What are some examples of GOAT detail writing?

serge-solkatt · November 20, 2023, 1:40pm

From Aaron Reed’s book about Inform 7:
“Details Are Adrenaline, Generalities Are Novocain
I stole this one from theater professor Greg Fritsch, but it works equally well for any form of storytelling, especially interactive ones.Your job is to make your story world so alive the players can picture being there, and believe the story will react when they type a command.
Think of specific objects that provide color and texture to a scene, and the particular qual-ities that make them unique. Use senses other than vision to paint a multisensory scene:
what does this place sound like? Feel like? Smell like? Avoid chiché by finding unique ways to describe the scene in your mind’s eye, delving deeper than the surface: if it’s a dark and stormy night, how dark and what kind of stormy? What does the storm do to the grass, and how does the dark taste?”.
What are some detailed depictions that you consider the greatest of all time, in regular & interactive fiction?

rovarsson · November 20, 2023, 1:48pm

Shore of An Underground Lake

A narrow ledge of solid rock at the southern end of a great cavern. Beyond it lies a body of water so flat, so black and tranquil, that it might be a surface of polished obsidian.

A loose rock lies near your foot.

Embedded in the wall, a mirror reflects your movements: an odd smoothness in the unshaped stone.

A heavy bronze bell hangs from a stand.

pieartsy · November 20, 2023, 1:49pm

Idk if this counts as the greatest of all time, but the most recent IF descriptions that struck me were from After the Accident by @AmandaB

These are the opening words of the game:

The sunset warms your face, impossible pink fading to lavender, gold fire touching the place where the road meets the sky, running in rivulets onto the pavement. The road awash in orange light. Something terrible behind you, you think. An ending before you, the day dropping away, the first stars above. The mountains rising to your left, covered in snow, reflecting the last light, an avalanche waiting to happen. The stark plains to your right, gilded with the low rays of sun.

Your hands tingle, a soft pain that sharpens when you acknowledge it. Your bare feet are cold. You breathe deep and it aches. It’s so beautiful, it aches, your face wet.

Something strange, though, that you are here

(why are you here your feet bare your face wet your hands tingling)

with all these colors of light layering softly into the road, the bare dirt, the scrub grass, the trash on the side of the road. You were somewhere else a moment ago, with him, and he’s not here, but you are, glittering in the last sunlight as a memory whispers in your ear and strokes your cheek.

SomeOne2 · November 20, 2023, 11:59pm

The whole of Eat Me by Chandler Groover. It’s so terrifying, the stuff you’ve been made to do, but such perfect writing. All of the courses is what you’re looking for.

severedhand · November 21, 2023, 12:10am

To me, the goat is what Charlie Brown wants to avoid being when he plays baseball, in Peanuts.

-Wade

Warrigal · November 21, 2023, 3:47am

What is “GOAT detail writing”?

inventor200 · November 21, 2023, 4:00am

Greatest
Of
All
Time

EDIT: As opposed to “BOAT”…
Buoyant
Of
All
Time

(Sorry that was an attempt at humor… and I am succeeding!)

Warrigal · November 21, 2023, 4:02am

Are you serious, or just pulling my leg?

inventor200 · November 21, 2023, 4:03am

The “GOAT” acronym is 100% serious. A linguistic gift from ~~my age bracket.~~ (Slang is weird…)

EDIT: Slang continues to elude me! I incorrectly attributed its origin!

DeusIrae · November 21, 2023, 4:03am

My friend that’s a gift from Muhammad Ali

inventor200 · November 21, 2023, 4:04am

Is it??? Hell, then it’s had a resurgence! My mistake! Thanks, Mr. Ali!

Warrigal · November 21, 2023, 4:05am

Thanks. I Googled it and you’re right. I’d never heard of it before. You learn something every day, huh?

inventor200 · November 21, 2023, 4:07am

Learning new slang from Australia and the UK is a tonne of adventure, too!

Draconis · November 21, 2023, 4:23am

A post was split to a new topic: So as not to derail with puns

pieartsy · November 22, 2023, 5:28am

gosh I can’t believe I forgot about Eat Me. perfect, delicious example.

pinkunz · November 22, 2023, 5:45am

This is a truly delightful bit of writing from Christopher Merriner that transports me directly to the Suffolk countryside:

Okay, so we're doing this -- StingComp!

We were at a music festival, in the Suffolk countryside: me, my wife, and my son who would have four at the time. It was one of those family-friendly affairs, full of new parents trying to taste again the wine of their youth while their toddlers played around in the dirt, older kids dressing up and doing arts and crafts and clambering around tree-top obstacle courses, and young teenagers let off the leash and moving about in furtive little clusters with the sole aim of avoiding, at all costs, running into their parents.

