To improve your writing is to become more critical of your writing.
Caveat:
First of all, this tutorial isn't really about taste. It definitely has little to do with the subjective aspects of taste. If you learn from the material here, you will sound more literate, and your work will contain far fewer of the technical problems which most IF suffers from. But it might be possible to master the material here, and still write IF that is aesthetically unsatisfying.
Also, it's a good idea to recognize right away that the IF community is very much like most communities. Doing something well does not necessarily lead to any kind of attention whatsoever -- and may lead to negative attention. (History teaches us, for example, that the occasional genius is normally berated by the mass of idiots.) So, writing well doesn't have much to do with anything except writing well.
Normal writing manuals advise you to consider your audience. This is slightly misleading. Traditionally, the audience has been the measure of what's appropriate and good. But nobody is in fact talking about your actual audience, but rather your ideal audience. Now to some extent, you as a writer actually create your ideal audience. But writing also makes certain demands on you, and it is this tutorial's principle task to inform you about those demands.
It's perfectly reasonable to approach our works with some skepticism. This is not the place for us to justify ourselves. However, the overarching idea of this tutorial, which you should think of as the first lesson, is simply this: questions of taste aside, if you are unaware of what you've written, that is, if you've written something that is not in total agreement with what you intended to write, we are going to consider it bad writing. Conversely, if you actually intend what your writing performs, you have succeeded. All of the following lessons are based on this fundamental notion in one way or another.
We will add one point of clarification. It is not necessarily being in control that the writing hinges on. In painting, you can make a nice, neat, perfect little draftsman drawing, or you can make a gesture drawing with big sloppy sweeping arcs. The same is true of writing. (Although we'd recommend writing with some precision until you're sure you know how, and only then swimming in more experimental waters.) But if it isn't a matter of controlling your language, it is a matter of not doing anything unintentional, that is, not including anything that you haven't considered, and not excluding anything that you would have included, had you considered things more carefully.
Nice big words are great, but if you don't incorporate them flawlessly, they won't help at all, but instead do much damage to a sentence which was probably just fine already. There's a name for elaborate, lyrical prose: "purple prose". It's lush, which means that it has nice big words, and complex syntactical structures. It's one writing style of many, but it gets a lot of attention these days from the IF community. Purple prose is terribly difficult to handle, and quickly becomes hopelessly clumsy prose if the writer doesn't have a steady handle on things. For the prose to be purple, it has to be either correct, or intentionally incorrect -- and almost always the former, since purple prose is so exceedingly formal.
Purple prose, in general, can be easily overwrought or over-stilted, and when it contains clumsy errors, it sounds just wretched. Purple prose should most definitely not be regarded as some kind of end goal of IF. If you decide to write this way, and are willing to live with the very strict requirements of the style, that's fine. But you really don't have to write in this style at all. Really. It is certainly worth speculating why amateur writers so often attempt to affect this type of writing, but we will leave this topic for another setting.
Here's an example which we harped on a bit in Angry
Parser. It comes from Winter Wonderland (Release
1):
Small Bedroom A small, sickly boy is lying on a bed that takes up most of the space in this room. Light filters in through drab curtains hung around the only window in this bedroom. A long dark drapery hangs down over a portion of the east wall. Small, disheveled shoes lie at the foot of the bed. > |
The careful reader notices a few problems here. The most glaring one is the misuse of the word "disheveled". This is a case where the writer overextended herself, and decided upon a word which she didn't know how to use properly. If you don't know how to use a word properly, you can't tell when you're using it improperly -- but you can bet that your audience will be able to tell. So, it's dangerous to use an unfamiliar word; you might get it right, but it's an unnecessary gamble. Here, the word "tattered" is clearly better, and was probably what was intended.
Notice how the experience of reading this description
changes when the error has been corrected:
Small Bedroom A small, sickly boy is lying on a bed that takes up most of the space in this room. Light filters in through drab curtains hung around the only window in this bedroom. A long dark drapery hangs down over a portion of the east wall. Small, tattered shoes lie at the foot of the bed. > |
The piece is still a pretty weak attempt at purplish prose, but it wouldn't even have a chance of performing within this style if it were still making word choice errors. More should be said about the style and subject matter of this piece as a whole, but that belongs to another section.
If the writer uses a word incorrectly, this indicates to the reader that the word in question either was hastily chosen, or is not a strong member of the writer's vocabulary. Either way, it comes across sounding sloppy, clumsy, and it ruins what could have been an otherwise beautiful sentence. Of course, we aren't talking about motivated misusage, or intentional lack of precision, but accidental misusage.
