§9.12. Cameras and Recording Devices
Recording what is going on, for later playing back or examination, is difficult because the range of situations is very complex. Exactly how much information should we store when we make a recording, and will this require problematically large tables? Will it be difficult even to do at all?
The usual approach is to record only basic details of events or situations. In If It Hadn't Been For... the tape recorder preserves only a few different sounds - footsteps, creaking, rustling - rather than capturing exactly the sound of every action taking place in earshot. In Claims Adjustment, we can take up to 36 Polaroid-style photographs, but each is described only by saying what it is a photo of. Thus we can have a photograph of a vase, or even a photograph of a photograph of a vase (because that too is a thing), but not a photograph of a still life in which several items have been gathered together by the player. That would ordinarily require too much storage.
A similar trick, though involving impromptu sculpture rather than photography, can be found in Originals. (The artist magically "manifests" these models rather than sculpting the conventional way in order to avoid the nuisance of carrying around raw materials - wax maquettes and so forth - which would clutter up the example.)
Text, of course, can store arbitrary descriptions. Mirror, Mirror provides a perfect visual recorder: it remembers a room description exactly as the player saw it at the time.
Actor's Studio provides a video camera that records and time stamps all actions performed in its presence while it is set to record.
See Telephones for ways to speak to inanimate objects, which might be appropriate when, say, tape-recording a confession
|
|
|
|
We start by creating a camera and a photograph object. As usual when we want to have a kind of object that can be dispensed in bulk, we start off with a bunch of identical instances of the object out of play (in this case, kept in an out-of-play container called "film roll"); we can then move them into play and give them characteristics when they're needed. Each photograph can depict exactly one thing -- we're assuming that the player is not a landscape photographer here -- so we create a relation to indicate what is shown by each photograph. We'll then use that relation to determine how photographs are described, named, and parsed:
This allows the player to refer to any photograph by its subject: useful if we have a large number of them. Now we create an action to let the player use the camera and generate these photograph objects:
Now we use two activities from the Activities chapter to describe the photographs to the player more elegantly:
And finally we provide a brief scenario to give the player something to take pictures of:
|
|
We start by creating a camera and a photograph object. As usual when we want to have a kind of object that can be dispensed in bulk, we start off with a bunch of identical instances of the object out of play (in this case, kept in an out-of-play container called "film roll"); we can then move them into play and give them characteristics when they're needed. Each photograph can depict exactly one thing -- we're assuming that the player is not a landscape photographer here -- so we create a relation to indicate what is shown by each photograph. We'll then use that relation to determine how photographs are described, named, and parsed:
This allows the player to refer to any photograph by its subject: useful if we have a large number of them. Now we create an action to let the player use the camera and generate these photograph objects:
Now we use two activities from the Activities chapter to describe the photographs to the player more elegantly:
And finally we provide a brief scenario to give the player something to take pictures of:
|