I thought it was a very interesting post that has a lot of influence. The idea of telling things through 'not telling' things is interesting and applicable; I wrote Julian to talk about his job for a lot of the start of Dinner Date so the date would grow more in the imagination.
I have to think a bit more on this, but I already now made the choice to have 'cuts' in my new game. It seemed obvious from the moment you wrote games 'don't have this' that this is a thing which misses from games. I thought for a moment that cuts are too much wanting to be cinema, but rather it is a language we are neglecting; and in a way it is odd games so stoically keep to a 1:1 time passing ratio. It makes no sense to tediously show every thing happening (and compress the world for it to happen in real time) if you could add some cuts and let the world be far larger in the player's mind.
That's the main thing I got away from it, actually, that perhaps we make small worlds and then show them 100%, rather than allowing the player's character to experience a far larger world and thus giving the player a means to imagine it also.
We are clamping down their otherwise excellent imagination
! I suppose it's part of what the player is 'good at'; writing dialogue; no; imagining opening the front door and walking to the living room; yes. We don't need to show that walking.
Besides, more rapid cuts makes it a bit more fast-paced and rhythmically more interesting than what the player could come up with. Also it saves you when the player starts doing bad things, you can just cut away to when the player behaves.
As I say I need to think more on this, it feels like such an obvious part of the game language that imagining its uses makes me ramble. (On,
and on, in one unbroken sentence...)
