Brown pantsed players and lighting effects

[Dan Lyke]

Morbus wrote:
> We could get into a horrible Reality Engine in this situation.
> Scare the crap out of the players - after they play our game
> for so long, we give them a personality synopsis - what we've
> determined and how we modified the game based upon their actions.

Somewhere I've got a 5 1/4" floppy with "Timothy Leary's Mind Mirror" on
it. It was really more like a multiple choice personality test sort of
thing, but it built a rudimentary model of the player, and then
suggested that they try to play the game to match a different model.

> This prompts an innocent question: if you were in an interactive
> fiction world, and we're immersed into it to a degree that we all
> want to create, would you be frightened of spiders in the game?
> Would this effect your decisions?

When Indiana Jones says "Snakes! Why does it have to be snakes?" we all
know why: Because snakes almost universally scare the crap out of the
audience. But if I trigger on spiders more than snakes, it'd probably
more effective it he says "Tarantulas! Why does it...?"

There was that cheesey Stallone movie, Cliffhanger, where the opening
scene is the girl falling because a pulley failed. Well, I've climbed
enough that pulley failure doesn't seem nearly as plausible as a
gazillion other similarly out of the blue ways to fall, but if you can
find one of those you'll have me changing my underwear.

(Well, okay, a couple of rock-jocks who have found a way that helicopter
time is cheaper than descender and rope wear for getting out of tight
spaces is also a bit unbeleivable. Maybe that was a lousy example.)

>> If you've ever wondered what "color timing" is and why the
>> color timer

> To be honest, you lost me on the whole technicality of the lighting
> explanations - you can be the resident Atmosphere Engine Expert...

Well, in simple terms, go watch "Casablanca" (Because some of us are
_McKee_ (http://www.mckeestory.com/) attendees and/or readers this'll
get used as the canonical example often). Note that Rick and Ilsa's
faces are always lit similarly, more light on one side of their face
than the other, and that everybody else is lit with fairly flat light.

And realize that the best cinematographers do it far more subtly than
that.

Dan