring and less appealing) to read a lot of text on
a computer screen than on the printed page. Moreover the physical
space available for a room description (or any other kind of
description) in a work of IF is to some extent limited to what will
fit in an interpreter screen, since it's in general a little
tiresome for readers of IF if a description extends over one
screenful. These two factors make brevity more necessary in IF than
in static fiction, quite apart from the need to focus the reader's
attention on the essentials for game-play purposes.
The ideal room description is one that manages to be simultaneously
economical (which doesn't necessarily equate to minimalist),
evocative and clearly informative (in terms of game play). That's
not impossible, but it's a hard trick to pull off in every room
description in a game, not least because the devices one may use to
achieve it in the first couple of room descriptions may start to
seem a little tired if repeated throughout a game with a large
number of rooms. There's only so many ways, for example, one can
work clearly marked exit directions into a room description that
reads as naturally-flowing prose!
In practice, room descriptions in IF are likely to be some kind of
compromise between elegance and functionality. But where the right
place for that compromise lies depends both on authorial style and
on the nature of the piece. There's no one right answer that suits
all games.
-- Eric
Blank
> Since our WIP is intended for newcomers to IF, I asked my ex-wife, who
> has never played _any_ text-based games, to try it out. Here is an
> edited version of her response:
>
>
> "The sidewalk runs east and west. To the south is a busy street, to the
> north a tall fence. Just ahead to the west the fence ends, and beyond
> the corner of the fence is Mrs. Pepper’s driveway."
>
> interesting. But at no time during the development of the game did it
> occur to me (nor, I'm pretty sure, did it occur to my co-author) that
> this room description was utterly, baldly inadequate. Nor did any of the
> testers (who are experienced IF players) complain.
>
> I expect that experienced IF players may complain that they don't want
> to read long, boring room descriptions -- and especially not
> descriptions that mention half a dozen irrelevant objects that you can't
> interact with, but have to examine to learn that they're irrelevant.
>
I think part of the problem is that we write room descriptions as a
spatial map and thus think of them as static chunks of text. After all,
the 'real' geography can't change, can it? Where there are variations in
a room description they're usually minimal: noting whether a door is
open or closed - that sort of thing.
But really a room description should be cueing the player about what's
significant (to the plot) in that place, at that time. So really the
text is not "what the player can see", but "what the PC has noticed."
Every detail should be there for a purpose: "You see a white house" is
absolutely fine if all the plot needs at that point is for the player to
be cued about, say, the possibilities of shelter or nearby inhabitants.
I could imagine a game where no matter which direction the player
approaches the village from, the first few dwellings are described
rather vaguely: "A low, half-timbered cottage", a "narrow building,
built from the local granite" and only later would details like every
window having stout shutters, small dollies made of hawthorn and hanging
bunches of garlic be mentioned. Perhaps only after meeting the local
aristocracy...
To go back to your street description; I realized that I actually didn't
bother remembering the full geography, even for that little scene. I
interpreted "busy traffic" and "tall fence" as "can't go that way" and
forgot about them. Maybe I was wrong and I could cross the street, but
right now I want to go investigate Mrs Pepper's place. That
interpretation is the result of being around IF for a little while and
learning its conventions, and as such is perfectly legitimate. Movies,
text and comic books all have their own conventions.
I do think though that the acceptance of compass-navigation as the
least-worst solution has blinded us to how unintuitive and downright
ugly some of the resulting descriptions are (ahem. not intended as a
criticism of that description per se!) and I think that that alien
spatial reference system is part of the reason that newcomers have
trouble. With the compass-stuff stripped out, it could read something like:
"You turn off from Lampert street. The sidewalk feels very narrow;
traffic thunders past in a constant steel stream, forcing you to walk
close to the wooden fence. Mrs Pepper's driveway is just ahead."
Which I find easy to visualise: you're on your way to Mrs Pepper's place.
I think compass navigation is one of IF's problem areas but has been
overlooked in favour of trying to work out a decent conversation system
or making the parser a bit smarter. Not that this problem's trivial:
it's easy enough to >GO TO MRS PEPPER'S, but what if you can cross the
road? >CROSS ROAD? >DODGE TRAFFIC? >JAYWALK? You end up with every
travel decision having its own unique command which might well be worse
than the original problem. I'm still thinking about this.
--jayzee
> The question is, who are we writing for?
>Are we writing exclusively for
> the tastes of the tiny community of a few hundred people who are
> currently playing the games? Or would we like to appeal to a broader
> audience?
>
> There are ways to approach this problem. For instance, a game might
> implement a "capsule" mode that would be halfway between "verbose" and
> "terse." In capsule mode, the room description would resemble old-style
> IF, mentioning only a few salient features, while verbose mode would
> provide a more colorful, immersive experience.
>
> What do others think of this line of thought? I'm curious.
>
> --Jim Aikin
Victor Gijsbers
> > (A) can evoke whatever the reader happens to associate with small
> > white houses (and for an IF reader there's likely to be quite a strong
> > association).
>
> An association, yes. A visual image, no. And a corollary of the point I
> started out by addressing was that the newcomer to IF has _no_ such
> associations to go by. The discussion has broadened (or devolved) since
> then.
Just a couple of words here, although I don't think this issue is the
heart of the thread. Unlike a picture, a photograph, or something you
see in real life, a mental visual image is always a _determinable_,
never a _determinate_. This means that when you visualise something,
there will always be details left that or not determined, that might
still be determined by further acts of imagination.
Let's do an experiment. Visualise a white house.
How many windows are visible in your visualisation? Presumably, this
question has no answer: you did not visualise any specific number of
windows. If you did, you can find another question to which you did
not visualise the answer. (Which colour are the window sills? Are the
windows open or closed? Can you see any plants through the windows?
Anything else of the interior? The windows on the other side of the
house?) You can decide on the detail and add it to your visualisation,
making it richer. No such thing could ever happen with a picture or a
photograph.
So, yes, "You see a white house" evokes a mental image, just as a more
definite description would. This mental image is rather abstract; but
_any_ mental image is somewhere on the line between abstract and
concrete, none is ever completely concrete.
Is concrete better than abstract? Determinate better than
determinable? I doubt that there is a clear-cut answer to that
question.
> > (B) evokes a feeling of having to read a tedious passage
> > of waffle in order for the author to show off his writing chops.
> > Detail is good if it's interesting or makes some kind of point, not if
> > it's just "I'll put some irrelevant nonsense in here so that the
> > reader can visualise it."
>
> This is interesting. Perhaps not extremely surprising, but interesting
> and a bit sad. It would appear that there are people in the IF author
> community who are actively hostile to good writing.
You draw a big conclusion (and a negative, cynical conclusion) from
awfully little evidence. What Khelwood seems to be saying is that, for
him, visualisation is not a good as such, but only a good if it is
means to 'the interesting'or 'the point'. This is nor absurd. It is
not active hostility to good writing. If good writing is writing that
has something interesting to say and makes this point clearly and
succinctly, then Khelwood is actively advocating good writing. He is
telling us that we should only add visual detail if this detail serves
the point of the writing.
What Khelwood is saying, or rather, what I am saying under the banner
of Khelwood, is that Corman McCarthy's lush, apocalyptic descriptions
of the natural surroundings in "Blood Meridian" are fully justifies
because they enhance the central theme of the book; and that, at the
same time, the lack of such visual detail in Philip Roth's "American
Pastoral" is justified, because adding it would not enhance his
central theme, or at least not as effectively as the long interior
monologues which he actually provides.
> Conversely, good writing provides vivid detail. In fiction, at least,
> good writing evokes emotion in the reader through the writer's careful
> choice of details. I don't think it's possible, really, to disagree with
> that, and I don't think it matters in the least whether the fiction is
> static or interactive.
Good writing provides vivid detail, sure. (Although even here there
are exceptions, and the importance of the details might vary from work
to work. Does Paradise Lost invoke emotion through a careful choice of
details, of through the sheer magnificence of the style?) But that
detail does not have to be visual, which seems to be your unspoken
assumption in this thread.
That seems to me the heart of the matter in this thread. You are
talking about visualising, and apparently some people don't think
visualisation is as big a deal as you do. But that doesn't mean they
dislike good writing. It just means that when they read, it's not the
_visual_ details that stick with them. (I cannot for the life of me
remember what Isabel Archer looks like, for instance, even though I'm
sure Henry James painted her portrait many times and with many
carefully chosen words.) It might be the details of psychology, of
abstract argument, of the sound and texture of the language, of mood,
of events--many things apart from the visual.
If you ask me to choose between a description that gives me visual
detail about the white house, and one that gives me historical detail
about the white house, I might well choose the latter. Does that mean
that I am actively hostile to good writing? Of course not.
Kind regards,
Victor
P.S.
And just to put your final doubts to rest: my living room walls are
currently adorned by Klee and Kandinsky, not by Mickey Mouse and
Spiderman.
Blank
(snip)
> Some middle ground between terse and verbose sounds like a good idea.
> Pulling spatial information out of the description and putting it in a
> status bar or mini-map window helps too.
Yes, I'm hoping that the I7 developments will lead to easier ways to
display images and manipulate the game UI so we can use text for its
strengths and not force it to be jill-of-all-trades.
Jeff Houck
LOL! I think you're on to something Jim! I rather like it...
Eric Eve
news:478218f6$1...@news.kcl.ac.uk...
> I do think though that the acceptance of compass-navigation as the
> least-worst solution has blinded us to how unintuitive and
> downright ugly some of the resulting descriptions are (ahem. not
> intended as a criticism of that description per se!) and I think
> that that alien spatial reference system is part of the reason
> that newcomers have trouble. With the compass-stuff stripped out,
> it could read something like:
>
> "You turn off from Lampert street. The sidewalk feels very narrow;
> traffic thunders past in a constant steel stream, forcing you to
> walk close to the wooden fence. Mrs Pepper's driveway is just
> ahead."
>
> Which I find easy to visualise: you're on your way to Mrs Pepper's
> place.
I see your point; your version reads more naturally as a description
of a place (in this instance). In other cases it might be harder to
give a description of an area (especially an outdoor area) without
recourse to compass directions. You could describe what's ahead, to
the left and to the right of the player character, I suppose, but
this makes an assumption about which way s/he's facing, and if the
description has to change with the character's orientation that's
not only harder work for the author but potentially more confusing
for players (at least, I'd find it so). Also with a left/right/ahead
system it becomes a little artificial to say "Behind you, you
see..." or some such equivalent, and there's no economical way of
referring to the equivalent of northwest, southwest, northeast and
southeast.
Of course, compass directions look more artificial when it's an
indoor location being described.
On the other hand, as you say, compass-navigation does seem to be
the least bad solution for moving the player around. For one thing,
it's economical and can be relied up to use a set of standard
commands. In the general case it's probably less confusing than most
of the obvious alternatives; and despite what some people say, it's
really not *that* unintuitive. We may not orient ourselves by
thinking consciously in terms of compass directions in real life
(though I think there are situations where we may do, particularly
when navigating an unfamiliar area on a large scale), but we don't
have any difficulty understanding what going in a given compass
direction means.
The problem is that once compass directions are used for navigation,
they almost have to feature in room descriptions in order to make it
clear to the player how the features of the location, and
particularly the exits, are oriented, and that can make for unwieldy
prose.
> I think compass navigation is one of IF's problem areas but has
> been overlooked in favour of trying to work out a decent
> conversation system or making the parser a bit smarter. Not that
> this problem's trivial: it's easy enough to >GO TO MRS PEPPER'S,
> but what if you can cross the road? >CROSS ROAD? >DODGE TRAFFIC?
> >JAYWALK? You end up with every travel decision having its own
> unique command which might well be worse than the original
> problem.
Quite; the danger of ending up with something worse than the problem
you were trying to solve is very real. Not only are the possible
alternatives you mention non-standard (in the sense that the player
may have to guess what they are), they are also more verbose (GO TO
MRS PEPPER'S is a lot more typing that W.W.N.N. to end up in her
front porch, if that's what you're aiming for).
It's true that one could have equally terse abbreviations for left,
right, ahead and back, so that the above would become A.A.R.A say,
but I do think such a system is actually harder to use and more
confusing in practice than compass directions (as well as offering
no obvious equvalents to NW, NE, SE, and SW).
In other words, I don't think it's just inadvertance, inertia, or
overlooking the issue in favour of others that have prolonged the
life of compass navigation. I think that (as you indicate) overall
it just is the least bad system for navigation (or even the best
system for navigation) by quite a long way (which doesn't mean it
can't be supplemented by commands like GO TO MRS. PEPPER'S or CROSS
THE ROAD where these can be implemented naturally). Given that, it's
hard (virtually impossible, in fact) to avoid the need to work
compass directions into room descriptions, however awkwardly that
can make them read.
Nor do I think the problem can really be solved by listing the exits
separately from the room description, in the status line or as a
separate paragraph (helpful of either of these may be as an
additional navigational aid). A list of exits in the status line,
say, is only of limited use if I can't see how the directions relate
to the location that's being described.
-- Eric
dave e
> Victor Gijsbers wrote:
>
> > I think the problem with this room description is not that it is not
> > evocative enough; the comments of your wife give me the same idea.
> > Adding more stuff in the description just makes it _harder_ to visualise
> > something, doesn't it? You have to visualise more.
>
> I guess I'd have to disagree with that conclusion, and in pretty strong
> terms. Let's compare two cases. Visualize (a) and (b) and tell me which
> is harder:
>
> a) "You're standing in front of a small white house."
>
> b) "You're standing in front of a small white house with a red tile
> roof. The chimney tilts a little at the upper end, in a way that's
> either rakish or alarming (depending, perhaps, on whether you're the
> homeowner, which you're not). Window-boxes full of bright red tulips are
> mounted below the twin windows on either side of the yellow dutch door."
>
I would argue that neither of these are effective for IF as the
following:
c) "You're loitering suspiciously in front of a well maintained
bungalow located in a suburban cul-de-sac. The absence of any SUV
suggests that the homeowner is out. The yellow dutch door is north,
but probably locked. You might need to go northeast, around to the
back of the house, and jimmy a window."
This describes the location, the exits, and suggests possible motives
for your character, without introducing too many nouns which have to
be implemented.
Dave
Dutchy (Rhian)
experience) is that it's all a matter of taste.
I love colourful descriptions and ellaborate scenes in writing/fiction
in general, but it does need to be in a supporting role.
