: >[4]) Make things inaccessible.
: For buildings lining a street (your example), this may be the best
: approach. But what's wrong with something between #3 and #4? Just
: simplify the world so that you're simulating only an approximtion of a city
: block. Perhaps you'll have three storefronts, whereas a real city block
: might have eight. You only have to simulate enough for the reader to
: suspend disbelief; besides, too much detail can be daunting.
True, but it seems that finding that cutoff point between enough
detail to be convincing and overburdening the player is very difficult.
I find the way most IF implements large areas like cities to be very
unconvincing. Infocom games, for example, often would have maybe half
a dozen locations as representing a town. Take the way "Bureaucracy"
implements a portion of a city, for example. I always found these
unsatisfying, because I didn't get any sense of size. My game has
around 4 dozen locations representing the main area of the city, but
one of my playtesters tells me he thinks it's too big. Daunting, as you
say. So I'm casting around for ways of building a reasonably convincing
city without having the player get tired of locked doors...
: >You pull at the locked door. Somehow you get the feeling it's not that
: >important, really, and give up.
: is a basic and generally very effective one (IMHO) --- you inject thoughts
: into the player/reader's mind via intuition.
The thing is, I'm not satisfied with that method either. I generally
find such placing of thoughts into the player's head to be rather
obtrusive and annoying. I've been forced to do it more and more in my
game, simply because I can't think of any other way of introducing
certain abstract concepts or emotions, but it still makes me uncomfortable.
Anyway, I don't mean to pick on your points, Dave. Just that I'm
frustrated with the conventional tools we seem to have at our disposal
for modelling text-based worlds. And I'm trying to think of ways around
that. So far with little success... Guess it's a bit of a windmill.
- Neil K.
-- Neil K. Guy * neilg@sfu.ca * tela@tela.bc.ca 49N 16' 123W 7' * Vancouver, BC, Canada