extra nouns in the description

Just curious, but what do you guys do about extra nouns that find themselves into your descriptions? For example, for the description of one of my rooms, I have:

Living Forest is a room. “You are encompassed by many trees. Their friendly branches swing back in forth as if in greeting to you, and as the wind rustles through their leaves you can almost hear them whispering to one another.[first time][paragraph break]Just peeking between the trunks of the trees, you can barely make out large mountain ranges off to both the far east and far west. The southern border of the forest leads into wide ocean, where rest three miniscule dots of land. On the northern side of the forest is a vast open area that doesn’t seem to serve much purpose at this point in the game.[only]”

he trees are something I intend to code for, describing them as “as you look closer, you notice they have faces etched into their trunks” (which then also leads me to the issue of having to create an additional description for their faces and possibly their trunks as well). But now I have to create objects that are mountain ranges, ocean, miniscule dots of land, etc or branches and trunks that are part of the trees. Naturally, I initially thought of just coding them as scenery, but then I thought, is that going to get me in trouble later when the player is actually in those areas of the map or in another area of the map where those things also end up being visible?

Also, I’m certain there must be some less burdensome way to handle the occurrence of insignificant nouns in each room.

I’m not sure whether you are asking a technical question, or a design question, or a bit of both.

As to the technical question, it’s not hard to define a kind of thing that is a sort of second-class citizen object. For instance, I usually define kinds for “decorations”, “distant things”, and “absent things”. For instance:

A decoration is a kind of thing. It is scenery. The description of a decoration 
is usually "[The noun] is not important." Instead of doing anything other than 
examining with a decoration, say "You can't do anything useful with [the noun]."

It’s then pretty easy to create objects which will deliver a “clear message” (don’t waste time on me), without annoyingly denying their very existence.

Lab is a room. "There's a mass of equipment stored here: test tubes, 
flasks, rubber tubing, old bunsen burners. Fortunately you don't need to worry about that.

The lab equipment is decoration in Lab. Understand "test tube/tubes", "flask", 
"flasks", "rubber", "tubing", "tubes", "bunsen burner/burners", "stored" as the lab equipment.

If, in a particular case, you want to allow some sort of short description, you can give it.

Lab is a room. "There's a mass of equipment stored here: test tubes, flasks,
rubber tubing, old bunsen burners. Fortunately you don't need to worry about that.

The lab equipment is decoration in Lab. The description is "There's so much
equipment here, you could spend all day looking at it: better focus on the problem
at hand." Understand "test tube/tubes", "flask", "flasks", "rubber", "tubing", "tubes",
"bunsen burner/burners", "stored" as the lab equipment.

And, indeed, if you need in some particular case to allow for some particularly obvious action, you can do that too:

Instead of searching the lab equipment, say "Really, you would not know where to start."

That’s a reasonably efficient way of taking care of the technical issue. But it doesn’t cover your design question. The key there, I think, is consistency. Is your game one in which the player needs to be in the habit of “kicking the tyres” on the objects that seem to be mentioned in room descriptions in order to progress. If so, you need to make sure you fairly consistently reward such exploration–and generically pre-programmed responses don’t. If, as a player, I try examining the minuscule dots of land, and the branches, and the mountains, and I’m told not to worry, I may never look at those trees. These things send subtle but unmistakeable signals to the players about how you expect them to play, and you owe it to the player to be consistent.

Anyway, tbh, it’s lazy. You are avoiding writing descriptions, but the price is that anyone who plays your game is going to waste their time! And the message that sends is “I don’t care enough to bother.”

In the example you give, it’s not difficult. You really have only a few objects:

  • The trees. The trunks, branches, twigs etc are all part of them, and simply redirect to examining the trees. A big part of managing this complexity is copious use of “Understand … as” to cope with different words which should really all go to the same object. Searching will need to redirect to examining as well.
  • The wind, which is not there to examined, but needs to be capable of being listened to.
  • The mountains and sea. That can quite reasonably default to one or two general descriptions of a “view”, which will need to be gated to avoid inappropriate actions (basically anything other than examining). The trick here is to make sure that when examined you /don’t/ mention further specific objects, which /subtly/ signals “You done good to look at me, but there’s no more to see.” If you do mention further specific objects, make them be understood as the general view, which also sends the same signal. You can often use a backdrop for this sort of thing, which means you can re-use your work in a variety of different locations.
  • The minuscule dots. These seem salient, and need therefore to be separately dealt with. If they are /not/ important enough to get a unique description, then they shouldn’t be mentioned at all. As it is, they stand out.

That is really, then three or four objects at most. It’s not a big deal. If that doesn’t work for you, you really need to reconsider your approach to descriptions, making them more generic and calling out objects which are important unmistakeably, rather than weaving them in as you are. But get used to the idea that with any IF you are going to spend a lot of time writing responses which most players won’t see!

Thanks, PaulS! That was indeed a big help!

