electronic sponges

When I was a kid, my friends and I were all fascinated with those role-playing games. They really were a lot more fun than the video games that soom replaced them. Other kids always wanted me to be the one to invent the scenerios for the games, because I had a talent for it: imagination, and the ability to use it flexibly and quickly. That same skill set sent me, growing-up, into the realms of theater, writing, and now this new online writing thing. The first and alst of these have frustrated me somewhat with the difference between the possibilities I can imagine and the realities of the artforms.

I remember the process of thinking up those scenerrios. I would come up with the frame of an idea: a problem, a setting, some characters to involve, some other elements that would be interesting but not so involved, and a couple of obstacles. That was about it really. The rest would always work itself out, by way of collaborative imagination.

I’ve been reading about a process that claims to be similar, the process of scripting an interacive fiction — I should specify, electronically. Take a look at some notes from one author’s experience with the process:

I became very fast at creating rooms and objects, of going from the notion "Hm, I need a sponge here." to typing its basic code:

Object -> sponge "sponge"
with name ’sponge’ ’squishy’ ‘little’,
description [;
print "It's a squishy little sponge, currently ";
if ( self hasnt general ) "dry. ";
"sopping with water. ";
],
before [;
! something for soaking up water
! give self general;
Squeeze: give self ~general;
"You squeeze the sponge, and the water gooshes out. ";
],
;

I think the word, or the idea "sponge" is a vasatly superior "code" for the object. The experience of my childhood games was easy to "program." I would merely need to think of a sponge, just as now, in writing, I need merely write one. You would NEED to get very fast at "creating rooms and objects" with all that code, otherwise the craft would completely drown the art. what frustrates me is that I do crave the ability to write the experrience we had as children with our acted-out make-believe kind of literature — I do not crave the kind of tedium that provides the ability, after so much work, to render a sponge that is dry, or wet, and squishy, but that has no color, and no real shape.

The sponge in a role playing game is more interactive. a player can ask the storyteller: "what color is the sponge?" or, "is it a natural sponge, or one of those man-made sponges?" In a program, you either have to write a stack of code that allows for any possible turn of the imagination, or you have to limit your audience somehow. I really loved the limitlessness, and the ease of those childhood games.

In short, I prefer a text like "Afternoon" to one like "Zork" even though I like them both, and I prefer a role-playing game to a video-game, even though I like them both. Having completed my thesis on hypertext, I think its time to assemble what I can learn from the field and run with it — and it isn’t too likely that I’m going to be running in the code-writing direction, as much as I can avoid it, that is.

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Dylan

Pleased to meet you! I'm Dylan Kinnett, your friendly neighborhood writer.