I have been mulling over different aspects of games during my English class today, and I had a thought that might inspire someone: In a lot of RPG''s the amount of reading sometimes sucks. Like say you walk into the city library with thousands of books whatever and you click on a shelf and get a random book...Then it''s like 10 pages of stuff. Like in Baldur''s Gaste. Fallout was also somewhat guilty of this. What I thought was have the little puicture of the scroll or book, whatever, with a little button that says "Summarize" and it condenses the text and replaces it with a summary that the writer wrote in advance. And then a second summary, summarizing it again and it can be taken to the 101th degree where a 10 page text could be summed up in: The world is a bug. M2C

Even better...tie it to a skill like ''reading'' or ''analysis'' and have the character''s level in this area affect how much info they get from a text.

R.

Better still: mull over English in English. Reading wouldn''t suck so much.

That sounded a little harsher than I meant it, but I don''t think ANYTHING that dumbs down the game is a good idea.

(Now, I slept through Senior English, but I was already reading at 3rd year college level by that time and made an A for the year.)

I was in a smoldering flamewar with AP in the gamewriting forum, but after reading this post I think he had a point.

ShadeStorm, the Day_Glo Fish

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Original post by Tacit
Even better...tie it to a skill like 'reading' or 'analysis' and have the character's level in this area affect how much info they get from a text.

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Isn't the point of the text for the player's benefit, not the character's? The consumption of the text is meant to inform the player on certain things relating to the game world.

And as for long texts, I think they should prvide the player with extra information and background on the gameworld, and maybe even some hints and tips scattered about, but not be required reading. For instance, Deus Ex had a lot of newspapers and books lying around that you could read and learn more about the Kinghts Templar and their history, or how the President was handling the plague epidemic. Stuff like that adds to the immersion greatly but it should not be required of the player to read them all.

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Drew Sikora
A.K.A. Gaiiden

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I like Tacit''s idea, so that if you have a character with an intelligence of 0, you get something like "funny squiggly lines" and if you had a godlike intelligence, you get something like "yet another boring teatise on unified field theory, primitive and uninteresting..."

I was going to side with Shadestorm and Gaiiden, until I remembered that there are at least two types of gamers, those that want to escape and those that just want to get things done (escapists and finishers, for those that remember my old post).

I think having just the summary would be a bad idea, given the people who play cRPGs. But having both would be the best of both worlds, as it would allow finishers to get on with finishing the game while letting escapists escape into the richness of the world.

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Just waiting for the mothership...