Here's another example, this time
from the game Metamorphoses (Release 3):
Shadows and Apparitions You stand in the center of a dim room, lit from above by a piercing light. Evidently there is another room above you, but the brilliance of its illumination makes it impossible for you to perceive anything up there. > |
The last sentence sounds a bit stilted. There are
a number of minor problems with it, but the one that really
stands out, which you have probably recognized already,
is the misuse -- in this case, basically the imprecise
usage -- of the word "perceive". The writer intended
to communicate that the light is so bright that you can't
see anything in the room above. "Percieve" is a nice word,
but it simply doesn't mean the same thing as "see", and shouldn't be used
where "see" is what is actually intended. The moral of the story: use the
simpler word when that's what you mean. You can try to
convert your prose into purplish prose by peppering it with
larger words, but if you put the larger word in a place where
a smaller word is more appropriate, the prose turns from
purple to, ummm... brownish.
This sort of thing is easy to fix once you've become aware of it:
Shadows and Apparitions You stand in the center of a dim room, lit from above by a piercing light. Evidently there is another room above you, but the brilliance of its illumination makes it impossible for you to see anything up there. > |
This still doesn't sound very good, but at least it doesn't sound incorrect. If you're having trouble finding the remaining problems, try reading it out loud.
There's more to writing well than not fouling up the word choice, but getting the words right is a necessary start. The more general problem with this description is that it has many awkward padding words. "You stand." "in the center." "from above." "Evidently there is." "another room." "above you." "makes seeing anything up there." None of these little pieces excite. In fact, it was probably this flatness that motivated the writer's clumsy attempt at complicating the vocabulary. Sloppy writing tends to proliferate itself. Compare the initial fix with one possible re-write:
Shadows and Apparitions Sharp rays of light rain from above, shattering the gloom. You glance upwards, but the brilliant illumination blinds you. > |
What has changed? Well, we'll be talking about this in more detail in the section on artistic writing, but you may note that the description is now active, not passive. This means that the verbs do things to other things. Also, the directional machinery has been minimized, as it was only dead weight in the first place. Talking about this thing being a "room" seemed a confusion of the writer. It's important to separate the coding-jargon from the literary scene of action. "Room", while naturally ubiquitous in the code, only belongs in the output text when the player is inside a house. (This happens not to be so at the moment.) Another way we could improve the scene would be to allow the player to actually try to perceive past the light before explaining that this is impossible. This would make the player more involved in the scene, but leads to other problems: for one thing, this would make the description itself only one line long. There's the other concern that the room description now is only two sentences long; the information is not only frustratingly scarce, but the scene is still rather dull. Dullness was probably what motivated all of the problems, problems which were introduced in an attempt to conceal this initial dullness. Again we have improved one thing, and found another is lacking; more work is still required, but at least the individual sentences no longer sound clumsy.
Continuity is a pretty advanced topic, because it relates to style in general. You should also be wary of unintentional fluctuations in style; you should notice these fluctuations, and eliminate them. "Style" involves both vocabulary and sentence structure.
The principle thing that needs to be emphasized is this: don't pursue any style that you will not feel comfortable maintaining throughout the piece. Often in IF, the writer sounds one minute like Shakespeare, the next like Joe Schmoe. Even if the Shakespearian bit is technically correctly executed, it may still sound out of place, depending on its context.
Prose continuity relates to IF in a special way. There is naturally a wide disparity between the author's language and the player's possible commands and responses. This melds especially poorly when the prose is really artistic and experimental (or purple), because unless you do a lot of work, the parser can only accept regular, relatively dry commands. If the game enjoys being artistic, but the player doesn't get to share the vocabulary and playfulness, the player is liable to be frustrated and confused. This is a disruptive problem whenever the mood that's set by the prose is contrary to the kind of language and action that the game requires of the player. This is a difficult problem to deal with, but it's something to be aware of; food for further thought. The game Bad Machine is so far the best treatment of this consideration.
