From: neilg@fraser.sfu.ca (Neil K. Guy)
Subject: Realism in IF (was Disch's _Amnesia_)
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 21:12:06 GMT

00mjstum@leo.bsuvc.bsu.edu (Matthew J. Stum) writes:
 (someone else wrote:)
>> 	1.  The map is enormous - like 2000 locations.  Visiting them
>> all is very tedious.
>> 	2.  You continually die of thirst or hunger, and need to sleep.
>> All your time is taken up searching for food, water, and a place to
>> sleep, so that in one day of game time (around 40 moves)
>> you can only explore about 5 of the 2000 locations.

>Wait wait wait... you consider 1 & 2 to be _bad_ things?  I think it's _very_
>realistic... otherwise it'd be more fantasy than fiction...

 Well, with any type of fiction there's always a line between realism
and tedium, don't you think? I mean, novels are often realistic. That
doesn't mean that they have to go in endless detail about the lives of
the characters. (and so Ernie gets up, goes to the bathroom, is about
to sit down, decides he should have a magazine, goes to the living
room, can't find one, backtracks to the study, decides he can't wait,
goes back to the bathroom, discovers someone left the seat up, etc.
etc. etc.) Boring.

 Interactive fiction is meant to be reasonably interesting and fun,
isn't it? Why else play the darn things? And games that kill
you if you don't find food for a day are, in my opinion, highly
unrealistic. Sure, we need food but a human is capable of going
without food for weeks. One gets weaker as time goes by, but you don't
drop dead instantly after 10 turns without food, right?

 So I guess my point is that realism isn't an absolute thing. You
don't want to have to type "Breathe air" every move. Extremes with
tons of uninteresting locations for the sake of completeness or
immensely onerous survival requirements may be marginally more
realistic, but that doesn't make them interesting. For that matter,
games where you go without eating for infinite periods of time and
which have only fifteen mappable locations don't exactly thrill me
either.

>> 	3.  Whenever anything interesting happens, you don't have any
>> control, but revert to being a reader of a non-interactive novel while
>> pages of description roll past you.  Your character may even respond
>> in these descriptions, without your consent!  _That_ certainly kills
>> any sense of involvement for me!

 How does anyone else feel about computers making a lot of assumptions
for character actions? I mean, I think we all agree that having the
computer bring up a page of text that says "Over the next ten days you
decide to run for office. You hijack an armoured car to raise funds,
and are drawn into a complex web of intrigue that spans several
continents. When you come back you find your house has burned down.
What do you want to do now?" to be rather unfair. What's interactive
about that? Press the space bar to read more text? But what about
responses like "You decide not to pick up the book off the table" or
"You find a pair of binoculars, which you take"? In both cases the
game makes largely innocuous assumptions about what the player wants
to do, usually to simplify implementation. But do (these admittedly
trivial) examples kind of bug anyone else? Do you have feel like
saying "Take the book anyway, dammit!"

 - Neil K. (n_k_guy@sfu.ca)