At 10:55 AM 5/27/98 -0700, John D. DeCuir wrote:
>Another Thought-Provoking-Question (TM) for discussion:
I would have liked to address this post earlier, but I've been busy and my
ideas on it were half-baked. I'm less busy now, but I'm afraid my ideas are
still half-baked. Here they are anyway.
>While poking around the various Infocom sites, I remembered that there are
>several authoring systems for text adventures. Some even target the exact
>Infocom interpreter used, to make Infocom-like adventures.
Zork 1 is still a high water mark to me. I think the reason is that it made
me use my imagination. The narrative was highly descriptive (if somewhat
terse), and much of the enjoyment I got out of the game was from
visualizing my surroundings.
First half-baked thought:
If we get much of our enjoyment out of a story by using our imagination to
place ourselves in the described surroundings, does giving the interactor a
solid 3D environment that doesn't involve them visualizing anything detract
from the story experience? I found Myst very unsatisfying, (but that could
be because of the endless/interuptive puzzles). It may have been from the
fact that my imagination wasn't kindled. Zork's 'pictures' weren't as
explicit as Myst's, but they were much more personal. The trees were trees
that I had climbed as a kid. The house was very similar to the one my
grandparents had lived in before they died. Myst's settings were cool to
look at once or twice but carried no personal meaning for me. It was
someone else's vision of a world. This may be a very large drawback to VRML
storytelling, and one of the hardest things to get around. I'm not sure you
could do Zork in VR. Interactive characters are key.
>The reason I ask is because we all know that building VRML worlds is not
>easy. Most of the time is spent on polygonal modeling and texturing -- not
>story mechanics. I'm afraid that if we just go ahead and start typing
>"#VRML v2.0 utf8" then we start focusing on the details instead of the
>larger story structure.
This one is a little more baked, because despite what I am saying here I do
realize that at some point you have to do some work to make the dream
happen, -but:
I try to let my worlds grow organically as I am modeling with very little
preplanning. There is a method behind this madness. The times I have tried
to layout the world in advance I find it hard to 'slug it out' at the
modeler until the world is complete. I find it best (for me) to model and
create the world simultaneously. World creation is a long hard process as
John pointed out, and doing it this way makes it even longer, but if I am
not doing at least some creative thinking during the actual work I lose
interest in what I am doing. Sometimes I am happy with what comes out, many
times disappointed, but nearly always suprised. It is also a reason I enjoy
collaborations so much. They tend to give some discipline to my creative
efforts.
Dennis
