[MUD-Dev] narrative

[Vincent Archer]

According to Matt Mihaly:
> On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
>> Matt Mihaly wrote:
  
>>> Further, most people do not WANT great writing. Joyce is
>>> arguably the greatest English-language writer of the 20th
>>> century
  
>> Joyce is a strawman.  When comparing the quality of writing to
>> something tangible, look at the screenplay for "The Lord Of The
>> Rings."
 
> The screenplay for Lord of the Rings is not what I'd term "great
> writing." Lord of the Rings isn't what I'd term great writing. I'd
> call it great storytelling. Joyce, on the other hand, is
> unquestionably a great writer.

Which brings us back to our original interest. What do we want in
our games? Good writing, or good stories?

That's where the graphical MUDs have the advantage over the textual
ones.

If you take again the dog-farmer story generated that was shown
earlier in this thread, you can quickly imagine how it translates
into a MUD context. Generating the "plot" looks doable. You have
every action, reaction, and motivations in there, so it's
done. Then, each MUD has to translate that story for presentation to
the players.

A text MUD will have to translate that into writing, and writing is
a dense medium. A small mistake is immediately visible, and jars the
readers appreciation.

A graphical MUD will have to translate that into animation of
"props" (the farmer NPC, the dog NPC, and so on), and a couple of
sentences (but shorter ones). But visual immersion is less dense
than writing. Small mistakes, repetitive effects pass more easily
the "is-this-good" filter of the player.

In the context of the MUD scene, we don't need novel generators. We
need scripts generators.

--
	Vincent Archer			Email:	archer at frmug.org

All men are mortal.  Socrates was mortal.  Therefore, all men are Socrates.
							(Woody Allen)

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