SmartMonsters

TriadCity Message of the Day
2008-06-25

Poobah and the other world Builders are slowly adding "Nouns" to existing Room descriptions.

What we call "Nouns" (capital "N") are detailed or secondary descriptions keyed by nouns (small "n") in a Room description. For instance, if a Room description says, "Green mold grows on all four walls," then the Nouns might be mold and walls.

Until now, if you were to ask to look mold, you'd be likely to receive the response, If only there were a "mold" here to look at. The Builders are now adding that extra layer of detail, so that if you look mold, you might be told, say, Yuck! Green and unpleasant-looking stuff. Blecch! Or maybe even something actually interesting.

This is a very large job, with literally tens of thousands of secondary descriptions needing to be added to thousands of game Rooms. It'll require several months.

We'd like to ask you to please monitor the Pancreatics BBS for updates as the Builders work Zone by Zone. When they're done with a Zone, they'll ask you to look it over for them. Please respond with feedback re any missed nouns which you feel deserve to have secondary descriptions.

This work will add lots of realistic detail to the game experience. Many thanks in advance to the Builders for taking it on.

Back to the current MOTD index.

 
 
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"In 1455, Gutenberg invented the printing press -- but not the book as we know it. Books printed before 1501 are called incunabula; the word is derived from the Latin for swaddling clothes and is used to indicate that these books are the work of a technology still in its infancy. It took fifty years of experimentation and more to establish such conventions as legible typefaces and proof sheet corrections; page numbering and paragraphing; and title pages, prefaces, and chapter divisions, which together made the published book a coherent means of communication. The garish videogames and tangled Web sites of the current digital environment are part of a similar period of technical evolution, part of a similar struggle for the conventions of coherent communication.

Now, in the incunabular days of the narrative computer, we can see how twentieth-century novels, films and plays have been steadily pushing against the boundaries of linear storytelling."
-- Janet H. Murray,
Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (info)

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