From: dmb@lf.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Length of Descriptions in Adventure Game
Date: 3 Oct 92 17:06:47 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

In article <greg.718057438@duke> greg@Quotron.COM (Greg "Maddog" Knauss) writes:
>But should all that information be crammed into the general room description?
>My impression from the original poster is that when you walk into a room,
>he's giving you the room description, plus the description of every object
>tacked onto the end.

That may be your impression, but having not seen any of the text you
have to admit that it's an assumption.  Since I'm not getting anywhere
trying to convince people that it's possible to have long but good room
descriptions, I'll post the room description for the first room of _The
Legend Lives!_, my current project.  Perhaps this concrete example will
make both sides' arguments clearer.  Free free to rip me to shreds.  :-)

The following text is Copyright (C) 1992 David M. Baggett.  All Rights
Reserved.  Please don't quote from it or copy it.

*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Your bachelor pod

   Ahhhhh.  Pod sweet pod!  Sure feels good to be back in the ol' closet-sized
capsule again, yes sir.  While slaving away on your master's thesis you've
spent many late hours here, sustaining yourself on naught but Akmi Snak Chipz
and ReVoLT Kola.

   Yep, it's basically a hell-hole, but it's served you adequately.  Looking
around you can see blurry reflections of yourself and your surroundings in the
familiar mauve and orange metal walls, which are rounded in the corners as is
typical of today's "economical" graduate housing.  (As if they offered any
other kind.)  The walls are still bare; you'd think after living here for two
years you'd have put some posters up.  But there's never much time for
aesthetics at Akmi Yooniversity.

   Your bed (if you can call it that) and the matter mover take up all the
available floor space in your pod.  Miscellaneous Stik-Em Nowtz cling to
various parts of the furniture and walls, and papers fill any stray gaps,
making this den an incredible fire trap.  Good thing you don't really have
heating here.

   Your pod is one of the "Yooniversity Economical Graduate Off-site Dwelling
Stations" (YEGODS).  Though the school is actually hundreds of light-years
away, matter mover technology makes it possible for them to put housing in the
cheapest, remotest, most inhospitable parts of the galaxy -- places like Frost,
the iceball of a planet your pod is situated on.

   On your desk is your EV, and next to that sits the computer you use nearly
37 hours a day.  Or at least you *assume* it's there; you can't really see it.
It's buried under the pile of books that just crashed down in front of you as
you hit your head on the shelf above upon reading more of the awful truth about
the Unnkulians.  Still rubbing the bruise on your topknot, you pick up all the
books and put them back in order.

   The EV is tuned to Hot Hits 1000, the "newest, coolest, most outrageous"
music video station.  Yep, it's pop, 37 hours a day.  Right now you see the
video for "I Want a Girl with Green Hair and Horns," by Timon Sketch and the
Hoi-Polloi.
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*

Viola, 31 lines.  A few extra lines are in there only when you first
see the room  (the stuff about returning the books to the shelf), and
the last four lines have some specific description about an object (the
EV).  I have reasons for making the EV "self-describing" but I'd need to
say a lot more about the game to explain them.  

But note that this description doesn't even include information about
"possible exits," as is common.  (The reason is that the pod doesn't
have any exits.  But that's another story.)  You have to work the
possible exit list into the prose too, and that takes up space as well.
Consider the following:

*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Room

   You are in a room.  A tall, narrow tunnel leads east.  There is
a grate in the west wall convering a passageway that it looks like
you could squeeze through.  High above you is a ledge.  With luck,
you might be able to climb up to it.
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*

Four lines of text, and I've said nothing about the room itself!  I've
only described the exits, and I hope most people would agree that the
prose is minimalist and uninspired.  So, again, I contend that double or
triple this length is often barely sufficient.

One point is that some of the _Legend_ text describes the player's
*situation,* not just his immediate surroundings.  You need to do this
if you want to have any semblance of a real plot, and you can't expect
the player to examine every single object in the game to get some
crucial plot points -- that would make for an utterly incomprehensible
story.  If your plot moves along well, you can expect to have plot
exposition in almost every location, or at least in every "location
cluster."

Of course, when the player examines objects he also gets similar
information.  For example, when you examine the matter mover the game
tells you all about how matter movers work, when they were invented,
the fact that Akmi lost the matter mover contract years ago due to
some terrible disaster <grin>, etc.  Such information may or may not be
used in a later puzzle, but at the very least gives the player a better
understanding of the game world and of his own context in it.

As in a novel, there's an enormous of information to impart to the
reader.  You need to say at least a little about so many things: 
What kind of person is the player?  What is his job?  Where does that
put him on the "social ladder?"  What's the society like in general?
What's the government like?  What kind of technology is there?  How
do people (creatures) generally interact in the universe?  Etc.

The parsing interface is extrememly limited.  I don't want to rely
only on the player asking questions to get information that I think
is crucial.  If parsers were good enough so that players could type

>What is a matter mover, and how does it work?

that would be one thing, but the only current way for a player to
get information is by examining things and through

>ask troll about book

types of commands, which are pitifully limited.  Similarly,
player-actor interactions are hopelessly stunted by the fact that
making an intelligent actor is a long way out of the realm of
possibility now.  That doesn't mean that I don't still want to have
complex player-character associations, though!  For such things we have
to resort to "plain old" static prose, and that makes descriptions
longer.

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