[MUD-Dev] Re: Room descriptions

[Matt Chatterley]

On Mon, 28 Sep 1998, Adam Wiggins wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Sep 1998, Raph & Kristen Koster wrote:
> > On Sat, 26 Sep 1998, Orion Henry wrote:
> > > "Koster, Raph" wrote:
> > > > I've often seen it cited as a rule that room descriptions in muds should
> > > > not impose feelings on the player or character.
> > >  [snip]
> > > I must say that they are very well written but I come from a very 
> > > minimalist school of throughout on room descriptions.
> > > [snip]
> > > A room description does not affect a character and therefore
> > > should not pretend to.  In an ideal situation a room should not
> > > even make mention of objects or people.  It should be concise
> > > and at most two sentences long.
> > 
> > Again, the same accepted wisdom. I am more interested in WHY we feel
> > that's the way it should be.

[All the above quoted for positerity, and to help me stop getting 
confused badly while writing this. Hi again btw, I've been away, and am 
doing a lot of catchup reading, and stuff]
 
> Rather than attempting to respond to the various posts in this thread
> point by point, I'll just sum up my own (strong) views on the subject.
> 
> First of all, Raph, I think your perception of the "accepted wisdom"
> is a bit off the mark.  While it may be true that the "don't-impose-feelings-
> on-players" school of thought shows itself often in area writing guides,
> this is RARELY put into practice.  I don't think I've ever played a mud
> which didn't use the word "you" at least a few times in room descriptions;
> most use it copiously.  This despite the fact that area writing guides
> always state that the word "you" is a no-no and should not be used.

Well, this brings us down to only saying what you mean in such guides - 
my own (currently operational) quality control procedures discourage the 
use of personalised statements (unless generated by small procedures 
which tailors them), for the fairly 'normal' principles. Room 
descriptions shouldn't make statements such as 'You feel afraid' without 
first performing some form of verification that its likely the character 
being referred to really is afraid, and so on. Note that this is a 
heavily automated environment; in a free-play situation where the player 
makes such decisions FOR their character, these references should not be 
made at all, or should work via some sort of user feedback, allowing the 
user to set tolerances, etc.
 
> So my view is that the whole method of writing an area by imposing a
> storyline and emotions upon the viewer/reader is actually done to death.

Abso-fraggin-lutely.

> Legend is probably the most extreme example of this method, and does an
> extremelly good job.  This is true of much more than just the room
> descriptions, I might add; if you recall the conversations we had over
> email long before either of us had joined mud-dev, I took exception to the
> inflexible story-based nature of the quests, while you assured me that this
> was Legend's whole goal.

Quests.. ahh.. one of the 'big' areas of development in muds now, I think 
(especially if you talk to people from here), but before that, for so 
long, one of the very static things - pick any LP from a similar era, and 
they'll have identically styled (and in a few cases, just plain 
identical) quests. This ties into the descriptions thing of course - 
stories are traditionally told through areas (explore your own 
adventure), and the 'quest plot' is just a part of this.

> So given that this method HAS been done to death (does anyone disagree
> wit this point?), I find more sparsely described locations (rooms) which
> have a higher degree of interactivity and changability much more appealing to
> work on, just because I feel that it has rarely been done, and never done well.

In some places, thin room descriptions work, but I tend to be an advocate 
of dynamically assembled descriptions (even though my *current* project 
only partly does this, and even then, 80% at the very least is static 
text, sometimes rotated based on the time of day, and so forth). 
Descriptions which change with time (or large parts of which are 
relatively speaking, based on 'text flow', rather than big chunks - 
snapshots) are very interesting, and really bring the environment to 
life. I've been considering problems with the 'snapshot' method recently, 
but alas, have no time to describe this in more detail right now.
 
> This all began the very first time I played a mud, where I made my way through
> the typical mud areas.  It looked something like this:

[Snip good example]
 
>   When I started to realize that it was all just text and very little actually
> *did* anything, I was extremely disappointed.  Rather than walking through an
> interactive world, as I had been led to believe, I was actually walking between
> props much like those fake buildings they used in the old Hollywood westerns.

Right. One thing with my current project (although in many ways it is 
'traditional' LP, albeit moving away from that rapidly), all objects 
refered to in text are at the very least examinable, and preferably, 
manipulatable in some way.
 
> And yes, one of the *first* things I implemented when I got a chance to code
> was having the extra descriptions in the room respond to object manipulation
> commands with generic messages other than "You don't see that here."  Of
> course, it's just as frustrating in the end to me.  If you can't interact
> with it, what's the point of it being there at all?  As you say, Legend is
> a special case, and does what it does very well.  But I think that the
> other extreme, the one that you refer to as "accepted wisdom", is rarely
> done, and has never been done to the same extreme.

Bravo.

--
	-Matt Chatterley