Re: Defined Plot Device OR Random Small Enc.

[Dan Lyke]

Bear with me if I repeat what others have said, I'm 4 days behind again.
And if I manage to dig through all of this tonight I may get the web
archive up. X yer fingers.

On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Morbus Iff wrote:
> Importantly, perhaps we shouldn't worry about necessary connecting all of
> the random events together into the story line, but rather enhancing the
> story line. Meaning that if we know (work with me here, this is a rough
> example) that Thomas Sumner is a character in the game that we interact
> with, the newest book to be released at a store we walk past is called
> "Twin Summoner".

I think this is dead-on necessary. The problem I've got is that either we
have to decide early that Thomas is a necessary story element, or we've
got to have an immensely detailed world.

Now I'm heading towards making Thomas a necessary story element, which
isn't the way Chris Crawford seems to be going.

> We have the expression of the artist, which is my defined plot device, and
> we also have the defined by the viewer, since they can totally ignore my
> expression and move on. The nicety of this is that although they ignored by
> initial plot device/expression, they go into their definition, still being
> created by myself, as I go along.

I think I need to download Inform and try to write a competition entry...

Dan