From: magnus@thep.lu.se (Magnus Olsson)
Subject: Re: Length of Descriptions in Adventure Game
Followup-To: rec.arts.int-fiction
Organization: Theoretical Physics, Lund University, Sweden
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 23:10:32 GMT

I made some statistics on my own adventure game, the Dungeons of Dunjin,
and got the following results on the length of room descriptions:

length of description (lines)      # of rooms

       1                              18
       2                              42
       3                              36 
       4                              24
       5                              25
       6                              12
       7                               6
       8                               4
       9                               7
      10                               1
      11                               2
      12                               2
      18                               1
      20                               1
      22                               1

The mean number of lines is 4.15.

I'm a bit surprised myself at these results, since in general, I quite
like long descriptions, and hate it when adventure authors are lazy
and just provide you with the absolute minmal descriptions ("You're in
the dragon's lair. There are exits to the east and to the west"). I do
believe, however, that you shouldn't overload the users by unneeded
verbiage; often one long description provides the right setting for a
group of rooms, so for the rest of those rooms just a few
well-selected words are needed to nudge the user's imagination in the
right direction. 

As an example, in Dunjin the player starts out in a forest:

"You are in a dark, mysterious and confusing forest.  Tall fir-trees form
a dark wall around you.  A cold wind is blowing from the mountains, and in the
far distance you can hear wolves howling. Faint trails lead east and south.
To the north the forest seems to continue for ever, and to the west the
vegetation is so dense that it would be impossible to go in that direction."

Then, the rest of the forest locations only need rather minimalistic
descriptions, until there's a change in the scenery:

"You are standing on the sandy shore of a small, muddy lake.  The wind makes
small ripples in the still, dark surface of the lake.  On the southern shore
of the lake, the water licks the surface of a high, vertical cliff, while the
forest reaches all the way down to the shore on the other three sides of the
lake.  About halfway up the cliff face, there is a wide, dark cave opening.

The paw prints of some large animal lead down to the water and back into the
forest.  No sign of human life is to be seen.  A narrow path leads north."



I must add that the statistics above are also a bit skewed by the fact
that there are quite a few identical rooms with very short
descriptions - such as rooms of the infamous "you're in a maze of
twisty passages, all alike". Also, some rooms have quite long
descriptions that for various reasons are shown only under special
circumstances and therefore aren't included above.  The following
description, for example, is shown only once, so the room description
counted in the statistics is counted only once. 

"You enter what must be the workshop of a wizard - a fantastic room full of
weird objects:  a dried basilisk;  a large bottle containing several
homunculi, engaged in a range of strange activities;  a mirror that reflects
an image not of the room, but of a weird, reddish desert landscape illuminated
by twin moons;  several crystal balls;  a rack of wands of varying materials;
a golden chair that seems to levitate in the middle of the air;  the severed
head of a hideous ogre that - despite its bodyless state - seems to be quite
alive and rolls its eyes at you;  three moving ivory statuettes of semi-nude
maidens that constantly throw a golden ball between them...

The workbench is covered by large, leatherbound tomes and scrolls of
parchment;  the shelves are full of strangely shaped vials of brightly
coloured potions and powders.

As soon as your foot touches the floor, however, there is an intense flash of
light that blinds you temporarily, and you feel a cold draught.  When your
vision returns, all the strange objects (except for a black book) are gone."

Magnus Olsson                   | \e+      /_
Dept. of Theoretical Physics    |  \  Z   / q
University of Lund, Sweden      |   >----<           
Internet: magnus@thep.lu.se     |  /      \===== g
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