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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: TrailerComp rules poll
Message-ID: <GEp2tL.34D@world.std.com>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 03:24:56 GMT
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>pongu001@sneakemail.com  (Jonathan Rosebaugh) wrote:
>>My main question is this: "What policy should the comp have on using
>>other authors' games?" (since that's a basic part of the comp)
>>I currently have 4 ideas here:
>>1) No restrictions.
>>2) Require authors to notify me if they don't want their game(s) used.
>>3) Require entrants to ask authors for permission.
>>4) Ask authors to notify me if their games can be used, entrants must
>>check with me.

I kind of have my doubts about the whole premise of this comp, but
I decided to not to bring them up earlier. Seeing, however, that there
seems to be some contention about the right thing to do with this
authoring problem, perhaps I should raise my concerns.

Namely, I just don't get it. I don't really understand what the
value of a text trailer for a text game is supposed to be.
(I'm not addressing the other half of the comp, because I suspect
that there won't be very many entries there.)

You could write it in screenplay format, but trailers don't
actually normally have screenplays, and screenplays don't capture
all the little details we're used to seeing visually.

You could just write it as prose, but the original is written
as prose.

Screenplays are written in present tense, just like IF. If you
carried that over to the trailer, it seems like about the only
thing that would change would be a shift from second-person to
third-person narrative.

Well, ok, and perhaps a breathless, overexcited style, and perhaps
revisiting familiar scenes in a lot, lot more detail--but is any
of that really that interesting? Do we really need to see someone
else's detailed description of the Inquisitor's eyebrow quirking
as he produces a famous line of Zarf's? Isn't the vision I already
have of the duct tape in "Death to My Enemies" plenty?

I mean, like I said, maybe this is just me and my natural
curmudgeonlyness, and most people love the idea and it's
therefore worth doing. Or maybe it's just a failure of my
imagination to think what these trailers could be. But would
it really add anything of value to the community?

Partly, I worry that we're becoming minicomp-crazy; shouldn't
people just try writing some of these things FIRST, sans
competition, to see if it's even worth doing?

SeanB
PS: the odd thing here is that I come from a Usenet culture of
sharing where people constantly adapt others' works into their
own, based on mutual respect and credit where credit is due.
But clearly people have different expectations when their work
is a post to Usenet, rather than something they spent 200 hours
developing.
