Re: Cameras and Player Info

[Dan Lyke]

Morbus IFF wrote:
> Agreeable, but we get into the discussion of person - third or
> first? Would an interactive fiction story focus more around the
> person or the environment? The movable camera lends itself to the
> environment, whereas your cardinal directions relate to first
> person.

I've tried to read a couple of stories that tried to place me as the
protagonist, and they've all failed. If the stories are weak on
characterization, I think they work, which is why first person
shoot-em-ups work so well, that really is my character, but if the
story is stronger on characterization we have to see the protagonist.

I have long rambling arguments with myself about stories that relate
to people versus environments. I'd love to be able to build
environmental stories into which people can insert their own
characters but, for the most part, when people come to entertainment
they're looking to experience other character.

A few years ago my best friend and I sat down to write a romance
novel. She'd read a bunch, I'd read a few and some genre fiction, and
so we took some assumptions and started writing.

One of the assumptions we made initially was that in genre fiction it
was the situations that were interesting and people wanted to be able
to imagine themselves in those situations. We were _very_
wrong. People want to imagine themselves those characters. I'm not the
crafty theif able to smoothly sneak in to the museum and heist the
jewel from under the noses of alert guards, heck, I can barely walk to
the bathroom in the middle of the night without tripping over a chair
and waking up the neighbors.

I'm not saying you can have characters without a story, but having an
environment alone isn't enough.

Dan