Message-ID: <3ACF08A6.21EC8677@csi.com>
Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2001 08:31:35 -0400
From: John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com>
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Subject: Re: Nudity in IF
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Magnus Olsson wrote:

> In article <3ACDC7FE.9249F8E4@csi.com>,
> John Colagioia  <JColagioia@csi.com> wrote:
> >Magnus Olsson wrote:
> >> Of course; but if I reach that stage and get a negative reaction,
> >> major rewriting may be necessary. (It's not just a case of a river
> >> having to be crossed.)
> >Well, depending on the point, perhaps you want a small amount of offensiveness.
> >It would be far better to make the player feel mildly uncomfortable than, for
> >example, to simply print out, "you feel rather uncomfortable standing here
> >without pants."
> Yes, I do intend to use the enforced nudity to make the player
> uncomfortable (because it's in character for PC to be uncomfortable in
> the situation).

So far, so good, then.


> But I want the player to be uncomfortable for the right reason -
> because the situation is unpleasant, not because she feels the author
> is a jerk :-).

Well, that's going to be in the writing.  Not the situation.

OK, technically SOME people will just be bothered by the situation, and will call
you a jerk outright.  Same would probably happen if you portrayed combat, theft, or
any number of other activities, so I'd rule those people out right off the bat.

But, yeah.  I'd write it and hand it off to a few people who you can trust to know
what you're looking for and ask them to...well, "edit" is a strong word, but at
least comment on where the language might be "shifted" to convey what you want.


> >In fact, to use the same example as Ms. Short, I actually thought that was part
> >of the point of Heroine's Mantle at the beginning, coercing the player into
> >empathizing with the heroine's plight.  That didn't last long, of
> >course.  But it
> >could have, if carried through consistently.
> The scene with Mistletoe in the restroom could have been very
> effective in that regard if it had been done a bit more
> sensitively. As it was, it was more icky than cathartic.

I didn't even find that problematic.  Well, no moreso than reading a fight scene by
somebody who's never fought or studied combat, anyway--I considered it more
"uninformed" than "icky."  Or maybe the ickiness of the situation made me feel for
the character, and I "displaced" my feelings onto Mistletoe, rather than the
author.  Who knows?

The descriptions of underwear, however, I thought were definitely far too much, and
there was no character around to blame.


