Cataloguing rooms...

…is an interactive fabulist’s most useful talent and most common nightmare.

But seriously, how many “rooms” can you describe before your interactive fabula starts resembling a Robbe-Grillet novel?

Ok. No idea what a “fabula” is, but I looked up Alain Robbe-Grillet and found this:

And I think an IF that does this would be very interesting.

@MTW: fabula is Latin for “narrative”, borrowed into English to describe the ideas used to build a story.

@Anders: I would say it depends on the genre. Works with more fantastic settings tend to have more diverse room descriptions (“Adventure” being the ur-example here, with all sorts of environments mashed together without rhyme or reason), whereas those set in more realistic environments tend to be more repetitive (as in real life there often isn’t much to distinguish one generic hallway from another).

Thanks! My favorite dictionary site didn’t help.

The House at the End of Rosewood Street kind of made me feel like this.

Cool. Will check it ert. :sunglasses:

Ideally, every room has a reason to exist in the game, and the reasons provide enough distinctiveness to keep them clear in the player’s mind. This is equally true for large and small games. …Ideally.

This http://planetpudlo.wordpress.com/2014/08/21/some-reviews/ is the only reference to “interactive fabula” I was able to find that has anything to do with interactive fiction. So no, it’s not a common phrase.

That’s enlightening.