My view of this discussion is that it all boils down to taste. Some
prefer brief descriptions and let their imagination do the rest,
whereas others might want more to get a better feel of the environment
they are emmerging themselves in.
It really is a pity that the community gets smaller and smaller. But
unless there is a simple, easy accessable, everywhere usable way of
playing IF, I think this form of art will become extinct in the next
decade or two. Somehow I still have my hopes up for a Nintento DS port
for playing IF (virtual keyboard on on of the screens) for example.
That would make things a bit more accessable, provided that there is
not too much typing involved or the players get too quickly bored with
it.
At the same time I'm thinking about how e-books are 'suffering' under
the lack of ease of access. The devices that make it portable (as
portable as a regular pocket book) are way too expensive. IF (with a
save state option) would be a great way of experiencing fiction whilst
being on the train to work for example.
So far I haven't written any IF recently (the last one was about 20+
years ago in basic), nevertheless I'm of the opinion that if only 1
single person likes my creations, it's fine with me. I'm writing for
the writing, same with everything else that is put into the world as a
result of a creative expression.
Just my thoughts. :-)
Rhian
Bert Byfield
You can't write one book that will please all people.
J. J. Guest
irrelevant items? The above examples suffer from this because they are
simply a list of the location's constituent parts, but this is not the
only way to describe something. You could describe the room in terms
of what it means to the player character (giving something of its
history), or how he or she feels about it, even going off on the
occasional digression, and do all of this using only those nouns that
are relevant to the puzzles or plot. It is hard to think of examples
off the top of my head, but Emily Short's Bronze springs to mind; many
of the descriptions there are used for exposition of the back story,
giving us a clear picture of the heroine and her life, whilst being
also very economical; giving us only those physical details which are
strictly relevant to the story or which give atmosphere. The humourous
descriptions of objects in Graham Cluley's Humbug are also worth
looking at; the few pertinent practical details are interspersed with
rambling, silly, and very amusing anecdotes.
Blank
Agreed. I think it's something to do with the scale, because where they
really grate on me is trying to describe small interior spaces: "The
floor of the cottage kitchen is littered with smashed crockery and
jagged glass. The back door is open to the east, and a low archway south
opens onto the living room. The grange to the north* appears to be out."
(*let's pretend the grange is a secret entrance, so we have to clue its
direction.)
But then interior spaces are usually modeled on a grid anyway so
semi-cardinal directions aren't necessary. Ideally the exit lister would
list the names of known destinations as well as the direction, and we'd
enable GO TO travel (perhaps not even full-blown pathfinding, just being
able to >GO LIVING ROOM in the above example would be good).
> On the other hand, as you say, compass-navigation does seem to be
> the least bad solution for moving the player around. For one thing,
> it's economical and can be relied up to use a set of standard
> commands.
Again, agreed. The trouble is, that for all its good points and its
practicality, I think it is (a)making us write ugly stuff, and
(b)turning off new players. We're all united in agreeing that it's not
what we want, but we've been busy doing other things.
> In the general case it's probably less confusing than most
> of the obvious alternatives; and despite what some people say, it's
> really not *that* unintuitive.
It's that lump in the cinema seat, it's that click in the CD player,
that stain on the page that yanks you back into the present. At least
those other examples were where the system was broken, but in IF we've
got to darned well /like/ the flaw and think it's almost cute.
> We may not orient ourselves by
> thinking consciously in terms of compass directions in real life
> (though I think there are situations where we may do, particularly
> when navigating an unfamiliar area on a large scale), but we don't
> have any difficulty understanding what going in a given compass
> direction means.
What I'm saying is that it increases the overhead. And every bit of the
player that's thinking "East - so I'm kind of going round that way and
the butler's pantry is over *there*" is keeping them that little bit
distant from the story. Which is not what any writer wants.
>
> The problem is that once compass directions are used for navigation,
> they almost have to feature in room descriptions in order to make it
> clear to the player how the features of the location, and
> particularly the exits, are oriented, and that can make for unwieldy
> prose.
>
If they have to read "the library door is on your right", look at the
status bar, work out that it's west of them and then type "w", sure. But
we watch which way they're facing and map the relative directions onto
the compass directions behind the scenes.
>> I think compass navigation is one of IF's problem areas but has
>> been overlooked in favour of trying to work out a decent
>> conversation system or making the parser a bit smarter. Not that
>> this problem's trivial: it's easy enough to >GO TO MRS PEPPER'S,
>> but what if you can cross the road? >CROSS ROAD? >DODGE TRAFFIC?
>> >JAYWALK? You end up with every travel decision having its own
>> unique command which might well be worse than the original
>> problem.
>
> Quite; the danger of ending up with something worse than the problem
> you were trying to solve is very real. Not only are the possible
> alternatives you mention non-standard (in the sense that the player
> may have to guess what they are), they are also more verbose (GO TO
> MRS PEPPER'S is a lot more typing that W.W.N.N. to end up in her
> front porch, if that's what you're aiming for).
>
I take my hat off to those who can remember long strings of directions.
I always have to do it one command at a time anyway. Besides, GO TO MRS
PEPPER'S is an expression of what I want to do: I stay within the story
while I'm typing that. Whereas "where's the bloody library - er, EXIT -
drat*, OUT, SOUTH" is me wrestling with the mechanics of the system.
*sorry, couldn't resist.
> It's true that one could have equally terse abbreviations for left,
> right, ahead and back, so that the above would become A.A.R.A say,
> but I do think such a system is actually harder to use and more
> confusing in practice than compass directions (as well as offering
> no obvious equvalents to NW, NE, SE, and SW).
>
I think the best thing is to provide different ways of navigating so
that different players can use what suits them best, rather than the
current one-size-doesn't-fit-all approach. The downside is that it's
more work for the author - but I7 is already providing some of the
tools, and it may be that this is an area where the library could do a
lot of the heavy lifting.
> In other words, I don't think it's just inadvertance, inertia, or
> overlooking the issue in favour of others that have prolonged the
> life of compass navigation. I think that (as you indicate) overall
> it just is the least bad system for navigation (or even the best
> system for navigation) by quite a long way (which doesn't mean it
> can't be supplemented by commands like GO TO MRS. PEPPER'S or CROSS
> THE ROAD where these can be implemented naturally). Given that, it's
> hard (virtually impossible, in fact) to avoid the need to work
> compass directions into room descriptions, however awkwardly that
> can make them read.
>
-- oops gotta go! thanks for your thoughts,
Jayzee
Jim Aikin
>
> I would argue that neither of these are effective for IF as the
> following:
>
> c) "You're loitering suspiciously in front of a well maintained
> bungalow located in a suburban cul-de-sac. The absence of any SUV
> suggests that the homeowner is out. The yellow dutch door is north,
> but probably locked. You might need to go northeast, around to the
> back of the house, and jimmy a window."
I agree that this creates a strong context. I hope you write a game that
uses it as a springboard! (Though if the PC is carrying a jimmy, as he
would be, suggesting where he should use it might be a bit obvious.)
Note, however, that "suspiciously" is being misused. This locution
refers to an exterior point of view: The suspicion would be in the mind
of someone who observes you loitering. If you mean that the viewpoint
character is himself suspicious of something (and I don't think you do),
you need to phrase it in a different way.
--JA
Jim Aikin
>
> I do think though that the acceptance of compass-navigation as the
> least-worst solution has blinded us to how unintuitive and downright
> ugly some of the resulting descriptions are (ahem. not intended as a
> criticism of that description per se!) and I think that that alien
> spatial reference system is part of the reason that newcomers have
> trouble.
Thank you. You said it better than I did. That may be the heart of the
problem.
--JA
Kathleen
> A rainbow membrane
> blocks the path. As if rubber
> it flexes, repels.
Actually,,. I found your haiku's far more engaging than any of the
previous examples so far. Perhaps it's because the strict restrictions
of a haiku made you choose your words very carefully and so you pack a
lot of punch in each word?
Haiku Comp anyone?
I think the happy medium is to reduce the description to the smallest
amount of text needed to produce the visual/emotional response
required by the work, but reduce no further. That could leave you with
a terse "small white house", or gushing text about raging creeks,
towering mountains and singing sparrows. And I don't see why you
couldn't have raging creeks in one room, and a small white house in
another. In fact, the very simplicity of the house description makes
it stand out in stark relief from the busy, colorful background. It
would almost feel spotlighted at that point.
Kathleen (of course, you will find as many opinions as there are
readers and authors!)
S. John Ross
>> "Brevity is wit."
>
> Shouldn't that be, "Brevity is the soul of wit"?
I can't tell if you're serious :)
S. John Ross
>>> "Brevity is wit."
>> Shouldn't that be, "Brevity is the soul of wit"?
>
> I've usually seem it as:
> "Brevity is ... wit."
Yeah, that's the way they did it on the Simpsons, years ago and it's
most often used that way. I've always preferred the joke sans ellipsis,
though. More punch :)
J. J. Guest
Ron Newcomb
> > spatial reference system is part of the reason that newcomers have
> > trouble.
I wrote as much in my IFDB review of Lord Bellwater's Secret.
As for the "more nouns == more required Examine commands" problem Jim
or someone mentioned up-thread, we could do worse than completely
strike Examine from the I-F vocabulary.
--Ron
Emily Short
If you want a test of the proposition, try "Adventurer's Consumer
Guide" and then come back and tell us whether you think it's better by
dint of having no EXAMINE.
My own feeling was that this put a horrible burden on the rest of the
system (inventory listings get very very long in order to convey every
important fact about the objects, for instance). So, for me, the lack
of EXAMINE impeded the interaction in something that was otherwise
quite a solid game.
Ron Newcomb
> On Jan 7, 2:00 pm, Ron Newcomb <psc...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > strike Examine from the I-F vocabulary.
> If you want a test of the proposition, try "Adventurer's Consumer
> Guide" and then come back and tell us whether you think it's better by
> dint of having no EXAMINE.
I'll try it out.
-R
Eric Eve
> Eric Eve wrote:
>> Of course, compass directions look more artificial when it's an
>> indoor location being described.
>>
>
> Agreed. I think it's something to do with the scale, because where
> they really grate on me is trying to describe small interior
> spaces: "The floor of the cottage kitchen is littered with smashed
> crockery and jagged glass. The back door is open to the east, and
> a low archway south opens onto the living room. The grange to the
> north* appears to be out." (*let's pretend the grange is a secret
> entrance, so we have to clue its direction.)
At least with this example there are standard commands that ought to
work as alternatives to compass directions, namely GO THROUGH BACK
DOOR, GO THROUGH LOW ARCHWAY and (once the player figures it out)
ENTER/GO THROUGH GRANGE. These really *ought* to be implemented in
any case, quite regardless of whatever other navigation system is in
operation.
The problem I can see is, not that it would be all that difficult to
make this space navigable without compass directions at all, but
that players used to using compass directions might not be happy
about being forced to type
GO THROUGH BACK DOOR, or GO THROUGH LOW ARCHWAY when they could just
type E or W.
I suppose it would be possible to provide alternative room
descriptions that provide or suppress compass directions according
to some player-declared option, but quite apart from the extra work
this could give game authors, I can see another problem here.
Suppose one stripped out the compass directions from your example:
we'd be left with:
"The floor of the cottage kitchen is littered with smashed crockery
and
jagged glass. The back door is open, and a low archway
opens onto the living room. The grange appears to be out."
This doesn't read too badly, but it doesn't give any sense of the
relative positions, directions, or orientations of anything. This
leads me to another thought: why would we want such a sense? To help
us navigate, or to help us visualize the scene?
It may be that the sensibilities of people who find compass
directions in rooms descriptions objectionable have been formed by
reading (static) prose fiction. But this is a different medium, and
whereas in some instances it may be important to give the reader an
idea of relative positions and orientations (in a detective mystery,
perhaps, where such details are important for solving the crime),
often that isn't all that necessary. The reader of a novel might
want to know roughly what a room looks like and what it contains,
just to get some feel of the place, but the reader doesn't need to
navigate, and has no need of the kind of orienting information
that's vital for playing IF. So to some extent I feel that part of
the problem maybe the application of the aesthetics of one medium to
a different medium that has different requirements.
But to return to the cottage kitchen example. It would be
*possible*, I think, to restore the (relative) directional
information to the room description without recourse to compass
directions, but it would be hard to do so with equal precision and
economy:
"The floor of the cottage kitchen is littered with smashed crockery
and
jagged glass. The back door is open, and through the wall to the
right of it a low archway
opens onto the living room. The grange, placed opposite the arch,
appears to be out."
IMHO this is worse than your original with compass directions.
Incidentally, the title of this thread is 'The Prose Medium and IF",
but I think this title may contain a misconception. Is prose a
medium? Speaking in prose is one thing, reading prose fiction
another, and playing IF another; regarding all three as the same
medium under the rubric 'prose' may be more confusing than
enlightening. Treating a work of IF as prose fiction (meaning an
idea of prose fiction largely shaped by the conventions of the
modern print novel or short story) is potentially misleading as
treating some ancient text (say the Gospel of Mark, to take an
example from my own academic discipline) this way. An ancient
manuscript like a gospel was most likely a script for oral
performance; a modern novel is designed to be read silently; an work
of IF is designed to be interacted with. The constraints of the
medium affect what works well in each case.
That means we simply have to accept different conventions in
different media. Of course, we don't necessarily have to have
accepted precisely the conventions we have. For example, an
alternative to working compass directions awkwardly into room
description prose might be to incorporate them parenthetically:
"The floor of the cottage kitchen is littered with smashed crockery
and
jagged glass. The back door [east] is open, and a low archway
[south]
opens onto the living room. The grange appears to be out."
With this style it would be easier to remove the direction tags from
the display if a player found them distracting and preferred typing
GO THROUGH BACK DOOR to the briefer E.
The downside is that it might be hard to keep this up consistently.
It would work fine for most indoor locations, I think, but some
expansive outdoor locations might more naturally incorporate compass
directions into their descriptions.
"You stand on the western shore of a large, placid lake. Off to the
north low-lying clouds shroud the top of a distant mountain. Further
west a heavily wooded slope rises gently for the best part of a
mile. A dirt track runs back towards the quaint little village to
the south."
