[MUD-Dev] narrative

[Brad Roberts]

On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> 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.

A mud setting needs some amount of narration (in the form of area
descriptions, environmental interaction, quest information, npc
behavior, etc) to provide an environment that's not just a blocky
set of rooms, people, and random objects.  There's an incredibly
wide spectrum between that and a full fledged novel, be it written
by one person or a staff of people.  For the purposes of this email,
I'll stick with a simplistic single author, since I'm going to
assume a target environment where the ratio of writers to players is
on the order of 1:100 or worse.

A single author isn't going to be capable of providing an ongoing
super rich world capable of acting and reacting to tens, hundreds,
or thousands of players.  To enable him to work in such an
environment will either require an enormous amount of pre-launch
writing with tons and tons of contingency pre-planned
out... OR.. the ability to seed some amount of automated systems and
adapt and re-seed as things change.

So.. yes, the world of narrative software isn't up to the level of
producing works on par with the great authors of our time.  That's
not the goal.  I'll admit that I'm a software guy, and very much not
a creative writer, so I'm not terribly up to speed on the state of
the art in this field, but to jump from the inability to produce
great literature all the way to suggesting that the entire topic
isn't worth discussing... well, that's about the most counter
productive thing I've seen float across the list in ages.

Later,
Brad


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