Let's take the following as an example of this problem. We have here some florid prose matched with basic parsing and low-level vocabulary/verb support (from For A Change, v1.02). Read the opening paragraph carefully to get a sense of the mood, and then notice how the mood is totally disrupted by the natural confines of the game (and for the moment, let's overlook the other problems with this piece -- we'll be taking this back up in the next chapter):
Under the High Wall (on the resting) Sweetness fills the shade of the High Wall to your east. Under this sweetness lies a small expanse of fod. A mobile releases mildly to the west; far in that direction a tower proudly plants itself, while the ground rises more slowly to the south and relaxes to the north. Spread on the resting is a guidebook. Sleep gradually departs from your eyes. A small stone has been insinuated into your hand. >relax That's not a verb I recognize. >rest That's not a verb I recognize. >stand The resting sighs at your departure. >sigh That's not a verb I recognize. > |
The beginning and end of artful prose is well crafted prose, and the key to well crafted prose is verbal coordination and awareness. Now you can submit your art to wily abandon, and be led by imagination and intuition, but you're not going to end up with anything hot unless you already had a great deal of coordination already. Like the dancer, you can't leap until you can stand there and hop around a bit. In other words, there's a difference between clumsiness and freedom; and most of the IF that tries to be artful these days is actually an exercise in accident and clumsiness.
So, how do you do away with clumsiness? It's really just a matter of becoming aware of your language, and learning how to manipulate it gracefully. (Technically speaking, there is such a thing as effective gracelessness, but this is an extremely delicate and refined state -- so grace is involved at another level.) Learning to write gracefully requires the same amount of practice and close attention as learning a physical coordination skill. Before we get into the nuts and bolts, let's attack the issue from another direction.
Here's a common problem: a writer wants to develop a "style", knowing that all great writers have "style", just like all good musicians, all good chess players, etc. Now what they discover when they look at books about writing style is something quite different, and apparently off the subject. All of these books are just about making clear sentences, eliminating unnecessary and clumsy words, making the sentences vary, and other stuff like that. "I want to find out how to develop my individual writing style! I'm not asking about general errors! Artists are not governed by rules!" But you might be surprised: stylish writing grows out of all of this persnickety style-book type stuff. Inspiration might come from somewhere else, but verbally expressing your inspired thought requires this sort of writing skill. These books on style are designed to teach you to become aware of your writing, by showing you what you're unintentionally writing. Once you're aware of what you're writing, your "individual" writing style can develop uninhibited. It's the becoming conscious that's difficult. (By the way, the muses are particularly fond of people who can write well.)
Now, as far as writing rules are concerned, yes, a few of them were invented by 19th century classical scholars who wanted English to be as regular as Latin, so they tried to force some arbitrary simplifications into the language. Granted. But this is largely moot, as people are resistant to these rules not out of principle, but rather because they are terrified of someone correcting their most inner, precious thoughts. They get confused and feel threatened, and begin to believe that all rules crush the spirit. So most people will pretend that all rules (even the helpful ones) are bad, stifling, stuffy, out-dated, fascist, and so forth and so on. This subjectivist "rule free" view is normally fueled by a paranoia based on fear of inadequacy. This is terribly wrong, and terribly counterproductive, and we strongly encourage you to force yourself to take the advice of expert writers, as painful and threatening as this might be. Anyway, we are dealing with guidelines which will actually uplift, not crush, the character of your writing. That's what style is all about. Just make sure you don't blindly follow any rules, as the key to this whole matter is gaining awareness and insight.
the conventions of a genre are in fact the same as the ideal audience of a genre, and in IF there's no canon, and no real set of conventions, so... the task is more complicated, as we can't just hypostatize an ideal audience or a set of legitimate conventions. on style: link linka slightly more developed section amidst the confusion. hmm... where's it go?
John Doe had been sleeping like the dead when his alarm clock screamed like a Banshee at him. It was 1:36 P.M., and John had planned to be up bright and early that morning. His eyelids were as heavy as lead as he wracked his brain for excuses. It had been the mother of all lost weekends. Now he had to pay the piper -- he'd missed Core again, and the hand of doom was heavy upon his grade in the class.
Once they were original expressions, but now they're trite. You should avoid falling back on cliches when you're trying to think of the right way to say something. They may seem innocuous, but they are naturally inclined to be mischievous, and they're powerful despite their seeming simplicity. If you aren't careful of them, they will to screw your writing up royally. One of the clearest signs of an underdeveloped style is the careless use of cliches; if you are interested in developing your writing style, you should spend some looking out for them. The present treatment of them is adapted from this site -- which also provides an exemplary list of cliches.
