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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: JRW Author Reviews
Message-ID: <G4765C.8L7@world.std.com>
Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 01:44:00 GMT
References: <B639616F.3A13%wheeler@jump.net> <B63B18A9.3B23%wheeler@jump.net> <slrn91bil7.e72.jcmason@xenocide.slack> <wkr94ap0vm.fsf@thecia.net>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Lines: 62
Xref: news.duke.edu rec.games.int-fiction:58616

In article <wkr94ap0vm.fsf@thecia.net>, Dan Schmidt  <dfan@thecia.net> wrote:
>jcmason@uwaterloo.ca (Joe Mason) writes:
>
>| I'd much prefer it if all games started with "Instructions (Y/N)"
>| and then cleared the screen and started the intro.  Or if the ABOUT
>| text always went to a menu screen, and reprinted the intro and
>| opening room description after returning.
>|
>| Consider this a request, everybody.
>
>Everybody should also consider that I hate starting a game and
>immediately seeing some meta prompt to read instructions or set my
>colors.

I'm going to have to agree with Joe, and for reference I'm going
to bring up what AdamC wrote in his review, since he seems to have
said it first (but I had it written down in my notes before I read
it, honest!):

>   Let's see, what else... ah, yes.  Hooray for a game which provides
>notes and deals with configuration issues *before* thrusting you into
>the narrative -- I may be in the minority on this one, but I really
>dislike it when games start with several paragraphs of story and then
>just when your brain has settled nicely into the world of the game,
>yank you out and say, "Oh, by the way, you need to type ABOUT and read
>a bunch of notes if you expect to get anywhere."  Would you put the
>foreword to a book between chapters 1 and 2?

I suppose the "ABOUT-that-reprints-the-start" would kind
of work ("METARESTART" anyone?) except I wouldn't know about
it in advance, so I'd go ahead and read all of the introductory
text first.

I'm not sure where the whole intro then banner then room
description thing came from in the first place.  It has
little counterpart in books (acknowledgements-forward-text).
TV has popularized teasers (intro-ads-show), and they show
up now and then in movies (delayed credits; check out
_The Fugitive_ for strangely split credits which make it
hard to say "teaser").

I would guess that mostly the need for introductory text is
because IF is interactive, and you need to provide the player
and the PC with motivation in a way that's inappropriate to
put in a room description.  But why put the banner in between?

I guess some fiction actually has a teaser, an excerpt before
the text proper, but it's not normally BEFORE the title page,
is it?

I mean, TV does teasers to keep you there through the ads.
At a movie you're not going to leave in the first five minutes,
so they don't need to use that format--although they sometimes
do it for stylistic reasons, it's far less common.  So is
there any reason?

I'm trying to reason out Dan's annoyance, too.  Would
"hit space to start playing, or hit something else to do
meta stuff" be that bad?  How about if we rolled that
into an opening quotation, which is meta in the first place?

SeanB
