When are descriptions or events, too little or too much?

Authoring General Design Discussions
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Some of you may know I like to write. For others, you will. <(￣︶￣)> For a game that is all text anyway, how much is too much or too little? You do not want to bog the player down and yet, not make it too sparse either.

Examples- Brief. Long. And brief, but upon further examination, a longer description.

Look (at) key
…
You see a key

OR

Look (at) key
…
You see a fairly old, almost ancient, hand shaped key made of wrought iron. If you did not know any better, you’d think that was made of actual human bone, with dried blood and not rust covering bits of it. You wonder if it would fit into a seemingly dastardly looking locking mechanism.

OR

Look (at) key
…
You see a key.

Examine key
…
You see a fairly old, almost ancient, hand shaped key made of wrought iron. If you did not know any better, you’d think that was made of actual human bone, with dried blood and not rust covering bits of it. You wonder if it would fit into a seemingly dastardly looking locking mechanism.

The same could be for a random and unimportant object.

Look (at) grass
…
You see grass

OR

Look (at) grass
…
You see grass, as green as an emerald. It reflects wonderfully in the light, as if made from the same crystal. The blades look like they reach your ankles and they look so sharp they could actually cut you if you are not careful.

OR

Look (at) grass
…
You see grass.

Examine grass
…
You see grass, as green as an emerald. It reflects wonderfully in the light, as if made from the same crystal. The blades look like they reach your ankles and they look so sharp they could actually cut you if you are not careful.

I ask this, because if there are objects in the room named or even not named (a wall is an expected part of the room inside a building), no matter how inconspicuous, I like to try and look more to see anything else. But if there are hardly or very brief descriptions for very few things, it seems it is missing elements to it. And yet too much and again, you trip the player up on unneeded dialogue.

What are your thoughts on the matter? Is an Examination action or verb a go between solution? Thank you.

Edit: I do not know why only some words are standing out more than others. I know I typed something for the website to treat it special, but that was not my intent.

Also I know game play is subjective, but there should be a middle ground or average sweet spot. You want a person to use their own imagination, but also show them your world.

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If I examine grass and get a description like this, I’m going to try to take it to a pawn shop and sell it.

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It’s a double-edged sword. Good and interesting descriptions are always welcome in a text game. If your prose is great, an occasional wall-of-text isn’t unwelcome, though you want to break it up.

What you want to avoid is what I call “describing the wallpaper”. Authors initially tend to think they need to include every possible goshdarn thing that might realistically be in a location. Thorough implementation is good, but sometimes a description describing everything in forensic detail can actually be distracting to the player as it falsely gives unimportant objects and details more attention than they should have.

You see grass, as green as an emerald. It reflects wonderfully in the light, as if made from the same crystal. The blades look like they reach your ankles and they look so sharp they could actually cut you if you are not careful.

While this isn’t a bad description, is the grass something the player needs to interact with? Adventure game players are often laser focused looking for hidden things. Is this paragraph hinting there is something hidden the grass? SEARCH GRASS. CUT GRASS. TAKE EMERALD. EXAMINE LIGHT. FIND CRYSTAL. SEARCH BLADES. TAKE BLADES. USE BLADES TO CUT GRASS. TAKE GRASS.

The catch-22 is overzealous description can suggest more detail than is actually implemented. It’s a paradox that the more stuff you describe in detail creates more stuff you have to describe in detail.

One solution is to write your description to imply that it’s basically window dressing instead of an important detail.

EXAMINE GRASS
Ankle-high grass, emerald green, reflects wonderfully in the light. The vegetation blades are sharp and you’re glad you needn’t bother with it as you aren’t the gardener and maintaining the lawn would take all day and a good set of gardening gloves - neither of which are available to you.

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I have three related ideas about text length.

  • Yes, these are text adventures, and I personally write for people who enjoy reading while playing. That isn’t everyone!
  • Players (and I am a player) tend to resent having to reread lengthy text for important information. IE, I do not want to go into a room for the third or tenth time and wade around looking for exit information. Two strategies that come out of that involve organization and content, both recognizing that text has utility in games (not only parser but choice games that require frequently revisited passages).
  • Similarly, players need different information at different points in the story, or in different contexts

Coming out of that:

  • Examining is not a “go between”, it is an important function that allows writers to explore/characterize things in the world without cluttering up the room description.
  • I usually print descriptions that are different if the player is looking or examining for the first time. They may vary based on other conditions. This is more work, but it keeps things succinct while offering a bit of variety or interest. In such a case, I would write the first look description of the grass as long and detailed, while subsequent descriptions would be less elaborate. Ideally, the descriptions provide some piece of helpful information as well, though that isn’t always feasible.
  • Organizationally: I tend to keep exits grouped near the bottom of a room description. Ditto important things.
  • Like @HanonO says, I don’t want to put players in a situation where they are trying to do a lot of things to a thing that has no mechanical purpose, because players get impatient after a while. Having a description that says “you can’t use this” in some way is good. I also like one size fits all responses to most/all actions applied to such things. Instead of returning a stock failure message, I’ll do something custom that implies the item isn’t useful. That keeps players from trying out several different verbs against the grass, for instance. Usually, I try to include some kind of helpful statement, because productive failure isn’t failure.

