intfiction.org

I've read a fair bit of writing advice for novels and short stories, but I figure that there are certain specific virtues of good IF prose. As someone who is interested in continuing improving my own writing, I'm interested in reading what people have to say on this matter. It seems that most prose in conventional modelled-world IF revolves around describing objects and letting you know where the exits are. Is this a desirable state of affairs?

That seems to me like a question about world-modeling, rather than about prose per se.

To some extent, I think this is like saying "most of the text in drama revolves around people talking to each other." Traditional IF is a medium that approaches the world through the lens of setting and of objects. That's what it's good at, because that's what it's built for. And if you're working in a medium, it's reasonable to play to its strengths. I do think that it would be good if there was also more parser-IF in which the primary interaction wasn't through medium-sized dry goods, but for that to become a standard you need standard architectures.

Perhaps I should have phrased my question as:

Conventional writing advice emphasises things like show don't tell, go easy on the adjectives, brevity is clarity, avoid the passive voice etc. One might question the usefulness of a lot of this kind of advice, but here I'm asking whether any of that advice is useful for writing IF, and whether there is any IF specific writing principles.

(And, of course, I'd like to see more manipulation of "people, people's voices, rivers, mountains, flames, rainbows,
shadows, pictures on the screen at the cinema, pictures in books or hung on walls, vapours, gases" in interactive fiction.)

The Prose Medium and IF may be of interest.

Show don't tell: yes. And (this is the standard line in videogame design) interacting is better yet than showing.

Easy on the adjectives, brevity is clarity: yes. The most common problem I see in new IF authors who think of themselves as writerly is overwriting. Learning to chop down a sentence into something that's elegantly brief, but still does all the work of a longer sentence, is absolutely invaluable. This goes even more for IF writing than for normal prose, because players want to play: they want to extract information from the text, and then they want to get on with interacting. There are prose writers (Proust comes to mind) who, by force of sheer awesomeness, can get away with throwing brevity out of the window; that's much harder to do in IF.

The principle running counter to this is that players miss stuff; if you need to deliver important information, you need to do so in a way that can't be missed. Doing so without bludgeoning the player is one of the tougher tricks in IF writing.

Condensed to cliche length:

Showing is better than telling; getting the player to *do* is better than either. Describe what the protagonist sees, not what the player would see. Better yet, describe what the protagonist thinks he sees. If possible, don't describe what the protagonist doesn't think about. (Ideally, it isn't that important to the player either.)

Don't flood the player with objects in a single move. (If you have to rig up some mechanism so that certain things aren't described until the second "look", or are triggered by a secondary interaction, do it. Better that than the player TLDRing past them.)

I like to use a system of ropes, pulleys, flashing lights and foghorns to get player attention. Then I force important points into their brain with italics, each point juicier and more italicised than the last.

I call it the 'ol one-two!

- Wade

Also, and I realise that this is really nebulous, reward the player. Early and often. This is a broader principle than just prose, but prose is one of the quickest, most direct ways to do it.

Another common failure, mostly of male authors: remember to ask yourself am I being a sleazeball? when writing about women. It's pretty easy to write something that you think is romantic, or perfectly innocent, but which actually reads as sketchy as hell. This is good writing advice in general, but it's particularly important in IF because IF is participatory; it's ickier to play a part in someone else's sleazeball world than it is to merely read about it.

Brevity is good. Authorial laziness, not so good. Consider this made-up example:

These types of non-description, found in all too many games, are the result of laziness. The writer can't be bothered to actually visualize the chair, the bed, or the chandelier and come up with a description that adds character to the scene.

The description of the chair is a vanilla-flavored cop-out.

The description of the bed is worse, because the author knows it's a cop-out, and is trying to be clever so the player won't notice.

The description of the chandelier refers to its function, not its appearance. This is rather common in IF. It's another cop-out. The author doesn't want to be bothered to write separate objects for the sub-parts of the chandelier, or even to add synonyms (such as "crystal" or "dangling") and therefore takes the easy way out, which is to tell you what the chandelier does rather than what it looks like.

I'm sure I may have been guilty of all of these at one time or another, so please don't bother quoting my own games at me. The point is, a player who thinks to examine an in-game object is primarily asking for more detail with which to construct a visual representation of the scene. A description that provides no further visual details makes the model world seem flat and uninteresting.

Since prose is the only thing that IF has to work with (at least practically), it can be argued that this is a prose-issue. The big question is how to reward the player with nothing but prose. Can a description itself be rewarding? Maybe if the writer is able to anticipate how to further the player's goals with each description...


I'm struggling with this in the game I'm writing right now. Since IF is participatory, the safest thing would be a very objective description with concrete details. However, not only are those kind of descriptions difficult to write, but they're often boring to read. In the specific case of describing a woman (with the PC being male), is an emotional word like "beautiful" a cop-out? Shouldn't the reader ideally construct the mental image from the details in the description and figure out that the woman is supposed to be "beautiful"? Here, the principal of showing instead of telling seems to conflict with the principal of conciseness and relevance, with the added problem of the sleazeball factor.


I'm sure it is a cop-out, and it probably has been abused to cover lazy implementation. However, I think it can be an effective, stylish cop-out at times. It can also help to build a certain mood of austere mystery that an objective, detail-heavy description could destroy.