I'm not claiming that's great prose, or even particularly good
prose; I'm just suggesting that it's the kind of situation where it
would more natural to include the compass directions than to write:
"You stand on the shore of a large, placid lake [east]. Low-flying
clouds shroud the top of a distant mountain [north]. Opposite the
lake a heavily wooded slope [west] rises gently for the best part of
a mile. A dirt track urns back towards the quaint little village
[south]."
So maybe one would only use the parenthetical convention for indoor
locations?
> But then interior spaces are usually modeled on a grid anyway so
> semi-cardinal directions aren't necessary.
That's generally true (though there can be exceptions).
> Ideally the exit lister would list the names of known destinations
> as well as the direction,
This would be cumbersome in the status line, but the TADS 3
exit-lister already does this as standard in response to an EXITS
command and when the player enables the option to have a list of
exits appended to every room description. I've imitated this
behaviour in my I7 exit lister extension (which provides a similar
EXITS command, and would allow game authors to append a similar list
of exits to room descriptions).
>and we'd enable GO TO travel (perhaps not even full-blown
>pathfinding, just being able to >GO LIVING ROOM in the above
>example would be good).
As an alternative that makes good sense (provided we also allow
standard compass direction travel for those that want it). Indeed,
I've tended to implement that kind of thing in my own games,
although not totally consistently. Sometimes you can get this almost
for free if you define a suitable door. E.g., if there's an object
called the 'living room door' then (at least in TADS 3) GO TO LIVING
ROOM, is interpreted as ENTER LIVING ROOM DOOR, which takes the
player char through the living room door into the living room.
>> In the general case it's probably less confusing than most of the
>> obvious alternatives; and despite what some people say, it's
>> really not *that* unintuitive.
>
> It's that lump in the cinema seat, it's that click in the CD
> player, that stain on the page that yanks you back into the
> present. At least those other examples were where the system was
> broken, but in IF we've got to darned well /like/ the flaw and
> think it's almost cute.
I'm not 100% convinced by this. It's only self-evidently a flaw if
we insist on judging the aesthetics of IF by the standards of other
media, but I don't think that's reasonable. To the extent that it
becomes an accepted convention of IF, it's far from self-evident to
me that the mechanics of compass navigation is any more likely to
yank anyone back into the present when playing IF than is the
mechanics of page-turning when reading a book. The latter is so
familiar that we take it for granted without giving it a second
thought, but it is nevertheless part of the conventional skill of
novel reading (a skill that might not have been anything like so
self-evident to an ancient reader used to manipulating scrolls
rather than codices for literary works, for example).
A click on a CD player is a self-evident fault, since the click is
quite obviously not meant to be part of the musical performance
we're trying to listen to, and we're used to listening to CDs that
reproduce sound with a fair degree of fidelity. A lump in the cinema
seat is a self-evident fault, since it's clearly no part of any
convention of film-making or film-watching, and lumpy seats are no
part of the convention of comfortable seating. A stain on a page is
a self-evident fault, since such stains are no part of the
convention of printing or reading, and clearly detract from the
visual appearance of the page (when we're used to the convention of
regarding an aesthetically anf functionally pleasing printed page as
being sharp black type on a clean pale background). None of these is
a valid analogy for the use of compass-navigation in IF, which is a
convention of the medium, and has become so because it has proved
functionally useful in ways that clicks in CDs, stains on pages, and
lumps in cinema seats have not.
> What I'm saying is that it increases the overhead. And every bit
> of the player that's thinking "East - so I'm kind of going round
> that way and the butler's pantry is over *there*" is keeping them
> that little bit distant from the story. Which is not what any
> writer wants.
I'm not convinced by this, either, at least, not in the general
case. If the player is keeping a mental or paper map of the layout
of an area, I think it's actually *easier* if this is associated
with compass directions. It actually comes quite naturally to most
people to look at a map on a page and think of the top of the page
as north. Operating with such a mental or paper makes typing E to
get to the butler's pantry arguably the *least* intrusive mechanism.
Hitting two keys, E and RETURN, is almost instantaneous. Typing GO
TO BUTLER'S PANTRY <return> not only takes longer, but is more prone
to typos, the parser's responses to which are more likely to
distance the player from the story.
> If they have to read "the library door is on your right", look at
> the status bar, work out that it's west of them and then type "w",
> sure. But we watch which way they're facing and map the relative
> directions onto the compass directions behind the scenes.
I'm not 100% sure I understand what you mean, but on any
interpretation I'd personally find this ten times more confusing
than what we have now. If I want to keep a mental map of a place,
it's actually easier for me to think in terms of absolute directions
rather than directions relative to which way I happen to be facing.
If NORTH were reinterpreted to mean 'whichever way I'm happening to
be facing now' I'd quickly get absolutely lost.
Also, *how* do 'we watch which way they're facing'. At present this
simply isn't part of the world-model; and I suspect that trying to
make it so would just make everything more confusing to authors and
players alike.
Of course, this may be a situation where individual psychologies
differ. Relative directions would quickly confuse the hell out of
me, but maybe other people find them easier (although I think Mike
Roberts's Rat In Control experiment suggested that I'm not alone in
my preference).
> I take my hat off to those who can remember long strings of
> directions.
Well, I am the co-author of this particular game, so it's perhaps
not so surprising that it's layout is rather familiar to me!
> I always have to do it one command at a time anyway.
That's what I normally do when I'm playing IF too. My point wasn't
about about entering multiple commands at one prompt, I was simply
abbreviating the way I was representing a series of commands.
> Besides, GO TO MRS PEPPER'S is an expression of what I want to
> do: I stay within the story while I'm typing that.
Possibly, but what do you mean by MRS PEPPER'S in this context. Her
drive? Her front yard? Her front porch? Her house - if so which part
of it? How is the parser meant to know what you had in mind?
Whereas "where's the bloody library - er, EXIT -
> drat*, OUT, SOUTH" is me wrestling with the mechanics of the
> system.
So is:
>GO TO LIRBARY
The word 'Lirbary' is not necessary in this story.
>OOPS LIBRAYR
I don't understand the word 'librayr'
Of course, you may be a good enough typist that this doesn't afflict
you. In any case, as I've said above, I've nothing against
implementing this kind of command alongside compass navigation. I'm
just not convinced that all players will automatically find it
preferable.
> I think the best thing is to provide different ways of navigating
> so that different players can use what suits them best, rather
> than the current one-size-doesn't-fit-all approach.
Quite - so it turns out we're pretty much in agreement on that
point!
> -- oops gotta go! thanks for your thoughts,
And for yours!
This is a bit of a rambling reply, I fear; perhaps I'm just think
out loud a bit too much here!
-- Eric
David Fisher
news:flu2to$gam$1...@frank-exchange-of-views.oucs.ox.ac.uk...
[...]
> I can see another problem here. Suppose one stripped out the compass
> directions from your example: we'd be left with:
>
> "The floor of the cottage kitchen is littered with smashed crockery and
> jagged glass. The back door is open, and a
> low archway opens onto the living room. The grange
> appears to be out."
>
> This doesn't read too badly, but it doesn't give any sense of the relative
> positions, directions, or orientations of anything. This leads me to
> another thought: why would we want such a sense? To help us navigate, or
> to help us visualize the scene?
At the risk of sounding heretical ... apart from the navigation issue, is it
really necessary to provide the relative positions of everything? Does it
ultimately matter if the player doesn't know if the living room east or west
of the kitchen? They are free to visualise other details of the scene
however they like; perhaps they can be free to imagine the layout as well.
I guess one good reason for providing relative positions is to allow players
to head in a general direction, eg. to find their way to a particular,
distant location. But this might not always apply. If they are exploring a
small area of a village, for example, it seems like enough to me to know
that the main street connnects to "Smith" street, which gives access to the
bridge and the mill. I don't really need to know their relative orientations
...
As for navigation:
I vaguely remember a post in the archives that mentioned a MUD technique of
using abbreviations of location names mentioned in the text. Something like
this:
The floor of the cottage kitchen is littered with smashed
crockery and jagged glass. The back door is open, and a
low archway opens onto the living room. The grange
appears to be out.
> bd
(back door)
You walk through the back door and into the garden.
... and if the abbreviation was inappropriate (eg. "lounge"; "L" is taken):
> lo-
(lounge)
-- or something like that, maybe?
I guess players might still miss being able to easily enter a sequence of
directions, though ("N. E. NW. S").
David Fisher
George Oliver
wrote:
>
> As for navigation:
>
> I vaguely remember a post in the archives that mentioned a MUD technique of
> using abbreviations of location names mentioned in the text. Something like
> this:
>
> The floor of the cottage kitchen is littered with smashed
> crockery and jagged glass. The back door is open, and a
> low archway opens onto the living room. The grange
> appears to be out.
>
>
> I guess players might still miss being able to easily enter a sequence of
> directions, though ("N. E. NW. S").
>
> David Fisher
Indeed, though often it looks something like:
> The floor of the cottage kitchen is littered with smashed
> crockery and jagged glass. The back door is open, and a
> low archway opens onto the living room. The grange
> appears to be out.
Back Door (bd) Low Archway (la) Grange (g)
If your newsreader doesn't preserve that spacing, the exits would be
separated by tabs and printed as one line. Those exits will have
multiple aliases not immediately apparent to the player -- for
example, Back Door;back;door;ba;b;d;bd;bac;do;doo -- and usually
typing 'out', 'o', or 'leave' repeatedly will return you to some
central or outdoors location. Of course, the exits can have compass
directions as aliases as well, so it could look like
Back Door (n) Low Archway (e) Grange (s)
Jim Aikin
> Surely there is no need for a description to contain a half dozen
> irrelevant items?
There may be such a need, yes.
William Carlos Williams said once (of his poetry), "No ideas but in
things." This principle is very applicable to IF. Things (nouns,
objects) are of the essence.
Because of this, attempting to convey an impression of a location
without mentioning any things is almost bound to be weaken the impression.
--JA
David Fisher
news:b3cf5740-daee-412b...@e10g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> On Jan 7, 1:48 pm, "David Fisher" <davidfis...@australiaonline.net.au>
> wrote:
>>
>> As for navigation:
>>
>> I vaguely remember a post in the archives that mentioned a MUD technique
>> of
>> using abbreviations of location names mentioned in the text.
> Indeed, though often it looks something like:
>
>> The floor of the cottage kitchen is littered with smashed
>> crockery and jagged glass. The back door is open, and a
>> low archway opens onto the living room. The grange
>> appears to be out.
>
> Back Door (bd) Low Archway (la) Grange (g)
How did that feel to play? Did you miss having compass directions, or find
any other disadvantages?
(Not sure whether to post this in this or the "Alternative to compass
directions" thread now ...)
David Fisher
Ron Newcomb
Ooo! A nice, meaty post!
> that players used to using compass directions might not be happy
> about being forced to type
> GO THROUGH BACK DOOR, or GO THROUGH LOW ARCHWAY when they could just
> type E or W.
Sounds like a tradeoff between extra mental load (memorizing which
compass directions links to which destinations) vs. extra typing.
David Fisher mentions abbreviating the destination names. The first
letter of each destination name could be bolded as a hint. Besides,
GO NORTH itself used to be canon before the abbreviation was.
> This doesn't read too badly, but it doesn't give any sense of the
> relative positions, directions, or orientations of anything. This
David Fisher wrote:
>At the risk of sounding heretical ... apart from the navigation issue, is it
>really necessary to provide the relative positions of everything? Does it
>ultimately matter if the player doesn't know if the living room east or west
Amen, David. We need more heresy 'round here.
> whereas in some instances it may be important to give the reader an
> idea of relative positions and orientations (in a detective mystery,
Then that's a genre convention, not an I-F one in general.
> It may be that the sensibilities of people who find compass
> directions in rooms descriptions objectionable have been formed by
> reading (static) prose fiction.
Nope. It's the "WTF, I'm confused" yardstick we, including Jim's ex-
wife, are using. Compass directions for logical navigation is using a
different side of the brain than appreciating evocative phrasing and
its emotional attachments. Mixing the two easily produces cognitive
dissonance.
>> I take my hat off to those who can remember long strings of directions.
Ditto. But, like becoming a human calculator, I don't want to put in
the time to learn it myself.
> > broken, but in IF we've got to darned well /like/ the flaw and
> > think it's almost cute.
Ditto. I don't think veterans are aware of just how jarring North is
in a description, especially one that tries to set a mood. It's like
trying to work in a mention of how much each object in the room
weighs.
> I'm not 100% convinced by this. It's only self-evidently a flaw if
> we insist on judging the aesthetics of IF by the standards of other
> media
Again, us newbs are judging by our WTF response.
> me that the mechanics of compass navigation is any more likely to
> yank anyone back into the present when playing IF than is the
> mechanics of page-turning when reading a book.
How about if that book said "Please turn the page." at the bottom of
every page? And that sentence was worked, even skillfully, into the
prose at the bottom of every right-hand page?
> If the player is keeping a mental or paper map of the layout
> of an area,
Nobody makes maps of their video games anymore. Or of their D&D
campaign's dungeons. It's tedious and error-prone. I-F itself has
already taken quite a downturn in requiring that activity as well.
> Typing GO
> TO BUTLER'S PANTRY <return> not only takes longer, but is more prone
> to typos, the parser's responses to which are more likely to
> distance the player from the story.
Again, a valid point, but addressed above.
> Possibly, but what do you mean by MRS PEPPER'S in this context.
"Does the player mean..." is a handy I7 rule.
>Whereas "where's the bloody library - er, EXIT -
GO TO LIBRARY never has this problem. Only north, north, east, south,
east, x library.
>GO TO LIRBARY
There's a Mistype extension for the I7 author.
>This is a bit of a rambling reply, I fear; perhaps I'm just think
>out loud a bit too much here!
Twas a good post. And, at the risk of undermining my own purpose, let
me throw you (and everyone) an idea to chew on:
> "You stand on the shore of a large, placid lake [east]. Low-flying
> clouds shroud the top of a distant mountain [north]. Opposite the
> lake a heavily wooded slope [west] rises gently for the best part of
> a mile. A dirt track urns back towards the quaint little village
> [south]."
Color-code the directions in the compass rose (north is always blue,
like the arctic, yellow is always east, for the rising sun, etc.) ,
then color-code the places mentioned in the room description to
match. The above example would have "lake" in yellow, for example.
As long as it's not cartoonish colors (so, navy blue and brownish-
golden for black text on white, for example), it's a good hint, and
eventually, the compass rose won't be needed.
