[MUD-Dev] Ownership

[Damion Schubert]

 From Marian Griffith

> Simply because it is far easier to evoke emotions using a few
> words where it takes a lot of footage to do the same with images.
> Simply because here your imagination works for you, where the
> movie must show you.  Lovecraft was a master at this, but much of
> the stylistic tools he uses in his prose do not translate well, if
> at all, to movies.  It is easier to make a text-based mud with a
> Lovecraft theme than it is to create a graphical one.

I would disagree strongly with this.  It is much easier to elicit
strong emotions from movies than from words.  Movies have full
control over the experience, whereas a book can be put down.  Movies
flood your two most imaginative senses: sight and sound.  Books
require your brain to reverse engineer the words an author is
written.  Books can describe things that cannot be put on film, but
movies can use camera motion, filters, effects and whatnot to create
visual sequences that would be nigh- impossible to recreate in all
of their glory.

The 'reverse engineering' part is the one that I would call the most
attention to.  Simply put, there are a lot of people who are not
good writers.  Not good writers often result in me reading a book
and only absorbing the dialogue and other changing elements, as all
of their backdrop is unconvincing and not worth absorbing in detail.
Not good writers, tragically, plague text MUDs with text
descriptions that are repetitive, overly convoluted, or perhaps
nonsensical.  A common problem for not good writers is that they
don't understand what makes this medium unique.  (I am the first to
grant that I likely fall into that category).

Excellent writers, such as King and Lovecraft, can play on emotions
very well.  But I've gotten a lot more nightmares from movies than
from books.

What I prefer about books is the level of political intrigue and
complexity they allow for.  The huge backstory is what was missing
from Lord of the Rings.  The political mach- inations were much
better in the Sum of All Fears book.  In both cases, the books made
me -think- a lot more, but the movie really made me -feel- more.

Maybe at some point we're just better off saying we're comparing
apples to oranges, and we should move on. =)

--d
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