Re: Gareth's competition comments


23 Oct 1995 20:28:38 GMT

In article <469m6v$1hs@life.ai.mit.edu>, dmb@ai.mit.edu wrote:
> Personally, I never liked the old Infocom's layout. Not enough whitespace
> for my taste. Without whitespace between paragrpahs, and separateing the
> room title from the room description, it's very hard to read, to my eyes at
> least.

when a game spits out a lot of paragraphs without spacing between them, i
agree, it stinks. the infocoms were usually short and to the point,
however, and rarely output more than one paragraph at a time. i think the
verbosity of recent games is actually a strike against them. "brevity is
the soul of wit" and all that.

> I don't take it as a flame, but I do find it puzzling. I went to some
> trouble to reformat all the text in our games to make paragraph spacing and
> indentation optional. (You control it with the SPACE and INDENT commands.)

guess i never played long enough to find those commands... i'll go back
and give it another shot.

> I can see your point, and others have said the same thing, but is this
> still a layout issue?

good question! i think it is, in some ways. perhaps the text could be
broken up or something. i dunno, i'm just shooting from the hip here.

> The text telling you who wrote the game, that it's
> copyrighted and shareware, etc. is mandatory as far as I'm concerned, for
> legal reasons.

if that's true, it's unfortunate. i really like those short,
less-than-24-line openings. guess i'm just a traditionalist.

> Long introductions are another point of contention among IF fans, but,
> again, this seems to have little to do with layout. (For the record, I
> aimed _Legend_ more at those who like to read than those who like to play
> games, so it's perfectly understandable that the latter group may find it
> wearisome on the basis of text density alone.)

hmmm, i like to read more than play games, but there is definitely a
balance that needs to be struck in adventure games. this is old news
though.

> >(i'm a technical writer by trade so this stuff is important to me!)
> How come you don't capitalize anything, then? :)

since i have to concentrate on mechanics 40 hrs a week, i like to be able
to relax and be sloppy the rest of the time... :)

-j-