Re: Fine writing in IF


Tue, 17 Jan 1995 13:11:47 -0500

Excerpts from netnews.rec.arts.int-fiction: 17-Jan-95 Fine writing in IF
Gareth Rees@cl.cam.ac.uk (4362)

> Proposition: adventure games don't encourage beautiful prose. Reasons:

> My
> own feeling is that it's sufficiently difficult to produce clear, sharp,
> crisp, accurate, terse, lively prose for all the functional text in an
> advanture game that it's not worth trying to write beautiful descriptive
> passage that the player is likely either to skip and hurry on towards
> the next puzzle, or else scour for clues and then discard when none are
> found.

Clear, terse, crisp, lively prose *is* beautiful.

Detailed description has its place: in "action" scenes. When you do
something climactic, and the plot is advancing, you want a good chunk of
text. (Just like in books, really. Beautiful prose is nice describing
the scenery, but *necessary* describing the death scene.)

You can't have a very long chunk of good text, because that bogs down
the reader, but there's room for more than the average room description
should get.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."