Clearly if we are on this forum we are users of kind #3, we appreciate both.
Personally I am instinctively a player of type #1, but I’ve learned to love long dialogs. But I can still feel the conflict: at the same time I love them and I feel a bit annoyed that they distract me from the puzzles (sometimes I am like “let’s get to the point please” and this does not help me enjoy the humor fully).
The strange thing is that I love to read plays, which are only dialogs (e.g. Agatha Christie plays like The Mousetrap). I hate books full of descriptions, I love dialogs.
Me too. I feel that long descriptions are just a cheap way of making a book thicker, spending time saying “hey, look how precise I can be describing my world”. The less descriptions I get, the more freedom I have when imagining the scenes in my mind… I can’t feel immersed in a book if I have to fine-tune my visualization to comply with the two-pages long description of the facial features of a character.
So, dialogs. Actions are also fine, if they’re not too full with details. But I went off topic
Ok, then you’ll have to read Dostoevskij’s Karamazov brothers.
The novel is intentionally divided into two books, and in the beginning the author (ironically) warns the reader that if he wants to skip the long description of events and reasons that lead to the actual matter of the story (definitely there are few dialogues in it), he can move on directly to the second book
Novel is also an art of description. The more I get involved in the description, and my imagination starts to draw all the little details of the world, and the emotional components of characters, the more I judge a book a good book. Good dialogues are also fundamental, and I like it too.
But I think that a few people nowadays have still the ability to use their minds to draw a complex world in their imagination starting from a text. We just get out of the habit since video media are so widespread. Or probably has always been that way. I’m in the niche also for that
This has significance also in the context of adventure games like the classic ones: compared to nowadays games in 360 degree 3D, you can enjoy those ones if you are able to let your mind get initial strong suggestions and then create an its own drawing of the world.
Well, pithiness is a hard skill to master, so some writers take a lot more words to express a particular sentiment, or to describe a situation or setting. It could be for cynical purposes, as you say, to bulk up a book; but it could also be that the author has no other tools as his disposal than verbose descriptions to get his point across. (Consider this very paragraph: perhaps someone else could have said the same thing in less words. )
This is an interesting matter.
If you consider the audience of the modern novel (XVIII - first half of XX century) you’ll be surprised that female readers were more than males. This because they have much more time to spend in reading while they were at home. Or maybe they liked a deeper detail in descriptions. They tend to be more verbose than men (up to seven times).
“Look behind you! A one headed human!”
Brunetto Latini, Tresor (XIII century proto-novel, with images).
Anyway all that to say that the writing style depends on the context: this is a time way richer in terms of media production and there’s little time to dedicate to reading or other things, and women work too so now less is more and so it goes. Or we just have no patience in imagination, there are media that reproduce things to be watched, so also books conform to that.
But if you just dedicate some time to train your mind to reproduce the smallest details of a face described in a two pages depiction, well you’ll probably be surprised by the astonishing power of it.
Coming back to topic: I like both.
I like puzzles, and I like story.
That’s the reason why I got attracted by Lucas’ way on the genre. There’s a great balance in them.
But probably the same concerns on novels can now be applied on adventure games: little time to play, little time to spend letting mind help us in a long playtrough, great supply of products.
I’m not so sure about that, taking into consideration the fact the books still sell quite well, including novels aimed at juvenile readers.
I would say that, within the specific audience of videogame players, reading text is a kind of activity that isn’t considered very compatible with the reasons why most people play games: executing a task, reaching a goal, “beating” something or someone. Nonetheless, this observation wouldn’t be enough for me to conclude that, in a general sense, people are losing their ability to read a text and create a detailed and vivid world in their minds. At least, I don’t see evidence of this phenomenon.
My statements about novels and how many words we say are pretty much supported by some studies and evidences, but since it will take a couple of days to find references, I’ll just omit them.
The statement about capability of new generations of creating a complex world starting from a text, also in reference to videogames audience, is totally a thought of mine, no reference. I said that 'cause I watched people around me. And I will be very happy to be proven wrong.
By the way with creating a complex world in our mind I mean not only a high degree of detail in natural depiction, but also a “civil” look to things, a depiction that is not only a leisure, but also a way to try submitting some concerns about the modern reality, in an effort to focus on them an make people establish connections among their toughts. But probably a more structured narration have always been tedious to many readers.
And then they suddenly explode in rage and we just wonder: “What the hell I’ve done?” And, most of all:“Why didn’t you said me that before, just after it happened?!”
I understand the impression that you have about people capabilities to read a text and use it to build a world (both a visual one and an “ethical” one) because a few years ago it also seemed to me that younger generations had in part lost this skill.
Later, I studied a huge social phenomenon that changed my view on this subject and that gave me hope, a hope that I try to share with others: the Harry Potter books. While they are fiction books and their effect on people’s ethics and analytical skills is probably limited to (simplistic but not unimportant) lessons about good and evil, their impact on literacy and reading habits has been serious and large, according to more than one analysis. The success of these books has also kickstarted other similar publishing phenomena.
While I don’t personally know people who have read these books, the size of their audience is so big that I think it’s improbable that they didn’t contribute to improve people’s ability to build worlds from textual descriptions, especially if we take into consideration the fact that these books were targeted at young readers, who still were in the process of defining their relationship with the written word.
So, according to those analyses and data, that’s why I’m optimistic about this topic and why I try to share this optimism.
)
And, most of all:“Why didn’t you said me that before, just after it happened?!”