It was hot, really, baking hot, and the flat part of the site where the main stages were located was a trash-strewn dustbowl with nowhere to hide from the sun. So we retreated up the slopes into the woodland area, where there was a stage hidden amongst the pine trees, alongside a bar and toilet block – all the facilities, in fact. It was day three of a four-day festival, and we were camping, so what with the break from everyday routine, the broken sleep, the enormous quantity of beer (taken medicinally, to alleviate the camping-related insomnia) and the four AM wake up call (it being impossible to remain in the tent after that time, at risk of being baked alive) the sense of dislocation and unreality had really begun to set in. I’d forgotten what day of the week and date in the month it was, and I wasn’t hugely confident about the year. But that didn’t seem to matter on this particular, insufferably sunny, Suffolk summer morning, under the trees with a pint in my hand, my child (wearing nothing but his nappy) playing delightedly amongst the pine needles, and my wife, barefoot and with flowers in her hair, sitting on a log and watching the band (I remember distinctly, they were called The Pains of Being Pure at Heart). Anyway, after a little while of basking in this idyllic, Woodstock-esque scene, I realised, being on my second or third pint of the morning, that I needed the loo. So off I went to use the gents (one of the definite advantages of maintaining a steady state of inebriation at a festival being to cushion the intellect against the horrors of the communal toilet facilities. In fact, these were no ordinary toilets but exotic, eco-friendly compost toilets, which lent them a certain mystique and glamour, and made me almost excited to use them; clearly I was quite drunk). Just as I was about to enter the makeshift plywood cubicle, my paper cup of woodchips in my hand, I looked back at the clearing where my family were residing happily. Sunlight was slanting majestically through the tall pines, lighting up the woodland floor and making the scattered pine cones glow like precious stones washed up on a beach of dried needles; I’m pretty sure cute cartoon deer were gambolling about while sweetly singing bluebirds fluttered by.

I went to the loo.

As soon as I stepped from the cubicle, I could sense that something had changed. A cloud had passed over the sun; the light was grey and sombre. The band, whose music had been so bright and uplifting before, now sounded merely petulant and grating (perhaps they’d always sounded like that? I’m not sure). A couple were arguing, and the bartended scowled at me peevishly as I passed by. But worse, when I got back to my family, it seemed that catastrophe had occurred in my brief absence. My boy was in tears and my wife semi-hysterical.

“A wasp!” she cried, gesturing wildly, “a wasp!”

“A wasp?” I replied, looking around and, seeing no wasp, simply repeating, “a wasp?”.

A wasp, it seemed, had appeared as soon as I had walked away, expertly reconnoitring my innocent family and then, having identified the most defenceless target, swooping in to attack my baby not just once but, as my wife graphically described it, several times. Somehow, the wasp had clung on beneath an onslaught of hysterically fierce blows and had continued to push its sting repeatedly into the tender flesh of my son’s leg until, a mother’s instinct overriding all other concerns, she managed to pluck off the fiend and crush the tiny black-and-yellow-stripy homicidal automaton between her bare fingers! The tone in which she told me this implied unambiguously that it was largely my fault, and that the bastard had been loitering there, behind the tree, watching and waiting, just waiting for me to go to the toilet so it could carry out its diabolical mission. And who was I to argue? I should have issued them both with Kevlar jumpsuits and smoking apparatus, before answering the call of nature. Things had been made worse, it seems, by the attentions of a concerned couple who, witnessing the incident, had rushed over and immediately issued the wounded with fresh, costly, and entirely fit-for-purpose professional-strength bite and sting cream, which put our dubious little crinkled tube of ineffectual and quite possibly out-of-date sting ointment to shame and showed us up as woefully unprepared parents and unfit do deal with such an acute health emergency (we’re a bit ramshackle when it comes to packing useful things for holidays: the last time we went away, for two weeks, I actually forgot to put in any underwear! And spent day one of the holiday trawling every shop in a small seaside town for a pair of underpants, amongst all the sticks of rock, seashell-adorned jewellery boxes and novelty postcards on offer. There’s a great IF story in there somewhere – perhaps I should submit it to SeedComp?).

When the dust had settled, it became apparent that my wife was far more traumatised by the incident that my son was – he forgot about it pretty much straight away; the high-end sting cream really did seem to take the pain and swelling away very rapidly and he was right as rain within a few minutes, but my wife was shaken up and talked about little else for the rest of the festival (and indeed, still talks about it to this day). Needless to say, we never felt quite the same about those woods after that. The extreme summer heatwave (then extraordinary, now becoming the norm) meant that we still had to spend a lot of the day in the shelter of the trees, but after that the music seemed a little more jarring, the beer lost a little of its savour, and we treaded warily amongst the pines, watching the shadows and alive to every click, whirr and buzz of wings, always expecting our stealthy assailant to reappear (uncrushed perhaps; certainly reanimated) and take its revenge.

It didn’t, for the rest of the festival, and my son has been stung a couple of times since – he seems a bit unlucky when it comes to wasp stings – but no other incident sticks in the mind, or is as frequently recounted, as this one.