Letters

@~Any letters or e-mails received on an adventuring-related topic
@~may be reprinted in here unless marked 'not for publication'.

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Only one letter this issue, from:
Nick Edmunds, Worcester via email

While recently playing a particularly verbose game I was left to
consider the merits, and indeed the place, of literary style in
text adventures.

The game in question had great, rambling descriptions for all
sorts of things, which only served to confuse and bog down the
train of thought, by forcing an exacting scrutiny of every line of
text before basic information could be assimilated.

For myself, I would say that in a text adventure game playability
is of greater concern than any literary style. After all, it's a
game and not a novel.  As such bad grammar and poor spelling are
forgivable to some extent (even some professional software isn't
exempt), but a lot of obvious mistakes can make a game irritating
for the player. Although there is little excuse for a shed load of
bad spelling when utilities like "Text Out" (a Tads utility by
Rick La Bach) are available in the public domain ( SynTax library
disk 925 PC. )

I am aware that my writing style is on a par with my spelling, so
I run the spell-check when I'm finished.  Unfortunately a good
writing style is more difficult to ensure and while formulae exist
for calculating the readability of prose, e.g. The Gunning
Equation (1), this sort of thing should be far in excess of our

* (1) The Gunning equation divides the number of words by the number
* of sentences.  It then adds to this the number of words which have
* 3 or more syllables and multiplies by 0.4.  A result of between 3
* and 11 is considered to be good prose, with 12 or more being too
* verbose and below 3 being too terse. (Robert Gunning, 1952)

textual needs as we are writing games and not prose.  Obviously,
fancy grammar and high faluting sentences do not necessarily play
any part in making a game any good. (See Bev Truter's review of
Magic Realms: The Sword of Kasza in SynTax issue 54)

Now, I'm not going to go completely hatstand and suggest that
there's no place for words in text adventures or that text
adventures aren't creative or literary, but I would humbly suggest
that the best exercise in writing text adventures is to play other
people's games first in order to get some idea of what a player
wants.  Logically, if something annoys you when you play a game,
don't build it in to your games.  (The other best thing is to
press-gang acquaintances into beta testing.  Warning: friends can
be blunt.)

@~I would prefer a wordy game to one which has extremely short
@~descriptions and zero atmosphere. However, I'd agree that some
@~messages and descriptions can be too verbose - then one's
@~attention starts to wander ... Sue
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