From: dmb@lf.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Length of Descriptions in Adventure Game
Date: 2 Oct 92 15:30:16 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

In article <librik.717906933@cory.Berkeley.EDU> librik@cory.Berkeley.EDU (David Librik) writes:
>But that's not what the original poster was saying; he said that he had
>written it so that _each description_ was _on average_ SIXTEEN TO TWENTY
>LINES.  That sounds like way too much wordiness to me, especially for an
>adventure game.  If you are creating "as realistic a world as possible,"
>then you may have complex descriptions, but you're more likely to want
>complex _behavior_.

Yes, and what I'm telling you is that my current project also has (at 
least) that size average room description.  When I said you could spend
an hour in a room just reading, I wasn't kidding.  There's just a lot
of *stuff* and a lot to say about the stuff. 

Length can imply wordiness *or* more information being imparted.  One
is bad; the other is good (or at least questionable).

>I remember this from the time I was writing Dog Star.  There is a terrible
>temptation to just blather on and on.  The user can't "use his imagination"
>to picture the scene when he's drowning in a sea of pointless detail.

You could make the same argument about storytelling.  William Gibson
may "blather on and on" about the high-tech setting in Neuromancer, but
that does *not* imply that he's wordy -- in fact his style almost
epitomizes compactness and strength.  He just gives you tons and tons
of detail, and that's what makes the world (at times) hauntingly real.

>Sure, you don't want to just see "You're in a shack.  There's a table here."
>but if someone can get 16-20 lines of 80-character description out of
>the table -- you have to wonder if all that description is properly supported:
>can you "examine" the features described in the table?  And how relevant
>is most of that to the game?

That's my point: You wouldn't spend 20 lines describing a table.  You'd
spend 20 lines describing the several *important* things in the room in
detail,the general atmospehere (things like architecture, decor,
lighting, scenery through a window, sounds, smells, how the player's
actor "feels" about the place, etc.)  Come on -- 20 lines times 12
words (avg.  per line) is only 240 words.  That's nothing! If you're
trying to describe a scene vividly, *in addition* to describing any
interactions between characters, objects, etc. it seems to me that
doing with less than a couple paragraphs is just being minimalist.

The nice thing is that the more information you give the player, the
larger the search space is, and hence the more potential for clever
puzzles there is.

>Except in the case of real humor -- one of
>the best features about the Unnkuulian series is that the descriptions
>are hilarious even if they're often irrelevant -- it's usually better
>to try to keep things in a consistent style.  Despite what we'd like to
>think, our players aren't playing the games to read all the nifty descriptions.

If people didn't want to read the descriptions, they wouldn't be
playing IF games, they'd be playing Sierra games where you don't have
to bother.  At least that's the impression I get.  You argue that the
nifty descriptions are ignored, yet cite the Unnkulians as good
examples of the opposite.  If the descriptions in UU[12] were
minimalist, they wouldn't be funny.

>This was one of the more subtle ironies in that game: with all that
>wonderful description, that room had nothing at all to do with the rest
>of the game.  There wasn't even anything you could do with all the
>things mentioned in there but gaze on it.  You wouldn't want the whole
>game to be like that.

I see it a bit differently -- there's much more to an IF game than just
the puzzles.  As an author I view it more as "welcome to my made-up
world; now play in it."  And in that context a thorough exposition of
the setting is crucial to creating the illusion that the player is
really "there."

Dave Baggett
--
dmb@ai.mit.edu           MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory                  
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