Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: rwallace@cs.tcd.ie (Russell Wallace)
Subject: Re: Internal Conflict (was News on Avalon, help ne
Message-ID: <1994Apr6.182119.18176@cs.tcd.ie>
Organization: Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin
References: <020629DNVABNLOWRNBQX@castlebbs.com> <1994Apr5.175750.24195@cs.tcd.ie> <2nsa5p$1vk@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 1994 18:21:19 GMT
Lines: 58

whizzard@uclink.berkeley.edu (Gerry Kevin Wilson) writes:

>In article <1994Apr5.175750.24195@cs.tcd.ie>,
>Russell Wallace <rwallace@cs.tcd.ie> wrote:
>>
>>Surely the best way is to define the player character's attributes, but
>>let the player choose them at the start of the game (using one of the
>>time-honored techniques such as a pool of character points)?  Then by
>>giving the player the choice you get the best of both worlds.

>Maybe.  Maybe not.  Again, there's no single solution to this.  Your 
>approach is more of an RPG technique, which text adventure authors might 
>want to avoid, considering the low quality of combat we have.

Whether you have combat or not is completely orthogonal to the issue of
whether you let the player create his own character or not, to be sure
RPGs generally have both and IF generally has neither, but there is
nothing necessary about this.

>It just
>depends on author taste.

Certainly, for example the technique of not distinguishing between
player and character at all is still perfectly valid.  As you say, a
matter of taste.

>In Avalon, you play the part of Frank Leandro, a
>soldier in Vietnam during the war in '68.  Cut and dried.  No choice.  
>Still, this allows me to develop a unique history for Frank and still 
>have the player feel that Frank has lived it.

For me, this would be something of a disadvantage.  What if I don't
happen to like Frank Leandro and would rather play the game as a
different character?  One thing I often do when reading SF/fantasy is to
ask myself "what would X do in this situation?", where X is a character
I've played in a (human moderated) RPG.  (I occasionally ask myself
"what would I do in this situation?", but this usually isn't appropriate
for SF and fantasy, there's not much point in asking what a computer
programmer would do in a situation that calls for a Space Marine or a
wizard :))  A potential advantage of interactive (as opposed to
non-interactive) fiction is that you could play the character you want,
not just a one-size-fits-all that the author has thought up.


>I dunno, but I dislike 
>games where the author sits back and tells me what >I've< done in the 
>past.  I haven't, and there's no emotional tie connected to that for me.  

I agree with this.  So if I can maybe play a character I've played
before in a (human moderated) RPG, that character's history is a lot
more meaningful to me than one I just read about on an intro screen
because I have at least vicariously lived through it.

>-- 
-- 
"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem"
Russell Wallace, Trinity College, Dublin
rwallace@cs.tcd.ie