(apologies to our southern hemisphere friends)
-Ron
S. John Ross
> J. J. Guest wrote:
>> Surely there is no need for a description to contain a half dozen
>> irrelevant items?
>
> without mentioning any things is almost bound to be weaken the impression.
To be fair, there is a (potentially critical) difference between
"without mentioning any things" and "a half dozen irrelevant items."
I think the trick is that, in truth, virtually everything is relevant in
some way to those things in proximity to it. Anything can shed light on
a character or place, anything can be a clue or a misdirection (or
both). The solution isn't to overload on detail or to avoid it
absolutely, but rather (as always) to carefully select each detail for
its function - even if its function is exposition or atmosphere, and to
demand of your own design that every detail punches its own weight.
The usual disclaimer: I'm a sourcebooks-and-adventures game writer, not
an IF guy, so apply salt in big grains. But I do think this is one of
those cases where the principles apply across boundaries.
Emily Short
I should add that this is probably not a conclusive demonstration --
there are probably other kinds of game one could write in which the
absence of EXAMINE would bother me a little less. But I do think it's
a good, working example of the kinds of annoyances one can run into
with descriptions stripped out, even when the rest of the game is
solid.
Emily Short
> I think the best thing is to provide different ways of navigating so
> that different players can use what suits them best, rather than the
> current one-size-doesn't-fit-all approach. The downside is that it's
> more work for the author - but I7 is already providing some of the
> tools, and it may be that this is an area where the library could do a
> lot of the heavy lifting.
I've discovered that my own preference is to have compass directions
and a GO TO command in combination, and then also (at least in an
exploration-heavy game) some indication of exits in the status bar,
ideally designed to indicate which exits I've already explored and
which I haven't. The prose can then afford to belabor the whole
question of directions a little less.
But I'm with you on the play effect of GO TO: as a player I don't
usually think, "okay, now I need to go west and southwest twice and
then south", and being able to type a command that's closer to
expressing my actual intention is more pleasing. This is, I think, the
same reason I've come to prefer a TADS 3-style prompt for guided
conversation, rather than a numbered menu: even if it's more typing
for me to enter
>ASK FRED ABOUT SEDITION
than
>2
the former is a much more interesting command and much closer to what
I think I'm doing, as a player, so it maintains a certain sort of
mental engagement.
But that's just my own experience; it's pretty clear one size doesn't
fit all, on this one.
Poster
Jim Aikin <midig...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> George Oliver wrote:
> > On Jan 6, 3:01 pm, Jim Aikin <midigur...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> >> Let's compare two cases. Visualize (a) and (b) and tell me which
> >> is harder:
> >>
> >> a) "You're standing in front of a small white house."
> >>
> >> b) "You're standing in front of a small white house with a red tile
> >> roof. The chimney tilts a little at the upper end, in a way that's
> >> either rakish or alarming (depending, perhaps, on whether you're the
> >> homeowner, which you're not). Window-boxes full of bright red tulips are
> >> mounted below the twin windows on either side of the yellow dutch door."
> >
> > (B) is harder for me to visualize, not only because there are more
> > details to process, but the description itself is somewhat confusingly
> > written. On the other hand I find (a) to be, though simple,
> > evocative.
>
> <sighs deeply> I give up. If you honestly think (b) is harder to
> visualize, while (a) is more evocative ... I don't know what to say.
> Almost any response I could think of would be no more than a personal
> insult, and I don't want to go there.
>
> To me, as a writer, what you're saying is rather like, "I prefer comic
> books. Picasso, Klee, Dali -- those guys make my head hurt." See, that's
> as close as I can get to not insulting you. Sorry.
>
> --JA
I would go even further than that, Jim. I would suspect that the people
who chose B fall into into two camps:
1) They don't want to actually visualize the scene because that gets in
the way of the plot. This mindset chooses not to stop and smell the
roses. That's fine, although not to my liking.
2) They are actually, literally, incapable of visualizing something of
that detail.
In any case, the use of the word "evocative" is misconstrued. "A small
white house" cannot be evocative because its generality suggests
nothing! There is no lyricism or poetry its description; there is
nothing to differentiate it from the many small white houses that we
have all seen our entire lives. To thus say that a generic description
is evocative, basically puts all of writing on an altar and sacrifices
it.
Honestly, folks. If generic sentences evoke for you, then anything
beyond "See Spot Run" is wasted!
-- Poster
www.intaligo.com Building, INFORM, Seasons (upcoming!)
Poster
<0349b2dd-6214-4542...@j20g2000hsi.googlegroups.com>,
sge...@hotpop.com wrote:
> I'm with Jim on this (though I think I see Victor's point). It is
> easier for me to picture something (or understand someone else's
> picture) if I am given an evocative description (Jim), but it takes
> more mental effort to visualise something you are given a lot of
> detail about (Victor). Personally, I think an evocative description
> wins hands down every time. I love games, and believe me when I say I
> think gameplay is important, but the unique thing about IF is the
> story. I can get the same sort of gaming pleasure I get from solving
> an IF puzzle from many video games, but the story experience you get
> can only be acheived elsewhere by reading a book. Some people might
> argue that many modern video games also give you a story, and they do
> to some extent, but they would find it difficult to achieve the kind
> of depth possible with text. It is like the difference between reading
> a book and watching a film (sorry, movie in American). If you read the
> book first, the film is often disappointing, because it cannot match
> up to the wealth of detail supplied in the book.
>
> What I am trying to say is that, in my opinion, the story is more
> important than the gameplay. This may spark some controversy, but that
> is what I think. So, the terse description of the street is poor
> because it is written for gameplayers, not as if it were a real street
> you were trying to describe. Some compromise is inevitable, but I
> think this description is aimed firmly at making it easy for the
> player to type in a direction, rather than conjuring up a picture in
> their mind.
>
> To return to the example:
> "The sidewalk runs east and west. To the south is a busy street, to
> the
> north a tall fence. Just ahead to the west the fence ends, and beyond
> the corner of the fence is Mrs. Pepper's driveway."
>
> A quick re-write:
> "You are standing on a sidewalk that runs east-west, looking south at
> the busy street where traffic races past at speeds fast enough to
> break the law, but slow enough for the police to ignore. Behind you,
> to the north, is a tall wooden fence with a strip of spikes attached
> to its top to deter intruders. A little further down the sidewalk to
> the west, the fence ends, and Mrs Pepper's driveway begins."
>
> Now this is not great prose, I admit, but I think it gives a better
> picture. It introduces only one new thing to examine (the traffic),
> but the description for the fence is already there, meaning a bit less
> work. It also brings the player into the scene ("You are
> standing..."), which the original does not.
>
> I am not saying my version is better, but I think every description
> should be written to evoke a picture in the player's/reader's mind,
> not just tell them the layout of the game map.
This is why a status line showing possible directions from the room is a
good idea, for it takes the burden from the text. The text is then free
to allude to directions, but it does not carry the weight alone.
--Poster
chipjack
information, I'll examine it and discover that it's got a yellow door.
I can choose, then, to examine the door and find the bits of paint
that have flaked off in such a way to suggest the profile of Alfred
Hitchcock rendered in a pale blue, which is the color the door used to
be. I may even smell the door and learn that the wood is getting a bit
mouldy.
That level of detail delights me, and I don't find having to ask for
it the least bit unpleasant. Better that than to have it inflicted
upon me at all times, whether I'm in the mood for it or not.
Dumping it all in the room description is a quick way to get the prose
out, and it insures that the player will be given the chance to read
it. Doing this often, I'm sad to say, also insures that I'll skip over
most of your carefully crafted prose in search of the exits and any
items that might be takable.
I find good IF to be concise; saying everything that's necessary to
respond to my latest command, and nothing that need not be said. And
yes, writing that way is very hard work and requires a fair amount of
talent, which explains why there isn't more of it.
Ron Newcomb
> > > If you want a test of the proposition, try "Adventurer's Consumer
> > > Guide" and then come back and tell us whether you think it's better by
> > > dint of having no EXAMINE.
> there are probably other kinds of game one could write in which the
> absence of EXAMINE would bother me a little less. But I do think it's
> a good, working example of the kinds of annoyances one can run into
> with descriptions stripped out, even when the rest of the game is
> solid.
These annoyances you speak of must be deeper into the game than I
progressed, because I found the up-front lack of examine quite nice.
It improved the pacing of the game remarkably. That's very important
when combat or dialogue or other immediate, up-tempo events involve
the PC. It also eased puzzle-solving in an appropriate way: I
concentrated on my resources and what they can and can't do, rather
than wondering if my exhaustive "examine everything" search was
exhaustive enough.
The long Inventory list becomes a problem as we get more stuff
obviously, but that's an inventory setting problem, not a lack-of-
examine problem. It needs a sticky-setting or two, a la Inventory
Wide, but overall I like the idea.
Are you referring to monster descriptions acting like ill-behaved room
descriptions that don't respond to VERBOSE / BRIEF settings, creating
a flood of ignorable text? LookMode should apply to monsters, items,
the -whole- Look action, not just the first paragraph of description
that applies to the room itself. But now we're starting to wade
into Introductions territory here, and the procedure for recalling an
introduction.
If there's a walkthru for the game, I can navigate to any problem
points you know of specifically. Or you can simply state them with
spoiler warnings for everyone else.
-Ron
Adam Thornton
Poster <pos...@nospamever.aurora.cotse.net> wrote:
>In any case, the use of the word "evocative" is misconstrued. "A small
>white house" cannot be evocative because its generality suggests
>nothing!
<mode=needlessly-inflammatory-like-SOME-posters-I-could-mentions>
I don't want to be gratutitously insulting, but that's one of the most
ass-brained utterances I've ever heard.
"A small white house" evokes ZORK ONE, you mouth-breathing cretin. And
therefore all the exciting emotions of playing adventure games when we
were young and innocent, and so were the games, and the world was fresh
and new and full of unicorns and fluffy pink clouds.
Which you evidently MISSED because you were FEEDING OFF THE BOTTOM-MUCK
WITH YOUR COMIC BOOKS AND STUFF. GO SUCK A SPIDER-MAN, YOU PHILISTINE.
</mode>
Adam
Ron Newcomb
> <mode=needlessly-inflammatory-like-SOME-posters-I-could-mentions>
:: silently wonders how much hate mail Victor got for recently giving
Zork only 2 stars on IFDB. ::
Poster, I like you, but, I think symbolism can be powerful.
-R
Khelwood
> In article <flrqpm$ep...@aioe.org>,
That someone isn't inclined towards visualising twee descriptions of
houses is not related to their ability to smell and/or appreciate
roses. Focussing the imagination on character or storyline is more
interesting to some than making sure they have a handle on what things
are supposed to look like.
The idea that a generic statement cannot be evocative is a little
puzzling. Non-exhaustive descriptions can certainly provoke curiosity
to find out more, which is evocation of a kind.
"You're standing in front of a small white house" isn't an inspired
turn of phrase that will get the heart racing, but it may get a reader
sufficiently interested to find out more; whereas a list of quirky
details straining to provoke visualisation for its own sake may put
them off.
Emily Short
> These annoyances you speak of must be deeper into the game than I
> progressed, because I found the up-front lack of examine quite nice.
> It improved the pacing of the game remarkably. That's very important
> when combat or dialogue or other immediate, up-tempo events involve
> the PC. It also eased puzzle-solving in an appropriate way: I
> concentrated on my resources and what they can and can't do, rather
> than wondering if my exhaustive "examine everything" search was
> exhaustive enough.
Our tastes diverge here, then: there's not anything hidden deep in the
game that makes the situation worse. I simply got tired of having my
inventory listings and, room descriptions padded out with lots and
lots of information, some of which didn't (in my opinion) flow very
well as a single segment, but which all *had* to be presented as a
lump because there was no other option. This did not improve the
quality of the prose.
I also felt, not as though I had been immersed more deeply in the
action, but as though I had suffered some kind of vital handicap. I
type EXAMINE frequently and instinctively when I want to focus on one
particular object, rather than the environment as a whole, and even
though the game took hours to play I still hadn't unlearned this
behavior by the end.
Conversely, I don't tend to find that examining stuff distances me
from the action unless the author has simply supplied way too much
material: yes, in an action game, some of the urgency is lost if I can
spend a long time counting the roses on the wallpaper, but an author
who knows what he's doing usually directs my attention through the
emphasis of the prose towards what's interesting and useful. And when
I imagine the action, I don't imagine EXAMINE taking very long at all;
I imagine it as a near instant glance, something that could easily be
tucked into a fight scene or a chase.
Anyway, I guess my feeling about this is that the absence of EXAMINE
reduces the number of tools available to the author in terms of pacing
exposition, and that from the perspective of a habitual player it can
be irksome. (I can't say how novice players might react.)
Jim Aikin
> In article <poster-91E42B....@news.giganews.com>,
> Poster <pos...@nospamever.aurora.cotse.net> wrote:
>> In any case, the use of the word "evocative" is misconstrued. "A small
>> white house" cannot be evocative because its generality suggests
>> nothing!
>
> <mode=needlessly-inflammatory-like-SOME-posters-I-could-mentions>
>
> I don't want to be gratutitously insulting, but that's one of the most
> ass-brained utterances I've ever heard.
>
> "A small white house" evokes ZORK ONE, you mouth-breathing cretin. And
> therefore all the exciting emotions of playing adventure games when we
> were young and innocent, and so were the games, and the world was fresh
> and new and full of unicorns and fluffy pink clouds.
Indeed it does. That's probably why I chose it for my needlessly
inflammatory example, which has turned out to be far more provocative
than I envisioned.
The point at which I began this thread was, I was interested in
exploring why some folks who take a peek at IF are not thrilled by what
they discover, and are not motivated to explore further, try out more
games, etc.
References to Zork would be of interest only to the in-group of already
committed IF aficionados. Leaving aside Howard Sherman, who is still
trying to leverage the halcyon days of Zork for promotional purposes
(and we can all guess how well that's working for him), nobody beyond
the confines of r.*.i-f gives a dippity-do about the Infocom era anymore.
Nor should they.
The question, "Is the mention of a small white house evocative?" can
only be answered with the question, "Evocative for whom?" If it's
evocative for you, then you're already in with the in-crowd, so your
personal reaction, however poignant, won't provide any reliable guidance
on the question of how best to interest outsiders in the medium of
text-based games.
