intfiction.org

A typical IF quality may be granular terseness. Emily Short already mentioned a (a specific kind of) narrative terseness, but good IF expands that.

• Spatial terseness: there should be no "unnecessary" rooms - each room must have a good excuse for existing, and if the same effect can be achieved using fewer rooms, that is generally better.
• Temporal terseness: the game ought not to require micromanagement beyond the level the story requires. This is what we were talking about above.
• Material terseness: There ought not to be more objects and details than the story requires.

An important qualifier here is the "than required", of course. Einstein's famous quip about simpliciry is valid here too. "A wood. You see: painting. Exits: east, up." - is not the ideal to strive after.

Of course this goes together with narrative terseness: a good choice of props can be smaller if they are well-described, and a description can be shorter in the presence of one or two 'telling' objects. With the correct prose, a temporal jump may still feel like a long stretch of time - et cetera.

(I am quite aware Emily and others have already written about these qualities; all I am doing here is trying to outline a general IF-theoretical framework. Of course the terseness criterion spreads all over art, and is identical to the novelty criterion. Repetition can set a background that allows orientation (the very fact of having room after room in IF, a repeating pattern in a decoration, the beat of music), but given that background repetition, whether it is within one work of art or between works of art, needs a strong justification. The first IF maze or find-the-key puzzle was great; the 100th a turn-off. My remarks above about macro-learning address the same issue: making the game more terse without degrading the story by removing repetition.)

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-- Biep.

I like the term elegance, myself, for the point where effectiveness (in artistic terms) joins with efficiency.

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Games, Fonts, and Font-Toys For Gamers - http://www.cumberlandgames.com

Re: granularity, I find myself using the term medium-size dry goods a lot, when picking out the classic style of IF game: something primarily concerned with the direct manipulation of familiar objects (rather than people or intangibles) at a human scale or something close to it. IF is very good indeed at medium-sized dry goods -- there are few things more satisfying than a well-crafted inventory list -- and often has difficulties when venturing outside it.

(I stole it from a philosophy term, but am using it in a much narrower sense; in Austin's meaning, people are definitely medium-sized dry goods.)

Defining a vocabulary for talking about interactive fiction is one thing, and a fine thing too, which I applaud.

Declaring that a certain qualities are better than others is another thing. Which can also be fine and dandy, especially if you there is room for disagreement. But you should not confuse these things.

Personally I can pretty much agree with that terseness criterion, on an abstract level ("design is not knowing what to add, but what you can't take away" - or whatever the original quote is), but from that it does not automatically follow that minimalism is the only aesthetic that is artistically interesting. Nor does it tell me that IF has to be designed like a jigsaw puzzle where every piece has one and only one place to go. Lego is another kind of toy.

And yes, these are my opinions, I just present them as facts.

I tend to enjoy adding details to my writing -- and I also enjoy reading writing that includes details. I've seen far too many games that would have benefited from longer, more carefully worked out descriptions of things. One-sentence descriptions of important objects (either important to the player or having emotional importance for the PC) are a vice, not a virtue.

Your mention of Hemingway got me curious, though, so I grabbed For Whom the Bell Tolls off of the shelf. Here is the first paragraph:

Yes, it's terse. There's no unnecessary detail -- but there's a lot of detail! There's also implied sensory detail: We can hear the sound the wind makes, even though the sound is never mentioned, and we can guess from "summer sunlight" that the day is warm. We can also, if we're imaginative, smell both the pine needles and the oil of the road (though the latter would be too far away for the odor to reach the viewpoint character.

Is this passage "Very Lean And Not all Frickin' Wordy And Flabby And On-And-On"? Unclear. The second occurrence of "pine" could be deleted. "He could see" and "he saw" are perhaps unnecessary, as is "There was," and there are two run-on sentences, so we could delete two "and"s. As minor as these changes would be, I think it's clear that Hemingway's style required "there was", "he could see", and run-on sentences. Those elements are part of the magic. So I'm a little leery of praising leanness for its own sake.

Remind me to post some Faulkner to this thread, later....

This is a fruitful discussion. Although I don't see the usefulness in all of Biep's well-thought vocabulary, I may start using some of them when discussing games and theory. Specifically, I like the concept of different kinds of "terseness"; I think it might be useful to use terms like "narrative/spatial/material terseness" in reviews. "Granularity" definitely sounds good.

On the other hand, "plotkin" is probably a bad choice for a term, even though it is a very clever coinage. It sounds like it's supposed to mean "story branch," the possibilities for the plot to take different directions. It would indeed be good to find a better term than "branch," since "branch" can mean a lot of things in reference to IF (such as dialog nodes in a menu or CYOA-like conversation system). However, "plotkin" is not really a natural-sounding term. It's not intuitive enough for me. Also, it could be confused with the association with name of the IF author; people might think a "plotkin" is a game device similar to the characteristics found in Andrew Plotkin's works. (For that, I think the adjective "zarfian" has been used.)

I think it's important not to create too much jargon. We have to have some, of course, but if our reviews and our discussions of theory contain a lot of terms that people unfamiliar with IF (or just not following the current discussion) can't figure out with some thought, we will have made IF even more difficult for people to get the hang of. There could be readers and writers of static fiction who may be really interested in IF, but they may dismiss it if they can't understand what is being talked about in terms that they can relate to. I'm not saying we shouldn't have terms, but I think they should be intuitive as much as possible.


I agree, but I think one-sentence descriptions can sometimes be the most effective style for a particular work. Not everything can be described well in one sentence, and sometimes a lot of effective and focused description can produce strong immersion and emotional impact. On the other hand, when one sentence is all it takes and that sentence is actually a real description, I will take the one sentence.

If we're going to be talking terseness, and Jim is going to post paragraphs of Hemingway's, I think we should look into the writing styles of other well-loved writers too. Here's one:



C.

*Confession: drawn from an inet meme; not culled from the corpus personally.

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http://tiltedcandle.wordpress.com

I thought Edward was a talking horse. Come to think of it, there's nothing in that passage that would suggest that we're not talking about Mr. Ed. More detail would be needed to establish Edward's species.

I rest my case.

Jim, you may be a published author and all that stuff, but you clearly are backward with respect to the classics. Mr. Ed was a *zombie*, as anyone knows who has heard the unBowdlerized lyrics--

A corpse is a corpse, of course, of course,
And a corpse cannot talk, of course, of course,
Unless, of course, I talk to the corpse,
'Cause I've got Speak with Dead!


C.

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http://tiltedcandle.wordpress.com

I would think that equine dentition is structurally inconsistent with vampirism.


Robert Rothman