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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Whats wrong with menu driven interfaces?
Message-ID: <GF70D9.F6A@world.std.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 19:48:45 GMT
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Joe Mason <jcmason@student.math.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>_Planescape: Torment_ did this well.  (Items in square brackets appear in the
>game text in bold.)
[snip]
>It put most of the tutorial section in the mouth of a character, but separated
>out the actual game mechanics stuff into the same font it uses to announce,
>"Max HP increased!" or "You gained an item!".

Your example is *probably* more useful than the one I am about
to give, because your example is from a more text-orietned game than
mine, but I will mention it anyway as more data.

In the first-person graphics PC game Terra Nova, I wrote the
tutorial and was careful to do exactly the above: the "instructor"
who tells you how to operate your powered battle armor describes
some abstract controls, while overlaid HUD text prompts tell you
exactly which key to press on your physical keyboard. At the time
I felt this would be important to maintain immersiveness.

Having since played any number of PC games (e.g.--I think--Half
Life, Battlezone) in which the tutorial section features an
instructor who says things like "Try pressing T to turn on your
fromitz brobnigator", I have to say that in that context it
really doesn't seem to matter.  This may only be true for graphics
games, or maybe it's only true for games which have a "separate"
tutorial section, I'm not sure.  But I'm pretty much a stickler
for immersiveness usually, and it just didn't turn out to bother
me in practice.

Other things to think about with this issue:

I think it was Masquerade that reworked all the parser error
messages into the fiction; and on the other side of the coin
My Angel, which made explicit the "bracketed parser comment"
by moving it into the prompt area in novel mode.

SeanB
