Proposition: adventure games don't encourage beautiful prose. Reasons:
(iv) players are conditioned to regard everything that's mentioned
in description as essential in some way, or at least worthy
of investigation in case it should be significant.
That's a problem with the conditioning - change what is presented, and
the conditioning will change with it.
I don't want to pick on this game, because it's generally of good
quality, but it seems to me that the puzzle-solving nature of
adventure games makes such long room descriptions unwise. A player
can never afford to relax and treat them as just "elegant prose",
because they might conceal subtle hints.
That's what it comes down to - whether a game is a puzzle or not (or
more than a puzzle). I do not ever want to see an artificial
distinction made between objects which are useful for the
game-as-a-puzzle and "just scenery". I'll read good prose about both,
and I certainly prefer to read it about objects which aren't important
to the game-as-a-puzzle - it tends to show that the author has taken
care with the things that I care about.
What do the readers of rec.arts.int-fiction think about this issue?
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.
I say let the players decide whether they will read a given piece of
text or not - not putting the good prose there doesn't allow anyone to
read it.
Jamie