I always type VERBOSE to switch on full-length room descriptions when I start playing a piece of IF. I find it much easier to skip passages of text I’m not interested in reading again, than to remember or scroll to potentially important text that has disappeared off-screen.
Furthermore, I feel having verbose descriptions turned on initially is a better default for games. My reasoning being that beginners would benefit from having the descriptions on, but wouldn’t even realise this was possible, whereas most people that didn’t want them would likely know how to turn them off.
TADS 3 (I think) has full-length descriptions on by default. Inform 7 has them off, and the documentation states that the reasoning for this is “convention”. This doesn’t seem like a great reason to me.
I’m obviously biased by the fact that I like having them on, though. Is there anyone that would be actively put off by starting a game where full-length descriptions have been turned on? Do any of you turn them off when writing TADS? Is it a bad idea for me to turn them on in every (hypothetical, at this point) game I write?
In the game I just co-wrote we had verbose always on. It saves the player looking every time they change location, and it makes sense in the game world because the character will obviously be moving around with their eyes open. For similar reasons we had unexamined items autoexamined whenever they’re taken. Furthermore, unless you’re listing all the exits in the status bar, the room description is giving the player vital info on how to continue navigating through the game.
I can, however, see the drawbacks if you have a mountain of unvarying text in each room description.
