But I will give it a try nonetheless.
Welcome!
(I’m surprised you didn’t pick an avatar of Caesar, though.)
Jacek is my avatar. I am Akhenaten. I know it’s confusing, but it’s all explained in my WIP.
By the way, do you know if this forum is being archived? If so, how does one access the archive? I’m asking on behalf of my future biographers.
Right now, it all goes back to the beginning. It does need a monthly text dump to the IF Archive. Future historians can probably find it there.
hmm, somehow I thought you were just a newsgroups troll. On the web though you sound like a pre-teen… explains a lot.
Well I thought it was funny. 8)
namekuseijin, that’s really not called for.
ah, moderated and touchy web… even with trolls like Jaceck (or indeed myself), free-speech newsgroups is still best…
“IF without puzzles is simply like a novel where you switch pages by typing “go north” or other silly and useless nonsense.”
This is no doubt a very profound sentiment you’re sharing with us, kiddo. Of course, pages are not “switched.” They are turned. You’d have known that, had you ever read a book.
You can’t type “go north” in a novel either, so I guess page switching doesn’t refer to the novel itself, but to puzzleless, novel-like, page-switching IF.
“Switch” implies a binary-type situation, like switching seats or husbands switching wives or switching the lights on and off. It doesn’t adequately describe turning pages, nor is it an adequate description of text scrolling on a computer screen. No matter how you look at it,“switching pages” is very awkward, unidiomatic English. Unidiomatic diction is the most common weakness one finds in the prose of untalented writers. Which is what makes this thing so ironic. Here’s a guy preaching to IF writers how to write good IF and he delivers his sermon in Neanderthal English.
Excuse me for butting in like this, but wouldn’t it be better to address the sentiment he exposes in his signature, rather than be overly picky about the way he stated it?
Sounds like you are saying that in order to be a good writer, you need to avoid forming new phrases and stick with clichéd phrases that we have already heard before, thus… ‘idiomatic’. The idiom is not what defines the correct way to write. The idiiom is what defines the way people ordinarily speak. Sticking to idiom is what you do when you are trying to write believable dialogue. It’s not what you do when you are trying to write great prose — then you should seek to stray from idiom and come up with some fresh phrases that will make people think on things in a new light. So your attempt to invent an insult here to apply to somebody else, didn’t really pan out. 8)
P.
I totally dig what you’re saying, Smokin’ Croc Dude. (Your avatar is a crocodile, right? It’s not an elk?) I only have one tiny caveat. Before you rebel against the idiom, you need to learn the idiom you’re rebelling against. When a person describes reading a book as “switching pages,” I get the feeling that person doesn’t have a firm grasp of the extant idiom, so inventing a radically new idiom isn’t really an option for them.
As to Peter Pears’s question, is puzzleless IF “silly and useless nonsense”? Do you feel that Photopia and Rameses are silly and useless? Assuming that you do, do you feel that Zork is less silly and more useful? Personally, I prefer both Photopia and Rameses to Zork, but I also prefer Savoir-Faire to both of them. So perhaps this whole puzzleless/puzzleheavy dichotomy isn’t really as aesthetically relevant as many people seem to think it is.
It’s ‘Wormy’ and it’s a dragon drawn by David Trampier in the 1980s in the pages of Dragon magazine, if anyone cares. Come to think of it, it does look rather like a crocodile.
Anyway I don’t agree with your ‘Rules of Idiom’. Nothing wrong with ‘switching pages’ – it’s both grammatical and describes what it is describing accurately. Those are the only requirements.
P.
I don’t think puzzleless IF is silly and useless, but that’s quite beside the point. His signature reflects discontentment with a growing trend of “puzzlelessness” (heck of a word). He might miss the mental exercise, or the feeling that he’s actually accomplishing something instead of being railroaded. He might feel things are becoming “artsy-fartsy” and moving away from what made IF great in the first place.
I don’t know whether he does feel all these things, but they’re possible issues that his signature raises. Faced with a signature like that, we can either ignore it and address his sentiments if and when he would decide to express them, leading to a hopefully useful overview of past and present IF and the way it’s changing, or we can pick up on it and start discussing it whether he starts the conversation or not.
Instead, you’ve picked up on his signature and started discussing his use of the language. This in a community where not everyone is from an English-speaking country (although I’ll agree most are).
I wouldn’t put it in better words myself. Still, puzzleless IF feels to me pretty pointless. Sure, good, puzzling plots interwined with some interaction go a long way providing the immersion and feeling of immersion and satisfaction puzzles provide. But just handling objects, examining things, exploring places and choosing options can’t make up for that lack of completion only puzzles provide: that sentiment of “my action was detrimental into making things happen in the plot.” Choosing a path from numerous is not as exciting as finding one.
I’ve also corrected the sig. I’m not a native english speaker and the right word failed my grasp at the moment…
I feel you would be the right woman for me were you to be a woman. No woman has ever looked upon my soul and distilled my feelings with such depth and accuracy.
I’m not kidding.
seems like the sig has been very effective. I’m glad for having come up with it.
To be fair, as an ambassador from ancient Egypt, Jacek is not a native English speaker either, though he has had longer to master its intricacies than most.
You’re going about this the wrong way. You’re eating blueberries, flour and sugar and hoping to crap blueberry pie. You can only stray from the idiom if you know the rules you’re supposed to stray from beforehand.
Nothing wrong with ‘switching pages’ – it’s both grammatical and describes what it is describing accurately. Those are the only requirements.
It describes exchanging two loose pages. It doesn’t describe turning pages in a book.