I would respectfully suggest that a better way to evaluate the question
would be to look at a random paragraph of IF and ask, "How closely does
this description resemble the writing of Stephen King?" Or Tolkien. Or
J. K. Rowling.
If you want to swim with the dolphins, you got to put on your fins.
--JA
Jim Aikin
>
> The idea that a generic statement cannot be evocative is a little
> puzzling. Non-exhaustive descriptions can certainly provoke curiosity
> to find out more, which is evocation of a kind.
Indeed ... assuming there is more to be found out. Mystery can be very
effective. But dull writing for its own sake is seldom effective. And
there's a huge difference between "generic" and "non-exhaustive."
> "You're standing in front of a small white house" isn't an inspired
> turn of phrase that will get the heart racing, but it may get a reader
> sufficiently interested to find out more; whereas a list of quirky
> details straining to provoke visualisation for its own sake may put
> them off.
That's an interesting theory, though it's rather undercut by your use of
the word "may", which lets you make an assertion while pretending not
to. Or perhaps you're not making an assertion but are allowing us to
think you did. Hard to say, isn't it?
Here's my suggestion:
Drop by your local public library and check out three or four books on
fiction writing technique. Read the chapters on setting and description.
Return to the newsgroup armed with half a dozen insights garnered from
seasoned professionals, and share them with us.
What? You're too busy? You think that would be irrelevant? Then why
should anyone who is striving to become a better writer pay any
attention to your unsupported theorizing?
See, this is a serious question. It's about whether you want to be
hopelessly insular and boundlessly pleased with yourself, or whether you
want to roll your pushcart out into the marketplace of ideas and hawk
your tangerines.
If all of the tangerines you've ever seen are covered with moldy spots,
and if you think spotted tangerines are just fine and dandy and how dare
anyone tell you otherwise, that's okay too. You and your friends can
roll the pushcart home at the end of the day and enjoy a whole load of
spotted tangerines. You'll still have the whole load, because you're not
going to sell any.
--JA
Eric Eve
news:fe49a082-addc-46e2...@u10g2000prn.googlegroups.com...
>> This doesn't read too badly, but it doesn't give any sense of the
>> relative positions, directions, or orientations of anything. This
For some reason David Fisher only quoted half of what I said here;
to give the complete extract:
>> This doesn't read too badly, but it doesn't give any sense of the
>> relative positions, directions, or orientations of anything. This
>> leads me to another thought: why would we want such a sense? To
>> help
>> us navigate, or to help us visualize the scene?
In other words, on pointing out the lack of orienting information, I
went on to ask why we would need it. At most David is as much
developing my line of thought as challenging it here.
>
> David Fisher wrote:
>>At the risk of sounding heretical ... apart from the navigation
>>issue, is it
>>really necessary to provide the relative positions of everything?
>>Does it
>>ultimately matter if the player doesn't know if the living room
>>east or west
>
> Amen, David. We need more heresy 'round here.
>
>> whereas in some instances it may be important to give the reader
>> an
>> idea of relative positions and orientations (in a detective
>> mystery,
>
> Then that's a genre convention, not an I-F one in general.
You seem to be responding to my remark out of context here, and
thereby reversing its point: what I wrote was:
>> whereas in some instances it may be important to give the reader
>> an
>> idea of relative positions and orientations (in a detective
>> mystery,
>> perhaps, where such details are important for solving the crime),
>> often that isn't all that necessary.
In other words, my point was that the detective mystery would be an
exception to the general rule that giving the idea of relative
positions often is *not* necessary. I was clearly not suggesting
that what applies to detective mysteries applies to all IF. The
point I was trying to make was that, except in certain special
circumstances (such as detective stories, perhaps), giving the
reader an idea of relative positions and orientations is necessary
only for the purposes of navigation.
>> It may be that the sensibilities of people who find compass
>> directions in rooms descriptions objectionable have been formed
>> by
>> reading (static) prose fiction.
>
> Nope. It's the "WTF, I'm confused" yardstick we, including Jim's
> ex-
> wife, are using. Compass directions for logical navigation is
> using a
> different side of the brain than appreciating evocative phrasing
> and
> its emotional attachments. Mixing the two easily produces
> cognitive
> dissonance.
I'm somewhat unconvinced by this. It's like saying that one can't
appreciate the emotional impact of a piece music without also
recognizing and appreciating some of the technical devices used
(orchestration, tempo, use of major/minor keys, form etc), because
there would be 'cognitive dissonance' between left and right brain
functions, and that seems to me to be simply false. I would still
maintain that people who come to IF as newbies don't come with
brains that are just blank slates, they come with expectations and
sensibilities formed by long exposure to other media.
>> > broken, but in IF we've got to darned well /like/ the flaw and
>> > think it's almost cute.
>
> Ditto. I don't think veterans are aware of just how jarring North
> is
> in a description, especially one that tries to set a mood. It's
> like
> trying to work in a mention of how much each object in the room
> weighs.
Blank and I already agreed that compass directions were generally
jarring (and certainly rather artificial) in the description of
interior rooms. I'm not so convinced that's always the case with
outdoor locations.
>> me that the mechanics of compass navigation is any more likely to
>> yank anyone back into the present when playing IF than is the
>> mechanics of page-turning when reading a book.
>
> How about if that book said "Please turn the page." at the bottom
> of
> every page? And that sentence was worked, even skillfully, into
> the
> prose at the bottom of every right-hand page?
But that's generally not needed, because book readers have
internalized the procedure of page-turning (I say generally, because
I'm aware that in some circumstances one does put PLEASE TURN OVER
at the bottom of right hand pages; I have to do that when setting
exam papers, for example).
Actually, it occurs to me that my remark and your response is
indicative of a different underlying argument here. Your arguing
from the perspective of a newcomer; I'm arguing from someone more
used to playing IF. You seem to be saying that IF should meet the
expectations of newcomers, I'm being a little sceptical of that, on
the grounds that one needs to gain a certain skill set and
internalize a certain set of conventions to appreciate any medium
(we are not born with the ability to read novels).
Of course one can look at ways at making some games more accessible
to newbies (I say some, since whatever ideas we come up with now
aren't going to get retro-fitted to all past works of IF, which are
still available to be played), and I'm not arguing against
implementing other forms of navigation alongside NORTH etc. My point
is rather than once one has internalized the use of compass
directions they don't always seem so intrusive and they provide a
particular concise and convenient means of moving around. But maybe
tastes will always differ on this.
>> If the player is keeping a mental or paper map of the layout
>> of an area,
>
> Nobody makes maps of their video games anymore. Or of their D&D
> campaign's dungeons. It's tedious and error-prone. I-F itself
> has
> already taken quite a downturn in requiring that activity as well.
Not even a mental map? People play these games without any
conception of the space in which they're meant to be taking place?
Or to take a different example, I don't make paper maps of the city
I live in (although I occasionally need to consult them), but I
certainly operate with a mental map of it (without which I'd hardly
find my way around), and that mental map also contains some general
idea of what lies north, west, south and east (I mean in the city as
a whole, not its internal spaces such as the insides of buildings).
Is it so unreasonable for IF to borrow a real-life convention to
that extent?
>> Possibly, but what do you mean by MRS PEPPER'S in this context.
>
> "Does the player mean..." is a handy I7 rule.
Sure, the parser can choose a default, but in this kind of case it
can't read the player's mind to determine which default corresponds
with what the player actually meant.
> Twas a good post.
Thanks!
> And, at the risk of undermining my own purpose, let
> me throw you (and everyone) an idea to chew on:
>
>> "You stand on the shore of a large, placid lake [east].
>> Low-flying
>> clouds shroud the top of a distant mountain [north]. Opposite the
>> lake a heavily wooded slope [west] rises gently for the best part
>> of
>> a mile. A dirt track urns back towards the quaint little village
>> [south]."
Er, isn't this a little like the suggestion I made for the kitchen?
> Color-code the directions in the compass rose (north is always
> blue,
> like the arctic, yellow is always east, for the rising sun, etc.)
> ,
> then color-code the places mentioned in the room description to
> match. The above example would have "lake" in yellow, for
> example.
>
> As long as it's not cartoonish colors (so, navy blue and brownish-
> golden for black text on white, for example), it's a good hint,
> and
> eventually, the compass rose won't be needed.
I don't think colour-coding is the way to go. For one thing, it
would be an even more difficult convention for newbies to grasp
(especially if the compass rose was deemed to be no longer needed!).
For another it might be visually distracting, even with moderately
muted colours (a bit like printing the words of different characters
in a novel in different colours, although admittedly not to the same
extent). For another it would be unhelpful to colour-blind or
visually impaired players. And for another, not all interpreters
would cope with it, and it would not be equally visible on every
players' preferred colour-schemes.
-- Eric
Blank
Um.
"The wind hisses over the snow, and your fingers have been numb for
longer than you really want to think about. You scan the bleak, sterile
horizon, trying to ignore the yapping of the huskies."
You see a small white house here."
"The low, slanting sunlight warms the landscape, making the purple and
gold hills glow against the darkening sky. You stretch your back,
shifting the straps of your knapsack to a more comfortable position as
you fumble for the map.
You see a small white house here."
Did you see the same house in both descriptions? I hope not. Properly
used, generic descriptions let the player or the reader "fill in the
blanks" and personalize the scene that they're constructing in their
mind - and this helps the reader invest emotionally in what's going on.
Every detail you put into a scene is both good and bad. It's good
because it cues the reader about what's important here and guides their
imagination enough that the scene they're imagining will work properly
in the story. It's bad because each detail gives the reader less "wiggle
room" to make the story personal to them.
That's not to say that there's no place for lushly-detailed stop-motion
prose; details are a tool and like all tools have to be used
appropriately and intelligently for best effect.
Good writing is all about balance. That's why it's so bloody hard to do
well.
(And it's not helped by having the Tin Idiot bung interpolations in
either! :o))
jayzee
Khelwood
I use the word "may" because I am suggestions possibilities that i
think explain my view. I couldn't possibly say "it will get a reader
sufficiently interested" because it obviously depends on the reader. I
am not trying to overrule your opinion with groundless assertions; I
am only describing the way that some people can react to the writing
you are advocating.
I notice your presumption here that anyone who has a different opinion
on writing from yours knows nothing about writing. I've no interest in
arguing by authority: I don't see much value in sitting around
admiring each other's clever quotes. I only voicing my opinion.
I don't see where I've been insular or pleased with myself. I've only
presented the way that I think some readers may (yes, may) view the
writing you were advocating; and I haven't pompously compared your
opinion to a preference for comic books over Picasso.
If every tangerine you've ever seen is purple and filled with
meringue, and you -- no, I can't be bothered coming up with something
as smug and irrelevant your analogy.
Blank
>
> To me, as a writer, what you're saying is rather like, "I prefer comic
> books. Picasso, Klee, Dali -- those guys make my head hurt." See, that's
> as close as I can get to not insulting you. Sorry.
>
> --JA
>
Maybe OT as far as IF is concerned, but not as far as writing is
concerned: comic books are not necessarily mindless pap any more than
text is. If you want to look at some comic books that will make your
heart hurt, I recommend "Barefoot Gen" (4 books) or "Maus" (2 books).
jayzee
Jim Aikin
>
> I notice your presumption here that anyone who has a different opinion
> on writing from yours knows nothing about writing.
It's a tragic and pathetic error (though very common in the United
States) to assume that the opinions of the ignorant are entitled to the
same respect as the opinions of those who have taken the trouble to
educate themselves.
--JA
Jim Aikin
>
> Actually, it occurs to me that my remark and your response is
> indicative of a different underlying argument here. Your arguing
> from the perspective of a newcomer; I'm arguing from someone more
> used to playing IF. You seem to be saying that IF should meet the
> expectations of newcomers, I'm being a little sceptical of that, on
> the grounds that one needs to gain a certain skill set and
> internalize a certain set of conventions to appreciate any medium
> (we are not born with the ability to read novels).
Technically correct, in that we're not born knowing how to read, but
very likely wrong as to the underlying brain mechanisms.
The human instinctive package includes, without doubt, both the ability
to tell stories and the ability to understand and appreciate stories
told by others. The inability to do this would be prima facie evidence
of a profound mental impairment. The ability to learn to speak and
understand a language is also hard-wired by genetics.
I agree that one needs to internalize a skill set in order to appreciate
a story when it's presented in any manner other than as a sequential
flow of words. I've read, for instance, that in the early days of film,
filmmakers had to educate viewers about what a reaction shot was.
--JA
Blank
Very true. This is a new medium and we're in the process of evolving our
own conventions and experimenting to find out what works. When
photography was new, the first photographers concentrated on reproducing
the appearance of paintings because that's what the body of opinion at
the time said a "good picture" should look like. It took, what? A
generation? A century? before photographs were able to be judged as
something in their own right, rather than "imitation paintings". So I do
take your point that with hindsight our efforts now to produce "well
written" games may well produce works that stand in the same relation to
future IF as the "imitation paintings" do to photography. (ew. lot of
scare quotes there, sorry.)
But that's for the future. Right now, our criteria for judging good
writing come from static fiction. We can't leapfrog this stage; we have
no option but just to write as well as we can. As a text medium, IF has
a huge advantage: there are a lot of skilled readers out there.
If we get the words right we can make 'em laugh, cry, or rendered unsafe
to operate heavy machinery because of the story they've been dragged
into. If we get the words right.
We've agreed that compass-direction navigation does work fine in a lot
of cases. I'm just saying that there are times it makes me write the
words wrong.
jayzee
(everything below snipped - but only because I'm out of time again!)
J. J. Guest
Hrrmph! A description is made of words, not things. I'm not suggesting
that a location description should contain no nouns at all, but I can
see no need to clutter it up with a plethora of impertinent
paraphernalia. A better approach is to take those nouns which do have
a bearing on the game, plot or puzzle-wise, and build it up from
there. That way the player is not side-tracked into examining every
last shingle on the roof of the white house, or worry about why its
owner chose to paint the window sills Chartreuse Yellow.
J. J. Guest
Jim Aikin
>
> This is a new medium and we're in the process of evolving our
> own conventions and experimenting to find out what works. When
> photography was new, the first photographers concentrated on reproducing
> the appearance of paintings because that's what the body of opinion at
> the time said a "good picture" should look like. It took, what? A
> generation? A century? before photographs were able to be judged as
> something in their own right, rather than "imitation paintings".
I know nothing about the history of photography, and only a little about
the history of painting, but I would have thought it would be the other
way around. I'd expect the composition of a good photograph to be
exactly the same as the composition of a good representational painting.
