Backstory (was RE: [MUD-Dev] New poll)

[Zak Jarvis]

> From: J C Lawrence [claw at cp.net]
> Sent: Friday, June 09, 2000 5:00 PM

-<Much snippage to get to what I wanted to comment on>-

> We're dealing with stories here, which immediately rephrases part of
> the question as to what scale of stories are we dealing with?
> Hollywood movies are inherently a short story form.  They're
> certainly not novels tho they keep pretending to be.  What is the
> narrative scale of our games?  What is the narrative scale of our
> player's participation in our games?  I see many mostly abortive
> attempts to establish vignette and ultra-short-story contexts in
> MUDs, all with the seeming assumption that by piling those on, by
> bundling them endlessly into a player's growth curve and game
> experience that we can eventually create a novel in some magical
> happenstance fashion, and I don't buy it.

It's worth noting here that as a medium, the Hollywood movie has had about
5,900 fewer years to evolve than the novel. It's quite likely that movies
will ultimately take a more novel-like format, or at least some of them.
The short story is the original narrative. Certainly quite a lot of early
stories are epic in stature, but in execution they *are* short stories.

Ditto movies.

Films probably need 15-20 more years to start to come into their own, and
it'll be a largely technological issue. Though I think there is also an
aspect here of audiences accepting the form. I'm fairly certain that the
average length of a movie has been fairly steadily rising.

Games are going to need 30-40 more years, again for technological issues,
but also so the form will be understood well enough that it can be properly
exploited.

As far as games and storytelling goes, we're not far removed from writing
in cuneiform on clay tablets. We've got papyrus or perhaps bamboo strips.
We're not even close to western-style movable type, and it's going to be
YEARS before we get a Tristram Shandy.

-Zak Jarvis
 http://www.voidmonster.com





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