[atxgpsig] Re: Can't Make It

["Chris Nystrom" <cnystrom@gmail.com>]

On 5/13/07, Bob Pendleton <bob@pendleton.com> wrote:
> I'm sorry to hear that, get well!

Thank you. Feeling a little better, but still recovering.

> The meeting was small, but interesting. We had a discussion on the
> differences between writing for games and movies with a meandering side
> discussion about Austin and the current job market.
>
> The writing discussion was enlightening and highlighted the problems
> that people working in traditional media have in transferring their
> skills to new media. It also highlighted the lack of accepted tools for
> game writing.

I read not too long ago an interesting article by one of the Infocom
(Zork, et al) writers who lamented how the art of writing in games had
regressed. He was complaining how the old in the old Infocom games you
could interact with using the full resources of the language, but with
modern games such as Everquest they had to highlight the significant
parts of the quest instead of letting you discover and figure it out
yourself.

The second interesting thing I have noticed is that game designers
want to write content for individuals and get peeved with third party
web sites that list and have walk throughs for all of the quests in a
game. I wonder if instead of designers thinking of players as
individuals, if they instead should think of it almost as a designers
vs. players deal and have some very difficult long term quests, so
even if all of the players in an MMO share information it would still
be difficult to solve the quest?

> Personally I would like to have a much longer and more in depth
> discussion of game writing.

Cool. That would be great.

Chris

--
E-Mail: Chris Nystrom <cnystrom@gmail.com>
Saving the world from web programming.
http://www.newio.org - AIM: nystromchris

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