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From: Russell L. Bryan <rbryan@Mail.trincoll.edu>
Subject: Searching for a sense of wonder
Message-ID: <1992Nov13.140109.7455@starbase.trincoll.edu>
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Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 14:01:09 GMT
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I've had this feeling come upon me many times while playing games --
looking at a puzzle, struggling with it, discovering the solution and
then saying to myself, "that was pretty logical."  What I want to do is
jump up in the air, do a couple of flips and immediately call up the
author to congratulate him on a puzzle to be added to the truly great
puzzles in IF history.  There are rarely opportunities to do that, and
honestly, no game ever made me feel that way until I played Trinity.

Now that I'm designing my own text adventure, I want others toave the
same sense of amazement at the puzzles, but I want to add something which
other IF is missing.  There is a tendency to take monsters attacking you
and such with stride, but when it comes to suspense, most interactive
fiction lumps it all at the climcactic finish.  Why not make someone
sweat in the beginning of the game?  How about the middle?  A good story
CAN be disguised by a facade of pulp.  If I can make just one person
swear in frustration, or have someone say to a friend, "Hey, come check
this out," or receive mail from one player asking me for a hint because
"he'll die if he doesn't find out how this thing ends," then I will have
succeeded in my attempt to create the "sense of wonder" which made
interactive fiction stick around all this time in the first place.

-- Russ
