Re: Talk about simulations.


19 Feb 1995 18:36:34 GMT

In article <3i50ce$2hq@westnet.westnet.com>,
Paul Munn <pmunn@westnet.westnet.com> wrote:
>Recently, there have been posts about simulating locales in text
>adventure form. The suggestions recent and not so recent have been for
>simulating parts of cities, of college campuses, and the like. The user
>is then free to walk through the simulations and kick the tires of
>everything around him or her.
>
>This sort of thing is not really interactive fiction as far as many game
>developers have pursued it. IF requires a plot, otherwise it is boring
>and we will turn it off and go play something else. Yes, we'd like to
>walk around and try and burn the houses down with the matches we picked
>up a few rooms back, but discussions have gone towards saying that such
>levels of detail are almost prohibitively time consuming to program, even
>when using a very nice OO language like TADS.

Yes, that's true. But in pushing the frontiers of IF, where else do we have
to expand to? IMHO, I'd like to see realistic worlds in which several plots
can take place, in addition to free-form interaction. This goes even better
when you get into the domain of multiple players! And such levels of detail
are not prohibitive when you have up to 30 authors working collaboratively :)

>Advice by several authors of interactive fiction is to not lose the
>forest for the trees. Do not spend time on details when creating your IF
>experience, spend time on details when _finishing_ your IF experience for
>the user. Make something playable and fun to explore with a direction in
>it so the player won't get bored, then fill in details, and even then
>only the details that pertain to the story. And your detail level must
>be relatively consistent throughout the game, otherwise some rooms may
>simply feel "2d" for lack of a better term while others appeal greatly to
>the user.

Good advice for traditional IF. But let's advance the state of the art, shall
we?

>I advise that simulation advocates read Graham Nelson's Craft of
>Adventure Writing document, extracted from the INFORM manual, kept on
>ftp.gmd.de's IF archive. It goes into much better and more coherent
>detail than I can.

(Definitely recommended reading)

But, just imagine the possibilities of having a richly simulated world of
Victorian London, in which you can set multiple Sherlock Holmes adventures.
Throw multiple player interaction in there and you have me drooling. :)

For such a project, check the Re: New Language (READ THIS) thread for my post
about boogum. Or else e-mail me at zun@foop.mit.edu.

Cheers,

. . . Zun.