I’m going to try to share a bit of my basic game design philosophy to help explain what “the point” to rewriting is.
Much like a jeweler, who takes raw materials and makes something beautiful with it, a writer in IF takes a normal linear story and makes something different with it. Writing IF is harder than writing a linear story, and the tools we use in IF writing sometimes are used differently.
Rewriting is the process that allows us to take something that mechanically works, but that is inherently flawed in one way or another, and then change this something to address these flaws.
Cecilia’s shed has all the functionality of a shed, so it is mechanically sound, but it has flaws that will cause issues or problems later. The warped roof lets in rain, which soaks the tools, and rust then eats away at the tools inside.
As a jeweler examines a raw diamond to find the best way possible to bring out its beauty, we, as IF game designers, look at a story to find the best possible way of bringing out interaction with the reader.
To illustrate this, let’s look at the introduction or opening of a game. In addition to all the things a traditional story’s introduction does, we, as IF designers also need to give our readers an immersive, interactive way of existing in our game world.
This is because our readers do one of two things: they self-insert or they roleplay the MC of our story.
In general terms, the introduction’s main goals are:
- Teach mechanics
- Introduce the basics of their setting and character
- Hook the player without the added complications of mistakes causing lasting consequences
In game terminology, we create a tutorial with the introduction.
The goal here is to give the reader the means and knowledge in order to roleplay, either a self-insert, or a made-up MC, within our game-world(story-world).
If any of the above fails, for example by creating clichés that fail to hook our reader into our narrative, then we need to go back to our design and revisit our work.
Editing by itself will not suffice here, because as Cecilla indicates above, tweaking something that is broken will not fix the issue. A cliché does not stop being a cliché, just because you change out one word for another or because you restructure a sentence.
That should cover the basics. We can get into the weeds and examine the many complexities involved in particular games/stories, but I feel that would be a topic for another thread, or a PM.