One approach that often seems to work is to reuse a sentence from the description, perhaps for many objects. This tells the player that yes, they are right to think that that are the sort of thing they can examine, but also that they’ve already heard everything there is to hear about it and they don’t really need to do anything more with it. As Paul said, this signals “you done good but there’s no more to see”–perhaps not so subtly.

And it can take care of several nouns at once–like, in your example, you could have “ocean,” “dots,” and “land” all referring to the same object which just repeats the same description. Not to mention you’ve already written the sentence.

Like this:

[code]Living Forest is a room. “You are encompassed by many trees. Their friendly branches swing back in forth as if in greeting to you, and as the wind rustles through their leaves you can almost hear them whispering to one another.[first time][paragraph break]Just peeking between the trunks of the trees, you can barely make out large mountain ranges off to both the far east and far west. The southern border of the forest leads into wide ocean, where rest three miniscule dots of land. On the northern side of the forest is a vast open area that doesn’t seem to serve much purpose at this point in the game.[only]”

The trunks of trees are scenery in the Living Forest. “Faces etc.”

The large mountain ranges is scenery in the Living Forest. “Just peeking between the trunks of the trees, you can barely make out large mountain ranges off to both the far east and far west.”

The ocean is scenery in the Living Forest. “The southern border of the forest leads into wide ocean, where rest three miniscule dots of land.” Understand “dots” or “land” or “minuscule” or “dots of land” or “wide” as the ocean.

The vast open area is scenery in the Living Forest. “On the northern side of the forest is a vast open area that doesn’t seem to serve much purpose at this point in the game.”[/code]

If they type “x ocean” and then “x dots” they learn that they don’t learn anything new by looking at the dots, and thus that the dots aren’t anything worth bothering with any more, at least not from here.

If you’re worried about another area of the map where they’re also visible, you could make them backdrops (you’d have to make the description not so site-specific, or give a way to vary it depending on the room you’re in). Though if the player is going to get down to the beach where the dots are visible close up, you need to deal with them.

A lot of these things also - trunks, mountains, ocean, vast open area - depending on your map could also be backdrops that exist in multiple rooms so you don’t have to keep putting scenery in Living Forest if it encompasses a whole region of locations. You can assign backdrops to regions that you name and they’ll show up everywhere. This will keep you from repeatedly making “sky” scenery in every location.

I did indeed make my mountain ranges and ocean backdrops. Then I made an “understand… as…” for the trunks, leaves, and branches. I didn’t do anything with the wind though, because my game won’t allow the player to listen to anything in the first place.

It’s your game, but I think that’s a mistake. The game does allow you to listen: it’s just given a description of what you hear in a way that positively invites further investigation. If you won’t let the player do that, you are teaching the lesson: “Don’t bother reading the descriptions carefully, I don’t really mean it.”

It’s an easy fix: take out the reference to the wind and the whispering. Make the description emphasise the thing that does matter:

In other words, turn a red-herring aural clue to a legitimate visual one.

In a screenwriting forum I used to participate in, there was a rule called “Don’t describe the wallpaper.” In a film, someone who is very capable and professional will design the set and you needn’t bother with that. Similarly, a reader’s brain can probably conjure up “derelict space station” pretty well, and other than pointing out specifics important to the story or maybe one really well-chosen specific detail, it’s often best to let the reader participate in creating the world than to waste words describing shapes of rust stains, and specific amounts of oxidation.

PaulS’s gives a great example of “show, don’t tell” - that description shows the wind by letting the reader see its effects instead of saying “there is wind here”.

IF often has to break “show don’t tell” due to the nature of the medium. Sometimes “This drawer is broken.” will suffice instead of “The wood rattles, crumbling internally, and the slides squeal, stirring your memories of the abbatoir you labored at in college. The drawer-pull breaks off in your hand, but the desk remains resolutely impervious to your snooping…” kind of purpleness over and over.

Huh. All this time I was always going the creative writing route, trying to paint a picture with my words. But what you’re saying is that in IF, it’s more typical to do the opposite: “tell, don’t show”, so that the player has a better chance of formulating their own creative outlook on the piece. yeah?

It goes back and forth a lot. You might have to be very descriptive about some thing – room layouts, the physical arrangements of certain objects – if they’re important for navigation or a puzzle. Then you may want to be non-descriptive about other things, in order to cue the player that they’re not important at all. You might want to separate important objects into their own paragraphs while lumping background stuff into an evocative but low-detail sentence. It’s a matter of focus.

It is a truism that in interactive literature, you communicate a point most effectively by neither telling nor showing, but getting the player to perform it. But this itself requires a fair amount of setup to give the player the right tools.

Blah. I should just give up now. I don’t have focus.

…No, not really. Thanks, guys. It’s always nice to get some good perspective from all the pros. I’mma keep trying.

Paint your picture, but use the appropriate amount of paint for the job instead of so much it takes forever to dry.