Niclas wrote:
>Maybe transitions is the poor author's
>tool to tightening up a discontinous story? Maybe it's just storytelling
>make-up?
'fraid I disagree pretty vehemently. Unless your story takes
place all in one room, it requires transitions.
I would define a transition as any method of getting from one
setting to another. Some transitions are simple and straightforward:
walk through this door into another room. Over fast and easy; you
can do that in realtime.
Some transitions are slower and more complex: maybe you walk
across street, maybe you supposed to be hit by car to make story
proceed. Can't just fade out/fade in across street; gotta make
interactor leave building, walk across street.
At the far end of the scale are transitions just don't make sense
to do in realtime. You want a prologue that takes place fifty years
before? You gotta have transition to main action, 'less you want
interactors to sit through fifty years of dull story. (For that
matter, how you gonna handle flashbacks without transition?) Say
you're doing a Western, and the character starts out in Cheyenne.
You could make interactor play through every grimy dusty step of the
long trail to Dodge City, but if your story don't really start 'til
they get there and find out the Sheriff's been killed, why bother
playing through travel time?
To put it in the terms you were using, a transition satisfies the
sub-goal of putting a character at a particular place and/or time.
That's an essential sub-goal of any story that happens in more than
one place and/or time.
(In Myst and Journeyman Project, there's a transition between
every node of the graph and the next; every time you move, you go
through a transition in which you can't control the character's
actions. It's pretty to watch, but frustrating at times.)
Now, to get back to Miriam's ideas, I actually think that the
jump-cut (perhaps with establishing shot) is often a perfectly
adequate transition. Most people've been watching movies (and TV)
all their lives; they're used to the language of (American) cinema.
There's room for lots of different kinds of transitions, of course:
from tracking shots to fades to wipes. But if you're playing a VR
game and someone says "You better get over to the old Same place
right away," and you touch/click the door handle, and the screen goes
blank and then you find yourself standing in the corn starch outside
a mansion, you'll probably understand what happened.
As often, there's an analogous situation in roleplaying games, and
I admit that it's sometimes a problem there. For short distances and
time jumps (let's call those local transitions), it's not so much of
a problem: the player says "Okay, let's go over to the old abandoned
brewery and check out these rumors of ghosts," and the GM says "It's
dusk when you arrive; shadows are stealing across the empty lots; the
kids are being called in to dinner from stickball games. There's
broken glass in the street." (Assuming the GM doesn't have an
incident planned to happen en route. And many GMs will take any
outdoors transition as an opportunity for a randomly generated
encounter that may or may not be relevant to any sub-goals. But the
ones that aren't relevant are generally thrown in as artificial
obstacles, or sometimes to get the characters paranoid and/or worn
out by the time they arrive.) But for non-local transitions, you've
got a problem: nobody wants to play out the three-day walk to the
next town in detail, and yet three days is a lot of time for a group
of people to spend together (especially if, as is often true in RPGs,
the characters have just met and don't know each other well yet), and
they're likely to spend some of that time talking with each other, so
skipping over the details of the transition means cheating the
characters out of interaction time. I usually compromise: play
through a couple of in-character conversations that happen along the
way, and just tell them in general terms what happens for the rest of
it. "You trudge along the winding path through the woods. For more
of the first day the ground is flat and the air is still; you can
hear forest creatures out there somewhere, but none of them bother
you. You talk about home, and you sing songs to help pass the time.
Early on the second day the path begins to rise, and you find
yourself weaving through wooded hills..." And so on. A lot harder
to do that in a visual setting, though again we can steal from the
language of cinema and use montage.
...Anyway, a lot of the problem with that situation in an RPG is
that part of the point of the game (for many of us) is interacting
with other characters in-character. In the near term, VR games are
likely to be fairly limited in that respect; you're unlikely to want
to spend an hour engaging in banter and chit-chat in character with a
computer-controlled character. So skipping through the long hours of
travel may not be such a bad thing.
One other point while I'm thinking of it: if you're going to use a
jump-cut transition, you do have to be careful to make sure you know
what the interactor intends. If they click the doorknob by accident,
you don't want to jump-cut to an hour later at the mansion outside of
time -- they can't easily recover from that without losing a lot of
in-game time. (They click the car to go back to their place -- but
now it's two hours later than it was before the accidental click.)
Perhaps some sort of undo mechanism is in order? Or a confirmation
query? ("You are about to spend an hour driving to the old Same
place. Do you really want to do this?") Or do a fade or montage or
other sequence that takes a small amount of time, with a Cancel
button prominently displayed during that sequence, so you have a few
seconds to change your mind...
Gotta run.
--jed
Jed Hartman
Fiction Editor
Strange Horizons
http://www.strangehorizons.com/
