Until I read this presentation by Scott Adams, the first commercial computer game programmer, I hadn't realized what I found so strange about playing those types of computer games. It's the lack of words. The descriptions are sparse. This is the passage that obviously tipped me off to this fact:
Adams: I see a tree. It looks climbable. Obvious exits: N, S, E, and W.Adams explains later that there wasn't much room for excess words on early computers, which is understandable. The most interesting thing about all of this isn't just dropping articles from responses -- it's dropping description.
Audience: Climb the tree.
Adams: Two words! Two words! We don't let you get away with anything here. Ok, climb tree.
I'm in the top of the tree. To the east I see a meadow. Obvious exits: Down.
Adams expects players to know what a tree is, what it looks like, and doesn't bother to say whether it is a pine or an oak, or if it has leaves or not. Why? Because it really doesn't matter. Most players have a form of a tree in their head anyway. The programmer has to make allowances for differences in people's forms, but overall, if one were to write "tree" or "meadow" the player will get some sort of tree or meadow in their head anyway.
This is great news for me. I'm not keen on describing things. I like to cut words out of sentences. Perfect! I ought to write text based games.
However, this weekend I played a game (Super Mario World, or something like it) on Nintendo 64, which is apparently cool because it's sort of 3-D. There was a plot behind the game somewhere, and it had something to do with finding stars and staying away from some weird shape that is apparently named Bowser. Here and there we had to do little challenges. It was bizarre. Anyway, frequently text would pop up that we were supposed to read that was probably about the story, but we hit B quickly to get rid of it.
This completely differs from IF. There, the words are the pictures, and without the words, players are faced with a black screen. Half the fun is the imaginary world that comes from describing your own tree, and not letting Nintendo do it for you. The same is true for good writing, in my opinion. A story is good when there isn't too much description, but you still get the picture, so to speak. It's the subtlety of description, and not the overload of images.
Plus, it never hurts to cut dead-weight words, in creative writing and in computer games.
Posted by Julie Young at March 28, 2004 08:34 PM