Cliches are dangerous because their natural tendency is to substitute and deaden thinking. They spring upon you when you're in a rush, but if you let them sneak into your writing at that point, they will always sound very stale, and even worse, they will usually be inaccurate. A cliche will attempt to force your writing to conform to the stock situation to which that cliche is typically attached, and it's unlikely that you are attempting to write about a perfectly stock situation, so if you admit the cliche into the text, you will be using the cliche inaccurately. Whenever you edit and revise your writing and you come across cliches, push yourself to develop more accurate, more vivid, more precise detail. Your writing will come to life. (The last sentence of that exposition uses a cliche. Isn't it cute?)
Learning how to avoid cliches is partly the task of being able to recognize them. So here's another list for you, which deals with cliches, but wanders into the hackneyed and generally overused, called Words that Should be Banned.
Again, there's something particular to be said about this in relation to IF. Consider for a moment each of these phrases: "You are standing in a...", "above you", "below you", "to the [direction]...", "surrounded by a...", "in a", "on the". You can probably compose a nice, long list of your own.
For interactive grammar quizzes, visit Pop-up Grammar. And good general reading, with lots of things to watch out for, is Lynch's Guide to Grammar and Style.
Here's an excellent writing technique page, which discusses dialogue, plot, endings and finales, and characterization. link. One writer's collected views on crafting a story: link.
simple introduction to typical and stylish phrase types. if you want to write beautifully, you need to know all of these: link combining sentences: link variation also requires that you say a word as rarely as possible, unless you're attempting to emphasize something by its repetition, as explained here: link developing a voice: (experiment/freewrite/mimic/etc. lots of peter elbow stuff): link what metaphors are, and how they can be used most effectively (it's not so hard to write lyrically, as long as you keep these few simple things in mind! The most crucial part of this site is the 'dead metaphor' section.): linkLinks about concise writing (after all, this really is where style begins). writing elaborately is not the opposite of writing concisely. in fact, if your elaborations are not concise, your writing turns into tar. concision is actually essential to an elaborate style (and just about all other writing too): link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link link and finally a parody of this concise stuff, about taking a reasonable sentence, and lengthening it and making it convoluted: link
the use of technically incorrect words can be used to artistic effect, particularly if there are many of them in collage... but only when the author is not only intending to do it, but doing it gracefully. it's clearly a problem if words are accidentally used imprecisely, but when they are intentionally used imprecisely, this usage can still be clumsy.
Let's take the example of For A Change. It's clear enough to the reader what this piece was attempting to accomplish, but for the sake of argument, we will include here some comments by the writer: "I read a book called The Age of Wire and String, by Ben Marcus, and it blew me away. It used what was ostensibly precise language, but in a way that was very difficult to make sense of, and a glossary that just added to the confusion. I immediately wanted to write something with a similar feel, in which objects are described in terse language that assumes the player character understands the terms used, though of course the player does not.... I still like the rather dreamlike quality that resulted; everything has some sort of internal logic, even if you don't know what it is."
>>OK, now we need to show how he failed. Poor chap.<<
If you want to improve your IF writing, you should play games, read books, watch movies, and notice everything, and when you're done, play more games. YAGWADragon starts off beautifully. If you notice this when it happens, you've learned a good technique. Of course, you can't create anything really great by simply mimicking the art of another writer, but you can change it, improve upon it, or combine it with another technique you've noticed. (Combining two old things to make a new thing is a perfectly artistic approach.)
consider all avenues technique: link
here temporarily for reference: the defense of a nineteenth century conception of continuity (which has its place if you're set on writing a really typical piece), crimes against mimesis is basically about making puzzles realistic, genres continuous without out of place stuff, not-arbitrary, non-lock and key, and making a cohesive fiction-world without weird out of place stuff. link link another probably failure (alongside whizzard's elements of plot): link
technique: simulated
output as design technique, and also
here. Both do the same thing.
On Taste and Subject
Matter More or less, the game Angry Parser
was designed as a commentary on the taste of Interactive
Fiction writers, and of the community at large. However,
it may be beneficial for others if we for a moment speak
plainly, rather than satirically, on the issue.
It is very difficult to say anything about taste as it relates to IF. This is primarily so because IF is such a new genre. The development of taste is always specific to the development of a genre, or at least to the foundation of a genre. The formal boundaries of IF have yet to be explored, and the works which represent the IF canon cannot sustain intelligent criticism, and most likely will not sustain the test of time either. These are certainly not problems with the genre, but rather with the genre's maturity. One striking formal consideration which may aggravate these problems is this: that the genre requires the writer to have some rudimentary facility with algorithms -- and conform the writing thereto (this is true for the moment, and is arguably essential to the form).