My experience is that if you’re mindful and have a player-centered mindset, people are usually very open to descriptive passages

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IF prose falls in an awkward spot between fiction and technical writing, in that you’re both concerned with things like atmosphere and character, but also with communicating practical information in an efficient way. It’s not a coincidence that in a lot of successful parser games the prose is either lightly comedic or vaguely poetic, and that’s because those are styles that tend to be concise but with a distinct voice.

Of course there are also plenty of great games that are more wordy, and a lot of it is down to preference, but both when reading and writing IF I tend to favor concise prose. For example, this:

You see a fairly old, almost ancient, hand shaped key made of wrought iron. If you did not know any better, you’d think that was made of actual human bone, with dried blood and not rust covering bits of it. You wonder if it would fit into a seemingly dastardly looking locking mechanism.

could just as easily be phrased like this:

An old wrought iron key in the shape of a hand. It almost looks like old bone, its rust like dried blood. What lock could it fit in?

It communicates the same imagery, but it takes less effort for me to scan for important information.

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Point taken ^^!

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I laughed out loud at this. (✿^‿^)

You make a good point

8

Did not want to quote it all, but it all sounds like words to design by, thank you.

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My thoughts: It depends on how important the item is to the story. You generally don’t want more than a few lines of text, and if it’s more than that, split it into multiple descriptions [1]. Unimportant things (scenery) get a sentence or two at most—just enough to establish some setting but still indicate that it’s not worth the player’s attention. More important things can get more description, but not too much (see footnote above). Or they may have some text indicating that it might be useful for something (e.g. It looks tasty.).

  1. e.g. a painting might have the description A painting depicted a dead eagle with a weasel skull clamped to its neck. with separate, more elaborate descriptions for the eagle and skull. ↩︎

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It depends.

It depends on what you want to do, what makes you happy, what audience you are writing for, and whether or not your writing is any good.

I write walls of beginning/transition text and fairly short descriptions of everything in between. It works for me. It doesn’t work for everybody. I’ve had complaints about text walls. I shrug at that because this is the structure that makes me happy.

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You’re my spirit animal ✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧

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On level of detail, I guess that I managed to implement the most detailed item in IF history (46 separately described components…) but I agree that the level of detail must be reined. A good method is implement the component as synonym of the item, and having the component included in the description of the item.

Brief and Verbose is implemented for room locations for historical reasons (in the day of teletype terminals, having a clanking ASR-33 printing the full description of Colossal Cave or Mainframe Zork’s locations room was a twin pollution, sound and wasted paper…) but frankly, I can’t see the need of implementing brief and verbose also for items…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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I think there’s only one of these per type of game. I’m all about what Amanda said… it depends.

A few of my tips:

  • Know your game’s goals, or keep trying to know them until you do. Think of the game’s ideal reader.
  • Make sure your goals are reflected back at you when you test your game. It is always in the testing, in situ, in context of play, where I go, ‘Whoa, didn’t need half these words. Didn’t need that word,’ etc. And that’s all based on realising how the game’s landing when played, and if it’s landing right for its goals.
  • A super common thing I do all the time is this: In the first draft of a room, I’m mentioning everything I’ll need, and probably too much about everything I need. An way to instantly turn X into more of a carrot is, once your ideas about the room are more solid, subtract info from the main description about room contents and move it into the top level X response for the individual bits.

-Wade

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Since I don’t think anyone’s mentioned this yet: do not expect a positive reception if your game gives different responses to LOOK AT compared to EXAMINE, particularly if one has important information needed to proceed and the other doesn’t. Convention is that these two verbs are synonyms. Players tend to give short shrift these days even for distinguishing between EXAMINE and SEARCH, two verbs which are definitely distinct and which often did give different responses in an earlier era of the medium.

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Admittedly an IF newbie and also no real game design experience (though I have played my fair share of games).

Know your game’s goals, or keep trying to know them until you do. Think of the game’s ideal reader.

Knowing your audience is key. The makers of Dark Souls are not making games for people like Tommy Wisaue (yes i know it’s spelled wrong). In the same way, the people who like Icewind Dale (action packed crpg) may not necessarily like Planescape Torment (it’s basically a book in crpg format). Are both games good in their own right? I would say so, but they appeal to different appreciations.

And to bring this back to the original question, I think I would ask OP, what are your goals? Are you trying to reach the most wide audience? Do you want to make a dense detail packed story? Does the worldbuilding take second stage to the actual plot? What do you have fun doing the most?

One thought that comes to mind is having optional in depth text scattered around your game (think audio logs in Bioshock). So streamline everything that is necessary for the plot and moving forward, but leave hints of description and flavor in (make it obvious to the player that it’s optional) various places that maybe can be unlocked or explored.

ex.
Examine Key - you see an old rusty key
Examine diary - It is done. I’ve finally escaped. I only can hope that the lock holds till someone finds a way to destroy those creatures once and for all. (I don’t know, write something better than this.)

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