A critical IF vocabulary

Playing Game Hints
21

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.)

22

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

23

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.)

24

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.

25

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…

26

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.

27

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.

28

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.

29

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.

30

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

Robert Rothman

31

Actually, horses can have canine teeth (it’s more prevalent in stallions and geldings), so you could conceivably have a vampire horse.

Is there a good term for the way great characterisation is upheld through incidental responses?

What about the exploration of new modes of interaction? I’d imagine a sapient vampire horse protagonist would interact with the world in a very different way from the typical gender neutral human adventurer.

32

Total agreement. The devil’s in the details and the devil’s my favorite :slight_smile:

But … that’s irrelevant to the Leanest Most Badass Killer Lean Prose Which is Very Lean And Not all Frickin’ Wordy And Flabby And On-And-On But Just Gets Right to the GOOD STUFF Like Only Good Writing Can category, which is not (at all) about the amount of detail.

33

I was serious regarding the concept. honorifically jocular regarding the name. It does have a nice ring to me, ‘kin’ also conveying something diminutive, as in ‘manikin’ - thus allowing the term plot to be used for the lateral whole. (Plotlet would do the same thing without the joke.) But the actual choice of terms is secondary to me in this whole discussion - the important bit is digging up the pure concepts and having a name for them (I have a Scheme background).

Technically, a plotkin would be an equivalence class over the set of possible walk-throughs of a game. In many situations, a walk-through ending in {You are in a narrow east-west straight between two monsters|n|Scylla ate you} would be in the same equivalence class as {You are in a narrow east-west straight between two monsters|s|Charybdis swallows you, ship and all}, because they would not be narratively different. If the strait of Messina were long, sailing a bit farther before veering off might still not make a difference, depending on the narrative. Exploring a house in different room orders, or picking up some irrelevant stuff or not along the way, or taking heavy item A or heavy item B in order to smash in the ivory okapi skull - all would in many cases not cause a change in plotkin.
The equivalence predicate would not be completely fixed. When discussing an on-the-side running joke, differences that would influence the showing up of the joke would matter, whereas when discussing the main plot, they wouldn’t. So roughly, a plotkin would be what all run-throughs that make for the same narrative as seen through our current glasses have in common; one narrative experience that reading the work to the end could yield.

So linear narrative, having a laterality of 1, necessarily has a plot consisting of a single plotkin. IF may, but need not, have more complex plots, consisting of up to many plotkins.

Well, he would have to change his name, then. First things first. I thought of maybe zarf (short for “the one with the zarfian ideas”), but that may not be really intuitive…

I agree jargon should not turn off or lock out people. Ideally it is transparent - which is one reason why I try to be systematic in naming, so that a meaning can be deduced from the parts the term is built up from. And really ideally, some of our useful terms will spread to other art forms.

But again, my main interest right now is getting the concept space clear - we can always decide on better names for areas once our map shows their precise nature and relation to other areas.

34

I fully agree. That’s why I posted them in different posts.

Granularity and its various forms are techical terms for technical concepts. Terseness is a esthetic/critical concept based on size, in this case granularity - in that post I intended to propose some critical terms for critical concepts based on the earlier technical ones. As with all critical concepts, some works of art derive part of their merit from not following the received critical concepts.

I agree this bears better explanation, and thank you for pointing this out.

So yes, we are really doing two things at once here, or rather three. Finding possible categories for appraising IF, finding the critical terminology with which to define these categories, and developing the technical vocabulary with which to describe the critical concepts. If there were a separate subforum for IF theory I should split this thread in three, but as there isn’t I prefer to keep the discussion in a single thread in order to keep the participants together.

35

This may be an obvious and stupid observation, but the nature of the input taken from the player will vary with the granularity of the time-frame. This might go so far as to vary the form of the input.

Conrad.

36

Well, as we are trying to capture the obvious, or at least the obvious in hindsight, I suppose obvious and stupid don’t go well together here, I think.

Yes, and as a result of that, all kinds of granularity affect both input and output, because in interaction they lead to temporal granularity. Whether the desk drawer is implemented as a detail (material granularity) affects whether taking my passport from the desk will be a single command or a series including “open drawer”. Likewise, spatial and temporal granularity go hand in hand. In one game {Europe|w|North America} might do, whereas in another this movement would consist of hundreds of commands, including paying taxis, opening doors, showing ones boarding pass…

37

Yep, I’m still alive.

So we now have:

  1. The concept of granularity (besides other concepts, most of which are to be established);
  2. The criterion of granular terseness/elegance (besides other, yet to find, criteria);
  3. The category of games making good use of granularity (besides…).

Making good use may be through tersenes or by fulfilling other criteria, but also through creative deviation from the criteria, or through the use of other forms of granularity, including original forms. Because many other forms are possible, some of which have already been explored. Some examples.

  • Dialogue granularity: the steps through a dialogue. Some games use the sentence as a granule, typically leading to menu systems, others topics, others something in-between, where the same topic can be retried for more dialogue, either immediately or after the world has changed.
  • Knowledge granularity: “Now the NPC knows X”. X can be at many levels, from “the horrible past of the villain” to “The first letter of the password is ‘D’”.

It would be nice to have a more complete list of what has been done so far.

Another concept that may be useful for the category is granular organisation. Granules come in groups that come in larger groups, et cetera. A group of locations may be a house, and a group of houses a village. Such groups may be locked by puzzles (one cannot get to Hades until one has obtained an obole), and may or may not be aligned with temporal structures (The Tartaros chapter comes after the Lethe chapter).

Likewise, objects can have parts and there is a containment structure, knowledge and dialogue could have subtopics… What would be a criterion for granular organisation?

The triangle of identities multiplies all this (it should have a category of its own, maybe including the self-awareness concept (my name for a contribution of Emily’s).
Differences between PC object granularity and Player object granularity are often distracting. “The wall is covered with beautifully intricate reliefs” - “x reliefs” - “There is no need to refer to that in this game” (or worse: “You can see no such thing”). Are there positive uses of this difference?
Player time may have a structure, and so may PC time - flashbacks and the like can decouple the two. There is this Jack and the Beanstalk game that had a very original way of decoupling the two. If I had a better connection I should look it up in IFDB.
PC knowledge and NPC knowledge are different from Player knowledge, and again from Game reporter knowledge - the game reporter may know things, and e.g. ask “Are you sure?” to hint at facts the player may not know. (Guess-the-verb is an inversion of this: the player knows more than the reporter, but can’t tell it.)

Well, I’ll shut up again for the moment.

38

Long overdue, from an idea by Maga:

Control granularity: the amount of stuff that is the PC or an NPC. Most often one controls a person of some kind, but one might control, “be”, an army, or (the brain part controlling) someone’s right hand.

In the latter case, maybe one only has actual control when the person doesn’t use it consciously, and realising ones objectives might make for a tricky puzzle: not only motorically (having a book fall open on the right page for the person to read something and be influenced by it, “accidentally” pocketing or mislaying something, touching someone to make them remark the person), but also sensorically (feeling the table hoping to hit something sufficiently interesting that the person may turn her eyes that way - maybe ending up catching a splinter).

That example shows this goes together with agency granularity, but the two are far from the same. A game such as “Snack time!” has person-level control granularity, but smaller agency granularity. In another game the PC might be Napoleon, again with person-level control granularity, but with army-level agency granularity (supposing the army informed and obeyed him strictly: “Ah, la garde doit se rendre? Très bien, monsieur le général!”).