Compared with other genres, and the comparison is perhaps not entirely fair, there are no geniuses, and very few competent artists, working on the development of IF. This accounts for its slow development, and helps explain why the failures of the community's judgement and standards often fester uncorrected. Naturally, this alienates the intelligent reader -- who quickly determines that old fashioned books are much better; and this also dissuades writers from working with the medium. After all, why write for a bunch of morons who can't tell a well wrought sentence from a bag of horseshit. (We've asked ourselves this question many times -- without ever discovering an aesthetically compelling answer.) Needless to say, this general problem has the trappings of a vicious circle.
Another problematic
consequence of the immaturity of the genre is that the
writer has a minimum of materials at her disposal;
generally speaking, a fertile genre is one which has a
rich history, and IF has almost none. This is a problem
because any really good piece of writing must interrogate
its material -- and when the material is too simple, the
chances for raising an interesting question about it
dwindle. To put this in another way, you can't write
anything without raising some question about writing; you
either intentionally raise the question, or you leave
this task to the reader: for the good reader will try to
understand the writer's use of the medium in the most
interesting way possible. So if the writer hasn't
carefully considered how she's manipulating the material,
she's losing control, and she's bound to appear clumsy.
Let's begin this section with a clarification: Originality is not the be-all end-all goal of Art. If you make that your goal, you are destined for disappointment. Being original is like learning to ride a bike: you can't do it by simply willing to do it. Plus, there's all sorts of problems with originality. For example, it occasionally happens that someone writes something really terrible in an original sort of way; and one can (as is so often the case) delude oneself into thinking that a work is original, maybe because of an inflated ego, a blind hope, or just simple ignorance. While it's true that an unoriginal piece doesn't contribute anything, more important than the pursuit of originality is the pursuit of quality. If a game is a genre piece but excellently done, there is nothing inherently wrong with that; part of its excellence might even be in the clever ways it conforms to the genre without boring the player. Plus, just because 3 zillion people have painted nude women doesn't mean you can't make a great painting of a nude woman.
Genre pieces become truly repetitive when they lack quality. After all, the reason there's a genre in the first place is that a lot of people like the genre. It is, in some sense, artistically successful.
Yet today, there is an overwhelming, seemingly oppressive inclination amongst IF writers towards the "genre piece", and it is this we need to address. Take, for example, the recent Muse: while this story doubtless has a plot and characters, every single detail is so immanently typical of the gothic genre that the piece becomes no longer a gothic story, but, in spite of itself, an unintentionally compelling performance of the writer's total rejection of originality. The reader may well come away with the feeling that she's just read a piece as flat as a medieval allegory, despite the gothic setting -- or better yet, that this was the writer's accidental confession of a fear of originality; in fact, the good reader will prefer this view of the piece, as it's more interesting to consider the writer's clumsy confession of his incapacity for originality than it is to suck up yet another bit of gothic pap.
Now genre pieces are not doomed, but if you should choose to write a genre piece, you really should take a critical approach to the material. This was achieved in the first few moments of Yet Another Game With A Dragon, although the genre-critical approach unfortunately didn't sustain itself consistently. Of course all genre pieces need not be self-defacing (as the title of the last example suggests) but each should at least hint that something conscious has been done with its material. By way of introducing one final example, again one of failure, the critic (name) wrote of Winter Wonderland the following near-ridiculous understatement: "Any work of fiction that deals with the holiday-time struggles of a poor family whose youngest child is sick is already toeing the self-parody line". Here, we must disagree: one can say without exaggeration that there can exist no clearer example of (unintentional) "self-parody" anywhere -- similar cases, of course, but none could be more protracted. One couldn't possibly go any further with this parody unconsciously, and once it's a conscious parody, an entirely different type of judgement of the piece becomes possible. To emphasize: this failure, amusing yet pathetic, results from an uncritical, almost unconscious appropriation of generic elements. Had it intended what it performed, it would have deserved success.
