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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Mimesis or Story Consistency [ was Re: room descriptions; how much is too far?
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L. Ross Raszewski <lraszewski@loyola.edu> wrote:
>This sounds an awful lot like the "who is the player" question which
>keeps popping up; from your response, it sounds like your immersion in
>the game draws heavily from the illusion that, as infocom put it *you*
>are the main character.

Nope. The goal is to get you to believe that your consciousness
is in the virtual world, not to get you to believe that your
whole person/personality is.

>If the intention is, on the other hand, for
>you to be taking on a role, then I think disallowing certain choices
>doesn't just make sense, it boosts the immersive quality of the game.

I don't think it generally boosts the immersive quality of the
game. It generally "reminds me of what the character I'm supposed
to be playing is like", but that doesn't necessarily make me
*identify* with the role. If you want to role-play in a detached,
uninvolved way, that's great, but it's not immersion.

If the character doesn't like guns, you should still be able to pick
up guns; after all, your character would, if sufficiently motivated.
(If a player is playing as a pack-rat, they're not playing in character
in the first place, so you've already lost them, so how a pack-rat
would play is not particularly important to the situation.)

If the character once lost her fiancee because she was
obligated to handle a gun and somehow it went off and she shot
him and he died, then ok, you can refuse to let me pick up
the gun. But if it's not that extreme, and you don't want me
to pick up a gun, DON'T PUT A FRIGGING GUN IN THE GAME. There
aren't just two choices (you can pick it up or you can't).
Refusing to allow the player to interact is the absolutely
worst way to show character *in an interactive medium*.
(See Rameses for an exception.)

In some cases, of course, there's no third alternative of leaving
it out; "kiss NPC" is pretty much blocked in every game except in
the crucial cases. I'm not arguing that you should never prevent
actions; I'm arguing that the habit of preventing actions is a poor
one, and it's best kept as a last resort.

SeanB
(who prevents zillions of actions in his games)
