Talk about simulations.


18 Feb 1995 09:31:42 -0500

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.

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.

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.

Just my 0.02,
Paul

-- 
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Paul Munn, pmunn@westnet.com.  PGP public key available.