Conversely, the birth of photography freed painters, who no longer had
to reproduce the absolute visual appearance of things (because
photography could now do that). The results included Impressionism and
Cubism.
> We've agreed that compass-direction navigation does work fine in a lot
> of cases. I'm just saying that there are times it makes me write the
> words wrong.
This is a real difficulty -- no argument on that point. On the other
hand, I'm pretty sure it's possible to use words like "northwest"
unobtrusively. Once the reader is familiar with the medium, these words
can fade into the semi-conscious background, much the way the word
"said" fades in written dialog. "A gravel path leads northwest around
the corner of the house" is not really substantively worse than, "A
gravel path leads around the corner of the house."
Very few readers are bothered by the frequent repetition of "said." Good
writers sometimes prefer to insert bits of action in place of dialog
tags, like this:
Janet frowned. "It couldn't have been an elephant. I would have noticed."
But that's not always a practical alternative, because you can only have
your characters frown, wince, giggle, or scratch their chins once per
scene before the device becomes glaringly obtrusive. Also, the
characters can't be doing something physical in connection with _every_
speech, and in a scene with three characters, pretty much every speech
needs a dialog tag. This never becomes obtrusive:
"It couldn't have been an elephant," Janet said. "I would have noticed."
So the underlying question is, what's the best way to tell people that
there's a gravel path leading around the corner of the house? This much
information can't really be put in a status line. And we want to mention
the path, because we don't want the reader to feel that each location is
a sealed cube.
--JA
Eric Eve
"Emily Short" <ems...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:613a26fc-0416-411f...@j20g2000hsi.googlegroups.com...
On Jan 7, 12:02 pm, Blank <bl...@nowhere.com> wrote:
> I've discovered that my own preference is to have compass
> directions
> and a GO TO command in combination, and then also (at least in an
> exploration-heavy game) some indication of exits in the status
> bar,
> ideally designed to indicate which exits I've already explored and
> which I haven't. The prose can then afford to belabor the whole
> question of directions a little less.
I think I'd broadly agree with that preference. I also like seeing a
list of exits in the status line, and the marking of visited vs
unvisited exits was a feature I particularly liked when I first
encountered it in "Bronze" (at least, as far as I can recall, that's
where I first encountered it).
> But I'm with you on the play effect of GO TO: as a player I don't
> usually think, "okay, now I need to go west and southwest twice
> and
> then south", and being able to type a command that's closer to
> expressing my actual intention is more pleasing.
I think this may depend on the nature of the game, though. The GO TO
command implemented in Bronze worked very well in the context of
that game, I think (and was another feature I liked about it). In a
game in which the player character is meant to be exploring
completely unfamiliar territory it might be less appropriate.
Furthermore, a GO TO command can be a useful tool for bridging the
gap between player and PC knowledge. If the game is set in the PC's
appartment, it's reasonable that GO TO BATHROOM should work even if
the player hasn't visited it before; the PC should presumably be
able to find his/her bathroom without a second thought. On a larger
scale, this also seems reasonable if, say, the story is set in a
city in which the PC has lived all his life. GO TO BLOGSWELL STREET
should arguably work even if the Player doesn't know the way there,
since the PC presumably does.
> This is, I think, the
> same reason I've come to prefer a TADS 3-style prompt for guided
> conversation, rather than a numbered menu: even if it's more
> typing
>for me to enter
>>ASK FRED ABOUT SEDITION
>than
>>2
> the former is a much more interesting command and much closer to
> what
> I think I'm doing, as a player, so it maintains a certain sort of
> mental engagement.
I agree with this too, but it interests me for a couple of reasons.
First of all, I have written a TADS 3 extension (intended somewhat
experimentally) that optionally numbers the suggested topics and
lets you choose which one you want with:
>2
rather than
>1
But the beta-tester who tried it out for me (in the context of a
game he was testing for me in any case) felt much as you did. In
particular he felt it was just too easy just to tear through a
conversation by entering numbers without giving much thought to what
was being said or why. In this case, making players type more forces
them to think about what they're going to ask/tell about more, and
this does seem to make for better game-play.
So this would seem to support your contention that brevity of
command entry is not the only relevant situation here.
But how far does this translate into moving around the map?
Well, for me, there's much less disconnect between typing N to go
north that there is than typing 2 to ask Fred about sedition. OTOH
there are occasions when I might choose to type a different sort of
movement command. My own tendencies are:
(a) I often prefer to type OUT when there's only one exit, and it
strikes me as leading out relative to where I am. Similarly I often
find it more natural to type IN or ENTER HOUSE for a movement that
seems to be primarily inward rather than eastwards, say.
(b) I would certainly tend to use a GO TO command where it offers
a quick short cut for traversing several locations, rather than
having to think about a series of compass movement commands.
(c) OTOH I'd be far less inclined to type GO TO KITCHEN to go the
kitchen if I knew I could get there by just typing N. I don't think
it would even occur to me that GO TO KITCHEN was any more expressive
of my intention than GO NORTH in that situation (the possible
awkwardness of the room description telling me that the kitchen lies
north is a different issue).
I'm not exactly sure what this says. I think it says that so far as
movement commands go, my preferences (as a player) tend to be more
pragmatic than artistic; I'll just use what seems the most
convenient phrasing at the moment (which isn't necessarily the
shortest). OTOH my preference for entering conversational commands
rather than just numbers has a strong artistic dimension; the game
seems to work much better as a story that way.
So, while brevity isn't everything, what applies to conversation
doesn't necessarily apply to movement. Still, I think we're about
99% in agreement here.
> But that's just my own experience; it's pretty clear one size
> doesn't
> fit all, on this one.
I'm with you on that as well, with the amplification that "all" here
means "all games" as well as "all players". Even if we agreed that
in general it's good practice to implement compass movement plus
some form of GO TO plus CLIMB, ENTER, GO THROUGH and the like
(thereby trying to cater for the maximum range of player tastes),
there can obviously be clear exceptions to this where an author
wants a particular effect for a particular game.
-- Eric
Victor Gijsbers
> I would respectfully suggest that a better way to evaluate the question
> would be to look at a random paragraph of IF and ask, "How closely does
> this description resemble the writing of Stephen King?" Or Tolkien. Or
> J. K. Rowling.
Did you choose those three writers because they all sell extremely well,
or did you choose those three writers because all of them are (to
differing degrees) inept stylists? (This is a serious, not a rhetorical
or derogatory question.)
Kind regards,
Victor
Victor Gijsbers
> On Jan 7, 7:05 pm, a...@fsf.net (Adam Thornton) wrote:
>> <mode=needlessly-inflammatory-like-SOME-posters-I-could-mentions>
>
> :: silently wonders how much hate mail Victor got for recently giving
> Zork only 2 stars on IFDB. ::
None, I'm happy to tell you. :)
Regards,
Victor
Victor Gijsbers
> See, this is a serious question.
Then why aren't you seriously listening to the answers? Many of your
posts seem to be calculated to either provoke or downright insult the
people who try to answer your 'serious' question. You do not engage
their opinions. When they say that your definition of good writing may
not be a good definition of good writing, you tell them to go read the
opinions of professionals and then come back to you.
Now that sounds as if you think you already know the answer to your
question and are boundlessly pleased with yourself.
Which means that your question is not a serious question, but a
rhetorical one, presumably asked in order to feel your own superiority.
Now I'm not saying that that is the way it is. Maybe you _do_ have a
serious question, and maybe there are just some misunderstandings
between you and those who attempt to discuss it with you,
misunderstandings which make you believe that they have an absurdly bad
taste where writing is concerned. Given how the conversation has
evolved, I believe this is quite likely.
But in either case there is no need for you to insult people and treat
them as morons, so I think we would all appreciate it if you stopped
doing that.
Also, you never responded to the post where I took a couple of very good
writers and showed how their books differed in the amount of visual
detail. (For instance, I told you that "Blood Meridian" has a lot of
visual detail and "American Pastoral" has very little.) I suggested that
there are good reasons for this difference, and that his proves that
'good writing' cannot be equated with 'having lots of visual detail'. In
many cases, those two might even be in opposition. I also suggested that
there are many other types of detail, which have little or nothing to do
with visualisation.
I would like to see a response to that, because I see it as the heart of
the contention here.
Regards,
Victor
Dan Schmidt
For sure. There's also the converse error, just as common and just as
tragic, of assuming that those who have a different opinion from you
are ignorant.
Greg Boettcher
> I guess I'd have to disagree with that conclusion, and in pretty strong
> terms. Let's compare two cases. Visualize (a) and (b) and tell me which
> is harder:
>
> a) "You're standing in front of a small white house."
>
> b) "You're standing in front of a small white house with a red tile
> roof. The chimney tilts a little at the upper end, in a way that's
> either rakish or alarming (depending, perhaps, on whether you're the
> homeowner, which you're not). Window-boxes full of bright red tulips are
> mounted below the twin windows on either side of the yellow dutch door."
>
> latter ... well, there may be several reasons. First, the traditions of
> the medium date back to the days when 64K was a generous allotment of
> memory. Second, not thinking about the writing very much, because you
> know players will just skim it in any case. Third, as I mentioned
> before, any noun in a description is an invitation: 'x tulips', 'x
> window-boxes' 'x windows', 'x chimney', 'x dutch door', 'x roof' --
> multiply that by 50 rooms and it's a lot of work to implement, with no
> gain whatever in terms of gameplay.
In my opinion, there's a particular reason why people want less detail
in IF than in fiction. With a short story or novel, the reader knows
how much he's getting in for from the start. With an IF game, the
player is faced with an *unknown* amount of text to read, and if you
ask me, players can certainly be forgiven if their attention span is
so much the less on that account.
Taking it down to a particular example, I liked your room descriptions
in Lydia's Heart. Some were a bit longer than I consider ideal, but
overall I liked them. They were well written and added to the
atmosphere. What's more, since you included a map in your game (and
because of TADS 3's exit-listing feature), nobody needed to hunt
through your room descriptions in a frustrating game of "find the list
of exits." That certainly helped too.
On the other hand, your Example B, with its tulips, gives me the
impression of containing detail that merely serves as ornament. Not a
contribution to the game's atmosphere, not as relevant information,
but as ornament. If so, I say get rid of it. I think your Example B is
a bad example for what you're trying to argue.
Likewise, I disagree with your first message in this thread, where I
took you to be saying, "Man, I really need to write even longer room
descriptions than I did in Lydia's Heart." Well, you can do that if
you want, and maybe if you do it well enough, I'll even like the
result, but you'll be forcing your players into an increasingly
frustrating game of "find out what details in this room description
are relevant." I think longer room descriptions -- substantially
longer than the ones in Lydia's Heart, say -- will make people like
your ex-wife complain more, not less.
In short, I think writing IF involves striking a balance between
providing enough detail to engage the imagination, while not providing
so much that it detracts from the game play experience.
Reading this thread a little more here, I see others already mentioned
some ideas I wrote here. Eric Eve and Aaron Reed, for example. Well,
here are my thoughts, just the same.
Greg
Ron Newcomb
> None, I'm happy to tell you. :)
:)
-R
Conrad
>
> "Brevity is wit."
Polonius: Brevity is the soul of wit:
Tediousness is its limbs and outward flourishes.
I've only read the first 25 posts in this thread so far, so I'd just
like to comment to this point:
To my mind, a good question to ask ourselves as writers of IF is: At
what point in our text does a player start skimming?
Because we can keep in mind this simple formula:
Skimming = Death
So, for me:
> b) "You're standing in front of a
> small white house with a red tile
> roof.
Good, clear.
> The chimney tilts a little at
> the upper end,
Clear, but... What kind of chimney? A
brick chimney? Those don't actually tilt,
in my experience. They have bricks fall
out. Or, a metal pipe?
In any case, it's cliche. But clear.
> in a way that's
> either rakish or alarming
This is no longer visual information: this
is evaluation (leading).
> (depending,
> perhaps, on whether you're the
> homeowner, which you're not).
At this point, I start skimming. This is
chattiness for the sake of chattiness:
no information about the scene.
Unless it's important I'm told explicitly
that it's not my house: which is unnecessary,
since presumably I'd know if it were.
> Window-boxes full of bright red
> tulips are mounted below the twin
We're back to visual scenic info, but I'd
gone into skimming mode. Also this is
minutia.
> windows on either side of the
> yellow dutch door."
I'd say you got the sequence wrong there:
the door, which is more prominent, I'd
notice first, and should be described first:
then the windows, then the window-boxes.
So: my recommendation:
"You're in front of a small white house with a
red tile roof. No smoke rises from the crooked
chimney-pipe. The top half of the yellow dutch
door swings open. On either side of the door,
identical windows have windowboxes holding
pink tulips. On the whole, it's an unspeakably
ugly house."
The reference to "standing" is unnecessary, I'd
say, unless I have reason to suppose I'd be
doing something other than standing. There's
only one evaluation/leading at the end, where it
forms a summing-up.
On Jan 6, 8:27 pm, Jason Dyer <ditt...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> From _The Sound of One Hand Clapping_ by Erica Sadun:
>
> Windswept Field
>
> You are standing amidst the tall
> grasses in a windswept field. Above
> the sky is blue. A small kill winds
> its way around granite boulders
> down the mountain. Purple and
> white peaks surround you on all sides,
> as does the forest. Within the greens
> of the summer mountain are the
> brown scores where loggers were
> and will be again. Blue herons pass
> occasionally overhead and gentle
> deer stop -- to eat the summer
> berries or drink from the kill water.
> Small frogs jump in and out of
> the kill and insects skim over the
> top, never breaking the surface.
> There are grey and silvery fish darting
> below the sun bleached rocks.
> You are surrounded on all sides by
> wild bushes. A narrow thorny gap
> lies to the west.
This one was really excellent. I'd say,
nitpick-wise, there were one or two wasted
moves: "Above the sky is blue," for example,
can just read: "The sky is blue." -- I know
where the sky is.
I'd like to have the feel of the wind and smell
of the air mentioned: but I make these
comments strictly for something to talk about.
It's a very well-written passage and, although
I was afraid I was going to start skimming, I
never did.
> From _Beyond Zork_ by Brian Moriarty:
>
> Hilltop
>
> The horizon is lost in the glare of morning
> upon the Great Sea. You shield your eyes
> to sweep the shore below, where a village lies
> nestled beside a quiet cove. A stunted oak
> tree shades the inland road.
