[MUD-Dev] narrative

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Joe Andrieu

> I would also give Crawford some slack.  The reason he has no
> product is independent of the viability of his approach. It is for
> very much the same reason Brooks hasn't put together a real
> product. Neither is playing by the rules of the computer games
> industry, which despite its faults is the best vehicle for funding
> and distributing "real" interactive entertainment products.

Chris Crawford *had* a real writer working on his project.  Laura J.
Mixon attempted to write "Shattertown Sky."  It was not completed,
and it has now undergone bitrot so it will probably never be viewed
by people who haven't already seen it.

  http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/SHATTERTOWNSKY.html 

is her postmortem.  If you want to judge her actual ability to
write, you can buy her books: 

  http://www.digitalnoir.com/l/works.htm

I respect Chris Crawford's R&D process.  He included a real writer.
Laura took issue with some of Chris Crawford's approaches, the key
issue being that of manually synchronizing events vs. just letting
the system resolve them automagically.  I'd like to think that if
Chris continued this R&D in earnest with new writers, *someday* he'd
end up with a viable tool.  But the bottom line is, faced with a
real writer, the tool was a failure.  We do not have any high
quality writing to point at to say, "this version of the Erasmatron
got us something."  It was not useful for producing what needs to be
produced.  Chris knows this, and at last count he was working on the
next rev.  He has his own ideas about what needs to be done to make
it viable; I couldn't tell you if those ideas square with those of a
writer.

It is nonsense to say this is failing due to the funding base or the
nasty computer industry or whatever.  This is failing because it's
R&D, and the R&D went the wrong way with respect to writing.  If you
don't include real writers in the R&D, if you don't tie the R&D
closely to their demands, YOU'RE GOING TO GO THE WRONG WAY.  You can
gauge a R&D project's health by whether they have *any* high quality
writing to show for their efforts.

SHOW ME THE WRITING.


Cheers,                         www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.


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