[MUD-Dev] A footnote to Procedural Storytelling

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Tue, 23 May 2000, Brandon J. Rickman wrote:

> On Tue, 23 May 2000, Lee Sheldon wrote:
> > Please don't make the mistake of throwing out competence to chase
> > brilliance.  I'm arguing for the education of professionals, none of whom
> > may be the next Shakespeare.  There aren't enough brilliant writers in the
> > world to support ANY entertainment medium.  We settle for competence all the
> > time.  It's not a bad thing.  Neither is supporting writers "...in every way
> > you can..."
> 
> Sure, but it helps if your end result is entertaining or worthwhile.  
> Your properly trained writers will produce a broad spectrum of
> entertainment, some of it brilliant, most of it okay.  Perhaps players
> will pay more for better entertainment, but regardless you're going to
> provide most people with a merely competent product.  Sounds like a good
> business plan, but personally that is not what I'm interested in.  I want
> to provide an entertaining activity to everyone who plays my game, or if
> there are any particular groups I am not interested in entertaining, that
> would include those hardcore hack-n-slash gamers who dominate the RPG
> market.  In other words, I want to provide a quality experience for any
> potential audience for which the current models of entertainment (tv,
> online RPG) are not appealing ("merely competent").

Well, good luck! I know I have yet to see any form of entertainment or art
that was marketed to the masses that comes anywhere near my definition of
brilliant. This includes every single game I've ever played. Maybe this is
just semantics, but while I find brilliance (a quality I am self-aware
enough to realize I don't possess) to be more admirable, look at the
writers (for instance) generally acknowleged as brilliant by the literati
this century. They include, for instance, Joyce and Beckett. Both were
brilliant. Joyce, in particular, didn't really produce anything
particularly commercially viable, or anything entertaining to the masses
(again, that might not be your goal, I don't know). In any case,
brilliance is something so rarely achieved that you have got to either
have low standards, or an extremely high level of arrogance to assume that
you have any shot at achieving it.

 
> > Sorry, I have no idea what you mean by this.  Talented writers don't want to
> > do interactive?  The WGA is forever holding seminars and lectures packed
> > with writers trying to figure this out.  It's pretty much the blind leading
> > the blind right now ("Hey, I just invented something I call branching!  It's
> > the key to interactive entertainment!"), but that will change.
> 
> I think a talented writer would be tempted to move on to better things,
> like creating their own fictional world, instead of contributing to an
> extablished one.  But this would be true of all the involved professions,
> not specifically writers.

I don't know too many writers who can code, manage a team of people, raise
money, market a product, do the live support etc etc. In fact I don't know
too many people (if any) period that can do all of those with sufficient
competence. No large-scale game is created by one person. Everyone
contributes to the final product.

What you are saying is like saying that it's impossible that movies could
ever get good writers (clearly false as there are some excellent scripts),
because the writers would just want to move on to do their own thing. I
don't see too many writers able to put together a movie on their own. And
really, if all you want to do is create a fictional world on your own, the
perfect medium already exists: write a book.

 
> > > 4 - If I'm a player in your interactive commercial fantasy world, I'm
> > > still a puppet on a string.
> > 
> > Puppets can be a perfectly good thing as long as the puppets can't feel the
> > strings.
> 
> Something an engineer would say?

Possibly. Or, in Lee's case, a professional writer. I suspect you've never
run a world if you think that the playerbases in any successful world are
not manipulated to kingdom come and back. It's a good thing, not a bad
thing.

--matt
 




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