Ok, this is dumb and I will not deny it's a
quirk on my part:
I started skimming with "You shield your eyes..."
Originally, I thought that was because the switch
from visual description to my action was too
jarring: but now, reading it, I notice:
The first two lines are about *not* seeing: I *can't*
see the horizion; I *shield* my eyes. The wrong
instructions to pull in the reader.
Conrad.
Khelwood
It's an impressive display of arrogance to ask for opinions and then
scorn them for proving their ignorance by differing from your own view.
Emily Short
> My own tendencies are:
>
> (a) I often prefer to type OUT when there's only one exit, and it
> strikes me as leading out relative to where I am. Similarly I often
> find it more natural to type IN or ENTER HOUSE for a movement that
> seems to be primarily inward rather than eastwards, say.
>
> (b) I would certainly tend to use a GO TO command where it offers
> a quick short cut for traversing several locations, rather than
> having to think about a series of compass movement commands.
>
> (c) OTOH I'd be far less inclined to type GO TO KITCHEN to go the
> kitchen if I knew I could get there by just typing N. I don't think
> it would even occur to me that GO TO KITCHEN was any more expressive
> of my intention than GO NORTH in that situation (the possible
> awkwardness of the room description telling me that the kitchen lies
> north is a different issue).
This is all true for me as well; possibly because when I'm moving from
one room to an adjacent one in real life, I think of my intended
action as "go over there" rather than "make a journey to destination
foo".
Emily Short
Oh, and I also meant to add: the other point here is that, while I
sometimes think "I should head north now", there is no point *ever* in
a real life conversation when I think "I'll say option 2" or "let me
make the second remark I was considering" or anything numerical that
would correspond to
>2
-- so the numbered menu really drives home the artificiality of the
interface. (I think MJR in fact has some comments on this on his pages
on conversation, so this is hardly a new observation.)
Greg Boettcher
> > I should add that this is probably not a conclusive demonstration --
> > there are probably other kinds of game one could write in which the
> > absence of EXAMINE would bother me a little less. But I do think it's
> > a good, working example of the kinds of annoyances one can run into
> > with descriptions stripped out, even when the rest of the game is
> > solid.
>
> These annoyances you speak of must be deeper into the game than I
> progressed, because I found the up-front lack of examine quite nice.
> It improved the pacing of the game remarkably. That's very important
> when combat or dialogue or other immediate, up-tempo events involve
> the PC. It also eased puzzle-solving in an appropriate way: I
> concentrated on my resources and what they can and can't do, rather
> than wondering if my exhaustive "examine everything" search was
> exhaustive enough.
I had a few conflicting ideas on this:
1. I can see your frustration about always wondering if your "examine
everything" search was exhaustive enough, but I don't really share it.
2. I didn't especially like the prohibition of EXAMINE in that game
per se.
3. On the other hand, I do like playing games where the author tries
something different and convention-defying, showing a unique vision of
what a game can be like, even if it's a vision I wouldn't want to
follow if I wrote a game.
> If there's a walkthru for the game, I can navigate to any problem
> points you know of specifically. Or you can simply state them with
> spoiler warnings for everyone else.
In case you're interested, there is a walkthrough at:
http://webhome.idirect.com/~dswxyz/sol/acg.html
Greg
Ron Newcomb
> For some reason David Fisher only quoted half of what I said here;
> went on to ask why we would need it.
My mistake; I misunderstood your position....
> You seem to be responding to my remark out of context here, and
> thereby reversing its point: what I wrote was:
...twice.
> > wife, are using. Compass directions for logical navigation is using a
> > different side of the brain than appreciating evocative phrasing and
> > its emotional attachments. Mixing the two easily produces cognitive dissonance.
> I'm somewhat unconvinced by this. It's like saying that one can't
> appreciate the emotional impact of a piece music without also
> recognizing and appreciating some of the technical devices used.
Uh, the opposite of that, I think. It's hard to appreciate both
aspects simultaneously.
In the endgame of the better I-F I play, my puzzle-solving ability
takes a nosedive as I get excited (or tense, or suspenseful, etc.).
My emotions get in the way of my cold analytical abilities. The
endgame puzzle is a big example, but this phenomenon happens in the
small as well, in every pretty room description with 3.2 exits.
> Blank and I already agreed that compass directions were generally
> jarring
OK, but Jim doesn't. He says they become invisible words, like
"said". I say they're like croutons in my yogurt.
> I'm not so convinced that's always the case with outdoor locations.
You could take any rule and construct a work where it works better if
the rule is false. Writing taught me that.
> Actually, it occurs to me that my remark and your response is
> indicative of a different underlying argument here. Your arguing
> from the perspective of a newcomer; I'm arguing from someone more
> used to playing IF.
> You seem to be saying that IF should meet the
> expectations of newcomers,
Yep to all of that.
> I'm being a little sceptical of that, on
> the grounds that one needs to gain a certain skill set and
> internalize a certain set of conventions
OK, but choose your conventions wisely, not because of the off-the-
cuff choice a guy made 20 years ago when he decided to write a
simulated tour of a Kentucky cave.
We newbs are saying, "Hey, have you looked at this convention? Like,
really looked at it?"
Compass directions are certainly easily typed, but as someone mentions
somewhere in this thread, setting up the player so he can use them can
wreck prose. And prose is all we've got. So I say wrecking prose is
a greater sin than requiring a bit more typing. And then I say,
therefore, compass directions shouldn't, in the general case, be the
default movement mode. GO TO is a better default.
(GO TO can be modified not to skip rooms, for exploratory works.)
> Not even a mental map?
OK, but it's hard to create an keep an accurate mental map when you're
not actually walking through the place. (Not impossible; some I-F have
done it well, but what does that have to do with *story*? It's an
adjunct, an add-on, not the real purpose of the work. (Unless it is.))
Regarding the color-wheel compass rose:
> I don't think colour-coding is the way to go. For one thing, it
> would be an even more difficult convention for newbies to grasp
> (especially if the compass rose was deemed to be no longer needed!).
I wasn't clear -- I meant the player would eventually no longer need
to look at the compass rose as a map legend, like they no longer need
to use the HELP or INSTRUCTIONS menu after spending some time with a
game. But anyway, the color-blind users and possibly distracting
aesthetics I find valid points.
-R
Victor Gijsbers
> Oh, and I also meant to add: the other point here is that, while I
> sometimes think "I should head north now", there is no point *ever* in
> a real life conversation when I think "I'll say option 2" or "let me
> make the second remark I was considering" or anything numerical that
> would correspond to
>
>> 2
>
> -- so the numbered menu really drives home the artificiality of the
> interface. (I think MJR in fact has some comments on this on his pages
> on conversation, so this is hardly a new observation.)
What would be a solution to this problem? The standard "ask/tell"
interface also leads to artificiality, although a different kind.
Although I might think, in real life, "I want to tell Emily about Little
Miss Sunshine", I'm never ever going to wonder whether what I am going
to tell you about that topic is what I _want_ to tell you.
For me it feels more natural to choose between
1) "Emily, did you see Little Miss Sunshine? It is great!"
2) "Emily, did you see Little Miss Sunshine? It is boring!"
then to "talk to you about" Little Miss Sunshine and Just _hope_ I'm
going to recommend it to you.
Whereas you say that there is no point *ever* in a real life
conversation when I think "I'll say option 2"; I say that there is
*definitely* going to be a point in a real life conversation where I
think "I'll say '[insert text of option 2]'".
I wonder if we can have the best of both worlds. Letting the player type
in the entire text she wants to say is definitely impossible, unless the
characters use a very simple fictional language to communicate. (The
spell puzzles in Suveh Nux can be interpreted as of this kind.)
Regards,
Victor
Harry Giles
>> has never played _any_ text-based games, to try it out. Here is an
>> edited version of her response:
>>
>> "I was easily able to download the interpreter and open the story. I
>> read through the instructions and sample, and got to a point where I
>> moved compass-wise to the window and a painted-shut garage door, and
>> realized I had to find a key. I must admit I prefer visual puzzles to
>> verbal puzzles, or visually pleasing surroundings. It's 'work' for me
>> to visualize where I am with only a verbal description."
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> What do others think of this line of thought? I'm curious.
>>
>
To take this down a completely different route than the conversation
about style that's occupied us so far, I think the key to answering
your question is the point that your close reader prefers visual
puzzles to verbal puzzles. Given the laudable aim of widening the
readership of IF, the conclusion you've drawn is that IF needs to be
more visual.
Well, I'm a bit puzzled by this line of thought, because what it reads
like to me is that IF needs to be more like point-and-click adventure
games -- visual adventure games -- if it's to expand its readership,
implying that we want to try and draw on that fan-base. But if what
we're trying to attract is people who prefer visual puzzles, then
surely playing point-and-click adventure games will better satisfy
that for them anyway?
So I don't think that being more visual is the best way of expanding
our audience. IF is, as your subject suggests, a prose medium and not
a visual medium. What IF needs to do is exploit its own advantages --
*be more textual*.
Part of this is to do with style, which you are, rightly, very much
concerned with (but I think for the wrong reasons). Every piece of
prose produced by an IF work should be of the highest stylistic
quality (though this varies from context to context). You can be more
textual by being more evocative -- the ability to conjure determinable
mental images is one of the written word's great qualities. But you
can also exploit text in a hundred other ways: by making the entire
game about language (cf The Gostak), or about a particular use of
language (cf conversation and Galatea), or the ability of language to
be intellectually discursive in a more direct way than images (cf De
Baron), and so forth.
I think expanding our readership is about pushing at the boundaries of
IF -- and one way of doing this is by making it a truly literary
medium, which is to say, one which exploits its textuality to the
fullest degree. (The other way of doing it is, of course, by
exploiting IF's nature as a game and making it more, er, gamey.
This should not be in tension with its textuality.)
I hope this provides some food for thought.
Hx
Jim Aikin
I chose them because they write fantasy and sell a lot of books. I'd be
very curious to read some examples of what you feel are inept stylistic
choices by each of them.
I've read almost no Stephen King. I read "Lord of the Rings" twice (once
in the '60s, and again a couple of years ago), and while I felt it had
some very significant weaknesses as a work of literature, I wasn't
bothered by the style.
I've always felt Rowling is a very capable writer, but I'm finding the
final volume of the Potter series almost unreadable because it assumes
you've read the first six books and have a great memory for detail.
As a general rule, people who think well-known authors are bad writers
are usually focusing on the wrong things. My favorite example is Erle
Stanley Gardner. The man sold _millions_ of books. He was an appallingly
bad stylist -- just unbelievable. But he was bad in a very consistent,
highly professional way, and his plots (however flimsy) keep you turning
the pages.
Criticisms of his style miss the point. He provided exactly the details
his readers needed to visualize the scene. The writing was spare, and it
was effective. Excruciatingly awful, but effective. His sales figures
leave no doubt whatever on that score.
--JA
S. John Ross
> The writing was spare, and it was effective.
QFI ;)
--
|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn/bio.htm
Ron Newcomb
> I simply got tired of having my
> inventory listings and, room descriptions padded out with lots and
> lots of information, some of which didn't (in my opinion) flow very
> well as a single segment, but which all *had* to be presented as a
> lump because there was no other option. This did not improve the
> quality of the prose.
I agree, but as I mentioned, there's another solution for that
particular bit.
I'm not surprised that the command's lack would wreak havoc with your
habits, but that's not a problem us newbs have of course. So I like to
think I'm working from a cleaner slate here, much as Victor's review
of Zork was working from a cleaner slate. (In defense of Zork's fans,
computer games in general do not age well.)
I've always thought of examine taking about as much time as it takes
to read whatever it prints. Examine shows detail, and details take
time to come into focus. Maybe the nuance of the word affected me --
the command isn't called glance after all. It's examine, as in
Sherlock with a magnifying lens.
I will amend my blanket statement about striking out examine, as it's
a perfectly appropriate command for sightseeing games. (Or
sightseeing portions, which would, yes, include a lot of games.) But
I've had an issue in gamemastering RPGs related to puzzles and
necessary examines: if you tell your players that the Jewel Of
Smiting they needed to avoid certain death was actually set it the
pommel of the fighter's sword that he's had for the last four playing
sessions, but no one actually looked at the sword when they picked it
off that dead ogre magi, then you'll quickly find yourself keel-hauled
across the underside of your own kitchen table. The GMs who actually
enforce this kind of player behavior -- along with requiring players
to constantly specify marching order, night-watch order, etc. -- will
cause the players to repeat a lot of tedious behaviors that quickly
kills the spirit, and pace, of the game as a whole.
I'm not seeing I-F in any different light. It's interactive
storytelling might be written instead of oral, but the same principle
holds. Hiding highly necessary information in all these cubbyholes
invites tedious behavior and extra-frustrating puzzles.
And then there's the havoc examine plays on a room description's
prose: if the author has to worry herself about implementing every
noun she uses, then that can begin to place unnecessary pressure on
the prose. If those nouns aren't implemented, players say the work
feels unfinished. How's an author to react? More work, or constrain
the prose?
> Anyway, I guess my feeling about this is that the absence of EXAMINE
> reduces the number of tools available to the author in terms of pacing
> exposition.
That's a very good point. I'd only add that examine allows the -
player- to pace exposition; the author just passes the buck. But
yeah, it is a tool that someone's losing somewhere. I say there are
worse things than putting the pace of exposition firmly in the
author's hands, though. (Or even into a rule's hands, as the
Introductions extension does a little of.) And not all the
exposition put into an I-F is necessary; some of it is just gravy. As
much as I'd like to keep the gravy, I'd like not to be keel-hauled...
or being in the mood to keelhaul someone else.
-Ron
Jim Aikin
>
> Which means that your question is not a serious question, but a
> rhetorical one, presumably asked in order to feel your own superiority.
It was a didactic question, not a rhetorical one.
Am I promoting a particular point of view? Yes. Would I do that if I
didn't feel my point of view had merit? No. Is feeling that one's views
have merit the same as feeling that one is superior? Arguably, but not
definitively.
> Also, you never responded to the post where I took a couple of very good
> writers and showed how their books differed in the amount of visual
> detail. (For instance, I told you that "Blood Meridian" has a lot of
> visual detail and "American Pastoral" has very little.) I suggested that
> there are good reasons for this difference, and that his proves that
> 'good writing' cannot be equated with 'having lots of visual detail'.
