Line #8 Literature/TheCraftOfTheAdventure


1	[[http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/interactive-fiction/info/Craft.Of.Adventure.pdf "The Craft of the Adventure"]] is a series of essays by Creator/GrahamNelson on the design of InteractiveFiction {{Adventure Game}}s. It is divided into the following sections:
2
3	# Introduction
4	# In The Beginning
5	# Bill of Player's Rights
6	# A Narrative... [[labelnote:Click for subsections]]\
7	Away in a Genre\
8	Adapting Books\
9	Magic and Mythology\
10	Research\
11	The Overture\
12	An Aim in Life\
13	Size and Density\
14	The Prologue\
15	The Middle Game\
16	The End Game[[/labelnote]]
17	# ...At War With a Crossword [[labelnote:Click for subsections]]\
18	Puzzles\
19	Machinery\
20	Keys and Doors\
21	Air, Earth, Fire and Water\
22	Animals and Plants\
23	People\
24	Mazes...\
25	...and Other Old Clichés\
26	Rewards and Penalties\
27	Writing Room Descriptions\
28	The Map\
29	Looking Back at the Shape[[/labelnote]]
30	# Varnish and Veneer [[labelnote:Click for subsections]]\
31	Scoring\
32	Wrong Guesses\
33	Hints and Prizes\
34	User Interface, and all that jazz\
35	Debugging and Testing\
36	Playtesting\
37	It's Never Finished\
38	...Afterword[[/labelnote]]
39	----
40	!!Contains or discusses the following tropes:
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42	!!!Tropes discussed
43	* BookEnds: Brought up at the end of "A Narrative…", when discussing end game design:
44	-->But a good rule of thumb, as any film screenplay writer will testify, seems to be to make the two scenes which open and close the story "book-ends" for each other: in some way symmetrical and matching.
45	* CreatorInJoke: Warned against in "…At War With a Crossword", which lists "The 'In-Joke' syndrome" as one of the three big pitfalls in making puzzles.
46	* CreatorProvincialism: One entry in the "Bill of Player's Rights" warns against this: "Not to need to be American". It gives an example of the diamond maze in ''VideoGame/{{Zork}} II'', which stumped many non-Americans who couldn't figure out that [[spoiler:it was a baseball diamond.]]
47	* AMillionIsAStatistic: Discussed in "Narrative…":
48	-->[…] it's more interesting and dramatic to save a small number of people (the mud-slide will wipe out the whole village!) than the whole impersonal world (but {{Series/Doctor\|Who}}, the instability could blow up every star in the universe!).
49	* YouCantGetYeFlask: Brought up a few times. One item on the "Bill of Player's Rights" is "Not to have to type exactly the right verb". Another is "To be allowed reasonable synonyms". And "…At War With a Crossword" lists "The 'What's-The-Verb" syndrome" as one of the three big pitfalls in making puzzles.
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51	!!!Tropes used
52	* {{Epigraph}}: Including the introduction, each essay apart from "Varnish and Veneer" opens with one or more quotes.
53	* ScareQuotes: From the closing section discussing how games are never truly finished:
54	-->Roughly 300 bugs in 'VideoGame/{{Curses}}' have been spotted since it was released publically two years ago (I have received well over a thousand email messages on the subject), and that was after play-testing had been "finished".
55	* SelfDeprecation: "A plant which can be grown into a beanstalk is now, perhaps, rather a cliché. So naturally no self-respecting author would write one." Note that Nelson's own game, ''VideoGame/{{Curses}}'', contains exactly this.
56	* TakeThat: The first epigraph, quoted from Creator/TomStoppard:
57	-->Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

Context Literature / TheCraftOfTheAdventure