This obsession with genres and types is a symptom of the fact that IF does not yet have rich sub-genres of its own. Even otherwise successful pieces are haunted by this urge towards the typical. Think for example of Spider and Web: the weakest element of this piece is its uninterrogated melodrama -- which, again, is typical of the genre it represents. The IF writer should certainly be wary of the tendency towards genre pieces. As you can see, this becomes absolutely crucial when you choose a subject and setting.
the genre "fantasy". the
general genre study (the sequel to the study of the
-- then -- overwhelmingly popular fantasy genre.
the craft of adventure. the "formally uninteresting movie" version of plot development, forcibly applied to IF writing.
There's already a very typical genre-feel to text
adventures. One excellent example is Babel. One main
point you can make about them, they're essentially
"adventures", as the name would already suggest anyway.
one weakness is the overemphasis on the puzzle, as
noted. also, the overemphasis on things that have to be
examined. we're in agreement with the somewhat satirical
piece on
banning the verb "examine". Ultimately the bill
of player's rights is probably necessary
reading. It's well intentioned, but based on a limited
understanding of IF.
Here's a piece on making good NPC interaction. here's another report on NPC characterization techniques, written by Emily Short. There's a lot of information that's missing, and some of it is incorrect or limited, but it's a good place to start.
>>the following can be reasonably objected to on grounds of bias. this part of the piece is subject to heavy revision (as is most of the appendix).<<
The best way to develop your taste is to read as widely as possible. Most IF writers and players, judging from what they create and celebrate, do not read very widely: and what's even more stifling, they all read the same things. We mentioned above the importance of the selection of subject and setting. You will learn better how to do this successfully by reading one short piece by Samuel Beckett (to pick a legitimate name at random) than by reading hundreds of those popular novels. Professional writers learn how to write by reading interesting material, and you can too. You know the difference between legitimate literature and brain candy. If you're always reading brain candy, it's going to show through in your writing. It's really as simple as that.
The notion of non-linear plot development is not very well understood by the IF community. At present, the notion is a hazy combination of 1990's American cinema conventions, and the popular 1980's "Choose Your Own Adventure" children's book form. Yet it is not only worth pursuing, but also is one of the more formally interesting potentials of the medium.
Naturally, the interactivity of IF requires some action on the part of the player -- or else we may as well be talking about the short story, novella, novel, or what have you. It is interactivity that makes the spatial relations particularly compelling. We do find quite effective the metaphorical "rooms", and the simulated spatial relations between elements. Anyone who has played Angry Parser can sense that we enjoyed writing the toilet and the other contraptions. While such spatial simulations have yet to achieve any real aesthetic value -- they are still of the order of toys -- spatial simulations in this genre may yet achieve some part of the appeal of sculpture, or of depth and dimension in painting. Clearly, this has yet to be worked out in any detail. The main contributor to this area, at least as far as general simulations are concerned, is Kevin Forchione, but instances of the spatial contraptions are quite numerous -- although some are much less interesting than others. (Is there an Inform guy?)
The contraption is an essential component of the IF category of the puzzle. And despite the fact that the contraption has such potential, we must note, with Adam Cadre, that the puzzle is an avenue which has stifled the general development of IF. There is no doubt that puzzles are artful of themselves, and have always had a deep involvement in a wide range of art forms, especially written art. But with IF, they have become something of a preoccupation. The contraption is by no means the only puzzle in town. You might want to check out this excellent puzzle classification scheme. Keep in mind that it's a (partial) description of what's been done, and doesn't describe a boundary, or govern possibilities for the future. Again, the key is to learn from what's been done and make improvements through combination, invention, etc.
The general notion of the player's action in IF has not been carefully explored. A few writers have made attempts at minimizing the player's action. Although some of the efforts have been dreadfully unsuccessful, this exploration is important to the development of the genre. Also essential will be the maximalization of the player's action: we will very likely see more of this within the next few years, despite the technical complexities involved. But generally, the main progress will be made through an exploration of the possible variations of player action.
This leads us into another essential area for development: the parser. The most important work that has been done with the medium has been done with the interface. There are some parts of Angry Parser which attempt to accomplish minor goals in this area, although quite imperfectly. Needless to say, we're looking forward to the day when the parser can handle normal sentences. Additionally, there is room for the development of the illusion of two-way interaction (by making the game respond in as appropriate a manner as possible). We have fiddled around with this a bit as well, but our initial approach to this challenge, that is, simply to give the game a personality, might already be showing signs of overuse. It's a good idea to work with the personality of the player him/herself also: this article isn't about that exclusively, but it profitably develops the possibility of separation between the player and the character. One of Neil K. Guy's suggestions is worth considering in this context. We refer you to the relevant thread on the RAIF.