I've never read either book; I'll take your word for it that they're
both good. Paradise Lost, which you mentioned in a different message, is
perhaps a special case, but the few passages that I remember are highly
visual. I don't think I ever got past the part about Satan, though. I've
heard the latter parts, about God, are pretty dull stuff.
Bertrand Russell was a wonderful writer. No visual detail there -- but
then, he wasn't writing fiction. In fiction, visual detail does tend to
be important. Roth is an interesting case. I happen to have an anthology
of short stories here that contains a Roth piece. The story opens with
dialog and almost no visual details, and frankly it looks rather
tedious, having something or other to do with how Jews feel or think
about Jesus. But I note that it ends with an arresting visual image: A
boy jumps off a roof "right into the center of the yellow net that
glowed in the evening's edge like an overgrown halo." Would the story
have worked without that image? One doubts it.
It may be instructive to compare Roth's heavily interior approach with
Flannery O'Connor's story "Greenleaf," which opens this same anthology.
"Greenleaf" starts out like this:
"Mrs. May's bedroom window was low and faced on the east and the bull,
silvered in the moonlight, stood under it, his head raised as if he
listened -- like some patient god come down to woo her -- for a stir
inside the room. The window was dark and the sound of her breathing too
light to be carried outside. Clouds crossing the moon blackened him and
in the dark he began to tear at the hedge. Presently they passed and he
appeared again in the same spot, chewing steadily, with a hedge-wreath
that he had ripped loose for himself caught in the tips of his horns."
I would suggest that O'Connor's style is one that might more profitably
be emulated by the aspiring writer of fiction than Roth's. It's not a
question of calling one or the other better or more evocative writing --
it's just a question of what techniques are likely, over the long haul,
to better serve the cause of effective storytelling.
I think maybe I'll read the O'Connor story now. I doubt I'll ever get
around to reading the Roth.
--JA
S. John Ross
> For sure. There's also the converse error, just as common and just as
> tragic, of assuming that those who have a different opinion from you
> are ignorant.
Half of Usenet often seems to translate approximately as:
"Anyone who knows as I know would choose as I choose."
:)
Emily Short
> Emily Short wrote:
> For me it feels more natural to choose between
>
> 1) "Emily, did you see Little Miss Sunshine? It is great!"
> 2) "Emily, did you see Little Miss Sunshine? It is boring!"
>
> then to "talk to you about" Little Miss Sunshine and Just _hope_ I'm
> going to recommend it to you.
This is why it is nice also to be able to have prompted commands like
RECOMMEND LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE TO EMILY. This doesn't work if you
don't give the player some prompt about his options, but I've come to
think that's worth it, and less odd-looking than a menu.
Emily Short
> OK, but choose your conventions wisely, not because of the off-the-
> cuff choice a guy made 20 years ago when he decided to write a
> simulated tour of a Kentucky cave.
>
> We newbs are saying, "Hey, have you looked at this convention? Like,
> really looked at it?"
In this particular case: yes. The question of why we rely on compass
directions, whether or not we should, and how they affect the prose,
is asked on average at least once a year on this group. Under "Compass
direction and navigation" on the list of past RAIF topics, I find
Compass directions (Nov 1996)
Directions in space / zero gravity (Nov 1996)
Compass directions + types of player (Feb 1999)
Left and right vs NSEW (May 1999)
Alternatives to NSEW (Jul 1999)
Shipboard directions #1 (Aug 1999)
Shipboard directions #2 (Aug 1999)
Navigation / using compass directions (Feb 2000, RGIF)
Navigating with compass directions / IF pet peeves (Oct 2000, RGIF)
Compass directions / cultural coordinate systems (Oct 2000)
Compass & relative directions (Aug 2001)
Directions in a 3D environment (Dec 2001)
Not using compass directions (Feb 2002)
Directionless IF / named exits (Jun 2002)
Directions on board a ship (Nov 2002)
"Rat in control" experiment (Apr 2003)
Extended compass directions (NNE, NorthUp, degrees, etc) (Sep 2005)
Navigation + review criteria (Earth and Sky 3) (Jan 2005, RGIF)
Directions and navigation + PCs who can drive cars properly (Nov 2006,
RGIF)
...and my own conclusion from all that has been that, yes, there are
times when it's possible to substitute relative directions (left/right/
forward) but that many people find it harder to navigate efficiently
using those than using compass directions (seen in the "Rat in
Control" experiment); that there are cases (as on board ships or in
small maps) when a game can dispense with compass directions in favor
of GO TO FOO, and have this work successfully; and that in very
narrative works, there's no reason not to whisk the player from place
to place according to the needs of the story, without bothering to
think about where each location is relative to every other.
But where there is a large and explorable map, the evidence seems to
be that absolute directions make it easier for people to understand
the layout than relative directions. As to
> OK, but it's hard to create an keep an accurate mental map when you're
> not actually walking through the place. (Not impossible; some I-F have
> done it well, but what does that have to do with *story*? It's an
> adjunct, an add-on, not the real purpose of the work. (Unless it is.))
Well, maybe. In that case, maybe what you want to write is the kind of
IF where moving from place to place is not in fact the player's major
activity, or where it's not modeled in great detail: skip locks and
doors, make places a bit more broad-brush, and treat location more as
stage setting. That's fine; we've seen that before, and no doubt we'll
be seeing more. For some work I think it is a good strategy.
But there is still IF in which the place itself -- its physicality,
its structure -- is important. Even Floatpoint, which I would say is
one of my more story-oriented works, and which does allow extensive
use of GO TO, keeps its compass directions. This is not because I'm
too hide-bound to think of anything different, but because I wanted
the player to experience the space as a physically immediate place,
and perhaps thereby to sympathize a little with the undercurrent of
sadness from the colonists at the prospect of having to leave their
home. I felt that would work better if the player were able to develop
a sense of the space. I suppose this might be what you meant by
"(unless it is)", but I just wanted to put in the argument that, yeah,
it is at least part of the point, more often than you might expect.
Ron Newcomb
> 1. I can see your frustration about always wondering if your "examine
> everything" search was exhaustive enough, but I don't really share it.
I feel the exact same way about Emily's stymied Examine That reflex.
Or yours, if applicable. :)
> 2. I didn't especially like the prohibition of EXAMINE in that game
> per se.
Try not to think of it in terms of prohibiting examine; think of it as
merely not requiring it. (True, it required something else not
provided...)
> 3. On the other hand, I do like playing games where the author tries
> something different and convention-defying, showing a unique vision of
> what a game can be like, even if it's a vision I wouldn't want to
> follow if I wrote a game.
Ditto. I *should* like Photopia, but I just can't get into it.
> In case you're interested, there is a walkthrough at:
thank you.
-R
Paul
I've only read a sampling of the posts on this thread, but I this is
the only direction that has made sense to me. My first reaction to the
original post is that the problem is the visual focus. Only some 60%
of people are primarily visual. While this is a majority, it is a
small one. Visual people have no problem processing five or six visual
details at a time. The others find it maddening. To give you some
perspective, an audial IF author could easily describe a room in terms
of sounds, each with its own character, and would effortlessly know
how to interact with them. I cannot reproduce this for you because I'm
not audial myself. But I know many audial readers who only read the
dialog in books because that's the only part they really relate to.
I'm kinesthetic, so I skim through conversations and long descriptions
of things, but I love to read the intricacies of relative locations
and how things happen.
So what I'm saying is we need to write to multiple senses to reach a
wider audience. "You hear a waterfall to the west." is good for me.
"You hear a deafening roar to the west. It smells humid here, and you
feel mist coming from that direction." will probably engage a wider
audience.
-Paul
Poster
<6c3ce50a-47fe-4197...@y5g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
Khelwood <Khel...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8 Jan, 01:04, Poster <pos...@nospamever.aurora.cotse.net> wrote:
> > In article <flrqpm$ep...@aioe.org>,
> > Jim Aikin <midigur...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > > George Oliver wrote:
> > > > On Jan 6, 3:01 pm, Jim Aikin <midigur...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> > > >> Let's compare two cases. Visualize (a) and (b) and tell me which
> > > >> is harder:
> >
> > > >> a) "You're standing in front of a small white house."
> >
> > > >> b) "You're standing in front of a small white house with a red tile
> > > >> roof. The chimney tilts a little at the upper end, in a way that's
> > > >> either rakish or alarming (depending, perhaps, on whether you're the
> > > >> homeowner, which you're not). Window-boxes full of bright red tulips
> > > >> are
> > > >> mounted below the twin windows on either side of the yellow dutch
> > > >> door."
> >
> > > > (B) is harder for me to visualize, not only because there are more
> > > > details to process, but the description itself is somewhat confusingly
> > > > written. On the other hand I find (a) to be, though simple,
> > > > evocative.
> >
> > > <sighs deeply> I give up. If you honestly think (b) is harder to
> > > visualize, while (a) is more evocative ... I don't know what to say.
> > > Almost any response I could think of would be no more than a personal
> > > insult, and I don't want to go there.
> >
> > > To me, as a writer, what you're saying is rather like, "I prefer comic
> > > books. Picasso, Klee, Dali -- those guys make my head hurt." See, that's
> > > as close as I can get to not insulting you. Sorry.
> >
> > > --JA
> >
> > I would go even further than that, Jim. I would suspect that the people
> > who chose B fall into into two camps:
> >
> > 1) They don't want to actually visualize the scene because that gets in
> > the way of the plot. This mindset chooses not to stop and smell the
> > roses. That's fine, although not to my liking.
> >
> > 2) They are actually, literally, incapable of visualizing something of
> > that detail.
> >
> > In any case, the use of the word "evocative" is misconstrued. "A small
> > white house" cannot be evocative because its generality suggests
> > nothing! There is no lyricism or poetry its description; there is
> > nothing to differentiate it from the many small white houses that we
> > have all seen our entire lives. To thus say that a generic description
> > is evocative, basically puts all of writing on an altar and sacrifices
> > it.
> >
> > Honestly, folks. If generic sentences evoke for you, then anything
> > beyond "See Spot Run" is wasted!
> >
> > -- Poster
> >
> > www.intaligo.com Building, INFORM, Seasons (upcoming!)
>
> The idea that a generic statement cannot be evocative is a little
> puzzling. Non-exhaustive descriptions can certainly provoke curiosity
> to find out more, which is evocation of a kind.
Curiosity is not evocation. A turn of phrase that is evocative creates
an unforgettable picture in the mind. A generic description that
inspires the desire to know more due to LACK of evocation cannot
therefore be evocative.
-- Poster
www.intaligo.com Building, INFORM, Seasons (upcoming!)
Mike Roberts
> Am I promoting a particular point of view? Yes. Would I do that if I
> didn't feel my point of view had merit? No. Is feeling that one's views
> have merit the same as feeling that one is superior? Arguably, but not
> definitively.
Has Donald Rumsfeld's pose-your-own-questions device caught on in a big way?
You bet. Has it changed oratory forever? Too soon to say. Is it a great
way to dodge questions? Sure is. Is the reason it bothers me that every
political hack and corporate weasel talks this way in every interview now?
Could be. Is it strange to see it even make its way into everyday
conversation and casual usenet exchanges? I sure think so. Is it really
surprising? I guess not. Would this be a good format for solving the
description problem that started this whole thread? Let's give it a try.
Is the house you're standing in front of white? Yes. Is it large? No.
Does it have a red tile roof? Looks like it. Is the tilt at the upper end
of the chimney alarming? Only if you're the homeowner. Are you? No. Are
the window boxes full of tulips? Depends on your definition of "full". Are
they attractively dense? Yes. Are there absolutely as many tulips in there
as you could possibly get into that kind of windowbox? I honestly don't
know. Could someone else get more tulips in there? Okay, sure, I admit
it's possible; in all the times I've stood up here and answered your
questions I've never claimed I had a monopoly on tulip-packing. Are the
tulips red? Of course they're red. Are the tulip boxes mounted below the
twin windows on either side of the door? Absolutely. Is the door yellow,
dutch, and closed? Yes, yes, and yes. Next question.
--Mike Roberts
Is my email address mjr underscore at hotmail dot com when the punctuation
is spelled out? That's one way to write it.
Ron Newcomb
[on compass directions]
> In this particular case: yes. The question of why we rely on compass
> directions, whether or not we should, and how they affect the prose,
> is asked on average at least once a year on this group.
I apologize if my comment seemed snooty, or worse; that's a long
list.
(BTW, relative directions is someone else's schtick; I'm for
abolishment of directions.)
After wading through the topic list (many included "how do I make a Go
To?"), I then poked around to see if tool support existed. There
seems to be a Go To for the major authoring tools throughout time.
Not built-in, but at least optional. I'm even prepared to accept that
compasses are the one nav tool that works in pretty much all possible
gameplay situations, if not in very much prose. (Playability trumps
story, I've heard before.) But...
Jim's example that he showed to his ex-wife did not need compass
directions; GO TO works in any environment where there's a lot of
things with names -- caves and bare wilderness being the few places on
earth that are an exception. And yet there they are, north and his
cronies, in Jim's suburb. Why are they there?
No one said "hey, maybe your ex-wife is confused because your prose is
all clogged up with directions appropriate to wilderness; you're
supposed to use Go To -style navigation." The thread instead went off
on tangents; I think it missed the point of his ex-wife. I feel that
the old I-F cave tradition still has a grip on the minds of authors,
so that when an author begins a new work in the suburbs, the trailer
park, the office complex, and with a thousand named objects around
him, he still uses compass directions, first and foremost, without
thinking. Without realizing that, the first few I-F games, the ones
that set the precedent, just happened to be in one of the few places
on earth where -only- compass directions work.
Unless we specifically do not wish for "very [interactive] narrative
works", I believe that the topic of Go To will continue to recur on
r*if, every year or so. If all these different people at all these
different times are saying the same thing, maybe there's merit to it.
Emily, you recently (December 9th) mentioned on your blog that many
successful interactive fictions that involve characters involves NPCs
that the PC already knows, on the grounds that the initial hi-how-ya-
doing stage prevents getting into the characters' interesting parts
(and hence, the narrative's interesting parts).
Well, what about places the PC already knows? What about I-Fs that
aren't so obsessed with introducing new rooms and the junk inside
them? Can they just get on with their narratives, too?
My argument is winding down. I apologize again if I have offended
you, or the rest of you.
--Ron